Special Study 5

Joel C. Christenson

Series Editors Jeffrey A. Larsen • Erin R. Mahan

Historical Office

Office of the Secretary of Defense

SEPTEMBER 2014

Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford

1963-1968

Expanding the Secretary’s Role

in Foreign Affairs

Cold War Foreign Policy Series
Cover Photos

Left: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson listen 

during a bipartisan congressional leadership meeting on Vietnam, July 1965.

Right: Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford speaks at a White House meeting as 

General Earle Wheeler listens, December 1968.

Source: LBJ Presidential Library, Austin, TX, used with permission.

Cover Design: OSD Graphics, Pentagon.

Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford

1963-1968

Historical Office

Office of the Secretary of Defense

September 2014

Series Editors

Erin R. Mahan, Ph.D.

Chief Historian, Office of the Secretary of Defense

Jeffrey A. Larsen, Ph.D.

Director, Research Division 

NATO Defense College

Special Study 5

Joel C. Christenson

Expanding the Secretary’s Role

in Foreign Affairs
Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Johnson’s Style of Decision Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Crises Confronting the Johnson Administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

McNamara’s Managerial Innovations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

McNamara to Clifford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

This study is cleared for public release. The views expressed or 

implied within are solely those of the author and do not necessarily 

represent the views of the Department of Defense, the Office 

of the Secretary of Defense, or any other agency of the Federal 

Government.

Portions of this work may be quoted or reprinted without 

permission, provided that a standard source credit line is included. 

The Historical Office of the Office of the Secretary of Defense 

would appreciate a courtesy copy of reprints or reviews.
vii

Foreword

This is the fifth special study in a series by the Office of the 

Secretary of Defense (OSD) Historical Office that emphasizes the 

secretary’s role in the U.S. foreign policymaking process and how 

the position evolved between 1947 and the end of the Cold War. 

The study focuses on the continued growth in the secretary’s role 

during the tenures of Robert McNamara and his successor, Clark 

Clifford, under President Lyndon Johnson. It is not meant to offer 

a comprehensive look at these secretaries, but rather to examine 

one particularly important aspect of their work. Unlike that of the 

secretary of state, the impact of the secretary of defense in overseas 

affairs is rarely studied and is not as well understood. Our intent 

is to address a deficiency in general knowledge by illustrating how 

McNamara and Clifford participated in U.S. foreign relations to a 

greater degree than their predecessors. 

This series is part of an ongoing effort to highlight various aspects 

of the secretary’s mission and achievements. It began as a book 

manuscript by Dr. Steve Rearden, author of The Formative Years, 

1947–1950, the first volume in our Secretaries of Defense Historical 

Series. We anticipate that future series will cover a variety of other 

defense topics as they relate to the position of the secretary.

I wish to thank Cheryl Bratten at the U.S. Army Center of Military 

History, for crossing organizational lanes and providing muchneeded editorial support. I also continue to be indebted to Kathleen 

Jones in OSD Graphics for her expertise and design.

The series titles printed to date as well as other publications are 

available on the OSD Historical Office website. We invite you to 

peruse our selections at <http://history.defense.gov/>.

Erin R. Mahan

Chief Historian

Office of the Secretary of Defense
ix

Executive Summary

The presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson solidified the secretary of 

defense’s position as a central figure in the conduct of U.S. foreign 

affairs. This is in large part because Johnson, who exercised an 

intensely personal style of management but preferred domestic 

policy to foreign and defense affairs, came to depend on Secretary 

of Defense Robert S. McNamara to an even greater degree than 

had his predecessor. In the wake of President John F. Kennedy’s 

assassination, Johnson saw the defense secretary as a “source of 

great strength” and drew comfort and confidence from McNamara’s 

presence. The secretary’s management acumen and strength relative 

to his cabinet peers lent an air of authority to his advice that 

Johnson, who distrusted the professional military, found reassuring. 

