0n February 19, 1968, Robert S. McNamara’s long tenure as Secretary of Defense ended in a sequence of events that resembled a Greek drama written jointly by Euripides and Aristophanes. It was a foul day, with rain falling in sheets, and President Johnson was, to put it mildly, in a foul mood. On the previous day we had had a White House ceremony in which he had awarded McNamara the presidential Medal of Freedom and enough was enough—particularly since he had reached the conclusion that the Secretary was secretly in cahoots with Bobby Kennedy. Of this more later, but let us return to the scene of the debacle, the Pentagon, and set the stage.
My friend and colleague, Harry McPherson, the President’s Special Counsel, had written a short, pithy farewell address, which the President was scheduled to deliver on the back parade ground. As usual, three or four of us were invited along to provide moral support. The author of a speech was always included, and I suspect the President’s perverse sense of humor had led him to include me. For almost two years I had been sending him “Eyes Only” memoranda suggesting that McNamara’s Vietnam strategy was disastrous, that the “Whiz Kids” were masters of simulated precision, nu-merologists who confused a wargame with a war, and that the Secretary was, in essence, the Wizard of Oz. Life was imitating art.
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