From the spring of 1965 (the pivotal year of escalation in Vietnam) 

through mid-1967, the president met only occasionally with the 

Joint Chiefs of Staff. He preferred instead to run policy options 

through McNamara and later Clark Clifford, Secretary of State Dean 

Rusk, and his other civilian national security aides in much more 

frequent “Tuesday Lunches.” The Tuesday Lunch quickly became 

the primary mechanism through which national security policy got 

coordinated during the Johnson administration. For its part, the 

National Security Council, which retained formal responsibilities 

but had fallen into disuse as a de facto bureaucratic force under 

Kennedy, devolved even further under Johnson. Attempts to 

revitalize the formal interagency national security policy process, 

such as the establishment of the Senior Interdepartmental Group, 

failed in part because those individuals responsible for making them 

work—including Walt Rostow, the president’s national security 
x xi

Executive Summary Executive Summary

this regard was the Office of International Security Affairs, which 

had been given a broad mandate during the Kennedy years and 

which McNamara continued to invest with considerable resources 

and organizational clout. The assistant secretary who led ISA until 

mid-1967, John McNaughton, developed an extraordinarily close 

relationship with McNamara. He provided the secretary with the 

kind of rigorous, detailed analyses of international problems that 

the analytically minded McNamara required in preparation for his 

myriad White House commitments. McNaughton marshaled all 

of his analytical strength, and most of his professional energy, in 

a vigorous, persistent attempt to convince the secretary to reverse 

course on Vietnam. Privately he argued to McNamara that the 

administration’s faith in graduated pressure was leading it down 

an unsustainable path, and that, unlike the Cuban missile crisis, 

the strategic and operational advantages in Vietnam did not lay 

with the United States. Over time, McNaughton’s case—carried 

on after his tragic death by successor Paul Warnke—began to have 

the desired effect. In May 1967 McNamara urged a progressive 

de-escalation of U.S. military operations in Vietnam. It was one 

in a series of developments throughout that year that signaled 

his growing disillusionment with Johnson’s approach to the war. 

McNamara’s drift away from the administration’s Vietnam policy 

eroded his relationship with the president. As evidenced by the role 

both he and Clifford played in resolving the Pueblo crisis, however, 

McNamara’s position on Vietnam did not undermine the growing 

importance of the position of secretary of defense in foreign affairs.

Johnson replaced McNamara with Clifford in March 1968 on the 

expectation that his longtime friend and confidant would support 

the administration’s Vietnam policy. Clifford, who had been both 

a hawk and a dove at different points on Southeast Asia, came to 

office as a strong supporter but quickly changed positions after 

canvassing the Joint Chiefs on General William Westmoreland’s 

request in late February for more than 200,000 additional troops 

to bolster the war effort. Convinced that his senior military leaders 

had little idea what practical good such an escalation would have on 

adviser after March, 1966—saw greater value in supporting the 

more personalized, informal mechanisms that Johnson favored.

The secretary’s deepening involvement in foreign affairs stemmed 

also from the military character of the foreign crises that demanded 

Johnson’s attention outside of Vietnam. Certain predicaments, 

such as growing instability in the Dominican Republic and North 

Korea’s seizure of the U.S. intelligence ship Pueblo, confirmed 

administration officials’ belief that a communist monolith was 

conspiring to pile on the United States as its military commitment 

in Southeast Asia grew. The specter of communist advances 

elsewhere in the world put containment in Vietnam at risk and 

caused Johnson to embrace military power as the key component 

of his approaches to both situations. This ensured that the secretary 

of defense would occupy center stage in the U.S. responses. In the 

Dominican Republic, McNamara orchestrated the deployment 

of more than 22,000 military personnel to prevent the island 

nation from “go[ing] to Castro.” Johnson ordered the Dominican 

intervention in part because he felt the stakes were so high, but 

also, undoubtedly, because U.S. escalation in Vietnam was still in 

its early stages. A brief operation in the Caribbean could be carried 

out, Johnson believed, with relative ease. Nearly three years later, 

with more than a half million U.S. troops bogged down in Vietnam 

and no clear end in sight, Johnson again turned to military power 

as part of the U.S. response to the seizure of the Pueblo. In this 

case, he deployed military assets in a limited show of force mindful 

that, as Clifford stressed, the United States could ill-afford to let 

the situation spiral toward war. The positioning of additional U.S. 

naval and air forces in and around the Korean Peninsula—managed 

by both McNamara and Clifford during their transition—helped 

facilitate the direct diplomatic negotiations that ultimately secured 

the release of the Pueblo’s crew. 

McNamara’s managerial innovations within the Pentagon also 

aided the secretary’s continued rise in foreign affairs during the 

Johnson administration. Perhaps the most important innovation in 
xii 1

Executive Summary

the conduct of the war, the new secretary set about convincing the 

president of the need to scale back the U.S. military commitment 

and seek a negotiated settlement. As he did, Clifford became even 

more deeply enmeshed in the inner workings of the Johnson White 

House than McNamara had been. By the time Johnson left office in 

January 1969, his administration had reinforced the institutional 

precedent set during the Kennedy years: the secretary of defense 

was a central, indispensable contributor to U.S. foreign policy. 

Introduction

The growing importance and visibility of the secretary of defense 

in foreign affairs during John F. Kennedy’s presidency continued 

uninterrupted under his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Several 

factors explain the leading foreign policy role that both Robert 

S. McNamara and Clark M. Clifford played in the mid-tolate 1960s. First and foremost, it arose from a combination of 

President Johnson’s own personal style of decision making and his 

lack of comfort with national security affairs. After assuming the 

presidency under tragic circumstances, Johnson moved quickly 

to ensure continuity with Kennedy’s policy priorities, staff, and 

modes of doing business. Johnson’s deep-seated penchant for 

secrecy during policy deliberations reinforced this instinct and 

caused the president to extend Kennedy’s institutional realignment 

of the national security policy process, which had significantly 

reduced the role of the National Security Council (NSC). At 

the same time, Johnson, a dyed-in-the-wool New Deal liberal 

with little interest or experience in foreign relations, laid out an 

ambitious program of domestic reforms and made it clear that he 

intended to devote less attention than Kennedy had to foreign and 

military affairs. As a result, even as they consumed an ever-larger 

share of his time, Johnson attended to foreign and defense affairs 

through less regimented, more personalized mechanisms (such 

as the “Tuesday Lunch”) that concentrated high-level discussions 

within a small, handpicked circle of trusted advisers. The net effect 

was to give McNamara, and then Clifford, more direct, frequent 

contact with the president than any previous secretary of defense 

had enjoyed—and in a forum ideally suited for influencing major 

national security decisions.1
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The secretary’s deepening involvement in foreign affairs arose also 

from the nature of the overseas crises that confronted President 

Johnson between 1963 and 1969. The escalating war in Vietnam 

fostered an especially close, personal connection between Johnson 

and Secretary McNamara, one that exacerbated the growing chasm 

between civilian and military leaders in the Department of Defense 

(DoD) and drew the secretary more firmly into the center of 

presidential decision making. The president also faced a daunting 

array of problems in places such as the Dominican Republic 

(1965), where he feared the emergence of a Castro-like communist 

regime, and on the Korean Peninsula (1968), where North Korea’s 

seizure of the electronic intelligence ship Pueblo threatened to 

imperil the nation’s ongoing and increasingly costly fight to contain 

communism in Southeast Asia. Given these stakes, the threat or use 

of force quickly became a principal policy option in both cases. 

As he had with Vietnam, Johnson adopted the practice of rarely 

acting on a major foreign policy decision without fully canvassing 

his closest advisers, especially his secretaries of defense.2

The secretary’s role in foreign policy was further bolstered 

by McNamara’s managerial innovations within the Defense 

Department. By late 1963 he had initiated a number of farreaching changes to DoD’s internal policy operations that, as the 

decade progressed, institutionalized his direction, authority, and 

control over day-to-day activities. Among the most important were 

the creation of a new resource allocation process (the Planning, 

Programming, and Budgeting System, or PPBS) to more clearly 

relate defense budgeting decisions to national objectives and strategy; 

the creation of the civilian-led Office of Systems Analysis, which 

specialized in producing independent quantitative assessments of 

program costs across the department; and the reinvigoration of the 

Office of International Security Affairs (ISA), which provided the 

secretary with an efficient, responsive source of politico-military 

analysis on the full range of overseas challenges confronting the 

United States. Together, these mechanisms strengthened the 

connections between foreign and defense policy. The emergence 

of ISA, in particular, enhanced the defense secretary’s credibility 

relative to the president’s other foreign affairs advisers and increased 

the department’s stature and influence on foreign policy matters 

within the administration.3

Johnson’s Style of Decision Making

Addressing a joint session of Congress five days after President 

Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson solemnly promised a grieving 

nation that “the ideas and ideals which he [Kennedy] so nobly 

represented must and will be translated into effective action.” 

It signaled the beginning of Johnson’s drive to make the fallen 

president’s priorities his own, to continue Kennedy’s push for major 

reforms such as federal civil rights legislation in the domestic realm, 

and, in world affairs, to continue to demonstrate what he called his 

predecessor’s “courage to seek peace” and “fortitude to risk war.” Yet 

differences in presidential style and temperament between Kennedy, 

the Boston patrician, and Johnson, the brash Texas legislator, were 

obvious from the start. The product of a rough-and-tumble variety 

of politics, Johnson had built his career around developing a power 

base in Congress, rising to national prominence there as Senate 

majority leader in the late 1950s. Accordingly, his skills were 

those of a parliamentarian and dealmaker whose preferred milieu 

was the Senate cloakroom, where he focused on domestic policy, 

forged countless legislative compromises, and bartered votes for 

immediate favors or later considerations. Johnson had acquired 

firsthand exposure to national security affairs while serving as 

vice president from 1961 to 1963, but the experience had not 

kindled any deep interest in foreign or military matters by the time 

he assumed the presidency. Indeed, he was considerably more at 

ease—and generally more effective—handling domestic matters. 

As a result, Johnson gave his secretaries of defense broad latitude to 

direct the nation’s defense policy.4

Johnson was conversant with the accepted Cold War concepts 

of containment, bipolarity, and limited war, but lacked the same 
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4 5

instinct for foreign policy that made him so effective in domestic 

affairs. Instead of involvements abroad, Johnson wanted to be 

remembered as the architect of the most ambitious agenda of 

domestic reforms since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 

1930s. In fact, he saw his program, which he dubbed the “Great 

Society,” as the New Deal’s heir—something that would complete 

the work that Roosevelt had begun three decades earlier. Johnson 

recognized, however, that the overarching contest with the Soviet 

Union could not be ignored or neglected and that even though 

he preferred to work on domestic issues, his administration would 

need steady hands tending to foreign affairs. This realization formed 

the basis of his dependence on advisers inherited from Kennedy, 

nearly all of whom he implored to stay on during the dark opening 

days of his presidency.5

Secretary McNamara was at or near the height of his power and 

reputation when Johnson took office, and had won plaudits from 

the Kennedy White House both for mastering the unwieldy 

Pentagon bureaucracy and for bringing a new level of efficiency and 

effectiveness to the defense establishment. Johnson had observed 

firsthand as vice president the extraordinarily close association 

McNamara had developed with Kennedy. He understood that, 

because the two men had not met until after the 1960 election, 

McNamara’s rise was attributable mainly to his intellect, managerial 

prowess, and capacity to produce results, and not because of 

deeply rooted political connections. McNamara enjoyed an aura 

of strength and confidence unmatched in the cabinet Johnson 

inherited, and the new president drew comfort and confidence 

from his defense secretary’s reassuring presence. Johnson later 

noted that McNamara was a “source of great strength” during the 

administration’s first days. Possessed of an exceptionally quick and 

retentive mind, the former Ford Motor Company chief executive 

officer quickly solidified his place in Johnson’s inner circle. Some 

longtime associates close to the president felt that his faith in 

McNamara, so quickly established, was misplaced. Johnson’s 

mentor, Senator Richard B. Russell (D–GA), thought McNamara 

was overly emotional in matters of foreign policy and took a dim 

view of what he considered the secretary of defense’s “hypnotic 

influence” over the president. Such views carried little weight with 

Johnson, however. As U.S. involvement in Vietnam intensified 

from 1964 to 1966, the president relied increasingly on McNamara 

both for policy advice and implementation of his decisions on 

military matters.6

Johnson operated on somewhat different terms with McNamara’s 

successor, longtime Democratic political operative and close friend 

Clark Clifford, whose connections to the White House dated to 

his service during Harry S. Truman’s administration. Although 

McNamara had grown close to the president during his sevenyear tenure as secretary, he always related to Johnson as an aide 

or adviser relates to a superior. Clifford, on the other hand, acted 

as an old and trusted confidant. His involvement in foreign and 

defense affairs had generally been behind the scenes in the Truman 

administration, as one might expect given his role as the White 

House Counsel who oversaw the drafting of the 1947 National 

Security Act. Clifford preferred this to any official role and in 

subsequent years continued to make routine detours from his 

successful legal practice to offer outside advice whenever Kennedy 

or Johnson needed someone to take on a sensitive, discrete 

mission—be it as a watchdog over the intelligence community (as 

a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board), 

or as a roving troubleshooter on matters ranging from Vietnam to 

the Liberty incident. When viewed in context, Clifford’s agreement 

to step onto center stage and serve as secretary of defense appears 

out of character with his established way of doing business.7

While rooted in their competence and strong personal relationships 

with the president, the intimate involvement of Johnson’s 

secretaries of defense in foreign affairs can also be attributed to 

his strong preference for civilian over military authorities and to a 

dearth of strong, effective foreign affairs advisers elsewhere in the 

administration. Like Kennedy, who blamed military leadership for 
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his administration’s early stumbles on the world stage, Johnson 

harbored a healthy suspicion of the professional military. As the 

challenges facing the United States in Vietnam mounted during 

the election year of 1964, Johnson looked less and less to his 

military advisers when assessing his options. The marginalizing 

of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) from policymaking during this 

pivotal period was the White House’s way of minimizing dissent 

within the administration and, by extension, limiting the exposure 

of its emerging Vietnam policy to public scrutiny ahead of the 

election. Johnson continued to hold the Joint Chiefs at a distance 

after winning his own term. Indeed, between March 1965 and June 

1967 he met with them on only ten occasions, and then not so 

much to seek advice on pressing problems as to ratify decisions he 

had made in consultation with civilian authorities such as Secretary 

McNamara and key staff from within the Office of the Secretary 

of Defense (OSD). The exclusion of the JCS from Vietnam 

deliberations, especially during the critical year of 1965, further 

boosted the defense secretary’s already strong standing within 

Johnson’s foreign affairs team, but had the unfortunate effect of 

alienating and marginalizing his military leadership.8

The one cabinet officer who might have challenged the defense 

secretary’s continued rise in foreign affairs during the Johnson 

administration was Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Despite early 

expectations to the contrary, however, his influence on overseas 

matters had fallen behind that of Secretary McNamara during the 

Kennedy administration. Johnson had a genuine depth of respect 

for Rusk’s views on foreign affairs. His desire for continuity with 

Kennedy’s personnel and policy initiatives saved the secretary of 

state’s position early on, and as time wore on, Rusk’s unswerving 

loyalty in the face of mounting criticism on Vietnam led Johnson 

to retain him as a member of his foreign affairs team.9

The fact that Rusk enjoyed a better rapport with Johnson than he 

had with Kennedy, however, did not automatically translate into 

a more prominent role in the Johnson administration’s foreign 

policy team. The State Department was plagued by internal 

fissures over Vietnam that Rusk proved unable to resolve as U.S. 

involvement deepened and intensified. Over time, those problems 

manifested themselves as costly inefficiencies that hampered the 

State Department’s participation in the foreign policy process. State 

Department offices often proved incapable of providing the White 

House with the kind of prompt advisory support the president 

needed. When this happened, McNamara’s efficient staff—

principally his favored offices, Systems Analysis and International 

Security Affairs—stepped into the void, further enhancing the 

defense secretary’s reputation as one who could quickly and 

efficiently deliver high-quality results on pressing foreign policy 

matters when the State Department could not.10

Also aiding the secretary of defense’s rise was the fact that, after 

holding together in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s 

assassination, key members of Johnson’s foreign policy team began 

departing after the president won his own term in 1964. Many 

would have left anyway, but after the election Johnson hastened the 

process by stepping up the recruitment of his own senior advisers. 

In March 1966, McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser since 

1961, left to become president of the Ford Foundation. Bundy’s 

departure came as a blow to McNamara, who could no longer 

count on having as trustworthy a personal friend coordinating 

policy in the White House. To replace Bundy, Johnson settled on 

Walt W. Rostow, an academic economist who had served both as 

Bundy’s deputy on the NSC and as head of the State Department’s 

Policy Planning Council.11

Little in Rostow’s background foreshadowed the forceful role he 

would play in support of Johnson’s Vietnam policy as national 

security adviser. At the State Department, he had spent considerable 

time working on the ill-fated multilateral nuclear force for Western 

Europe that Johnson abandoned in late 1964. He had been 

involved only on the fringes of Johnson’s decision to escalate U.S. 

involvement in Vietnam in 1965. Despite this, one White House 
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insider remembered Rostow as “a fervid, almost an exuberant hawk” 

on Vietnam at the helm of the NSC staff. McNamara provided 

a similar assessment, writing later that Rostow was “optimistic 

by nature,” that he viewed U.S. political and military objectives 

in Vietnam “uncritically,” and that, over time, he “tended to be 

skeptical of any report that failed to indicate we were making 

progress” in Southeast Asia. Rostow’s strong commitment to 

Johnson’s Vietnam policy contrasted with McNamara’s growing 

doubts throughout late 1966 and 1967. When Johnson made the 

decision to replace McNamara with Clifford in early 1968, he was 

seeking a defense secretary whose views on Vietnam were more in 

tune with Rostow’s.12

Although it was not immediately apparent, Rostow’s promotion 

also heralded a further stage in the devolution of the NSC 

apparatus. Although the council had lost considerable prestige 

and influence under Kennedy, who preferred informal, issueoriented advisory groups to official NSC channels, it had remained 

an important mechanism for processing policy directives, 

planning covert operations, and managing crises. Johnson shared 

Kennedy’s preference for a more personal style of national security 

policymaking but also harbored an instinctive dislike for the NSC 

system. He considered its meetings, which had grown under 

Kennedy to include a sizable number of nonmember advisers, 

too large and potentially porous to allow forthright discussion. 

Moreover, he believed that large, crowded meetings were not 

conducive to presidential decision making. Finding even less use 

for the NSC than Kennedy had, Johnson gave Rostow virtually 

a free hand to redesign its procedures and wound up effectively 

relegating it to the status of a part-time consultative committee 

with limited responsibilities. Not only did the president hold 

fewer NSC meetings than his predecessors, he also cut back on 

the number of written policy directives it vetted from an annual 

average of 90 under Kennedy to 19 under Johnson.13

With the NSC a less integral player in the policymaking process, 

Johnson managed policy by other means. His favorite was to 

hold small, fairly regular White House meetings with his senior 

advisers—gatherings that became known as the Tuesday Lunch, 

even though they were not always held on Tuesdays or even at 

lunchtime. Beginning in August 1964, these meetings quickly 

became the true focal point of high-level policy deliberations for 

the remainder of Johnson’s presidency. They tended to be informal 

and leisurely gatherings, but did adhere to preset agendas in order 

to keep discussion from wandering. In preparation for these 

sessions, McNamara often lunched the day before with his deputy 

secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then 

phoned the White House with a list of subjects he wanted placed 

on the agenda. Items selected for discussion were invariably matters 

requiring prompt attention. Vietnam typically dominated, but 

topics ranged widely over other issues such as the 1964 Cyprus 

crisis, NATO, East-West trade, relations with Latin America, the 

use and stockpiling of nuclear weapons, and even ambassadorial 

appointments. In the early days, Bundy would compile and circulate 

summaries of the discussions. But fearful of leaks, Johnson soon 

ordered that all records related to the lunches remain in the White 

House. It then fell to the various participants to communicate the 

sessions’ results to the senior members of their staffs.14

The Tuesday Lunch reflected Johnson’s personal style of decision 

making. Its organization and function closely resembled that of an 

inner cabinet of top officials, handpicked by the chief executive, 

meeting in seclusion to hash out their most difficult issues in 

uninhibited discussion. British governments had operated in this 

fashion for years, but for an American administration it was a novel 

development. The lack of structure often made it hard for even 

the participants to understand what the meetings were supposed 

to accomplish. Rostow, for one, described the Tuesday Lunch as a 

“stock-taking session,” partly to air opinions, but more importantly, 

to come up with decisions. McNamara had a somewhat different 
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assessment. He saw the meetings not as policymaking gatherings, 

but as opportunities to “isolate problems” for the president’s 

attention. “I thought them extremely useful opportunities for 

the President to exchange views informally with his key national 

security advisors,” McNamara later recalled, “And for the President 

. . . to probe intensively the views of each of the participants” 

without deputies and lower-level policy types in the room.15

Despite the obvious advantages of having a small forum for 

high-level discussion, the Tuesday Lunch turned out to be an 

overly personalized, often inefficient means for conducting 

business and making policy. For those left out of the inner circle, 

its exclusivity, coupled with the diminished importance of the 

NSC to policymaking under Johnson, severely complicated 

interagency coordination and made influencing the direction 

of policy virtually impossible. Initiatives to strengthen formal 

policy development channels within the administration, such as 

the creation of the Senior Interdepartmental Group (SIG) under 

the NSC to give “full, prompt, and systematic consideration” 

to foreign policy problems across interagency lines, failed due 

to lack of top-level support. Operating a tier below the NSC, 

the SIG was a deliberative body of under secretaries whose 

first chairman, Under Secretary of State George Ball, likened 

it to government-by-committee and gave it only grudging 

support. SIG meetings were irregular at first, the schedule and 

agenda inhibited by Ball’s ambivalence as well as by members’ 

uncertainty about how to approach their tasks. As a result, the 

organization never delivered the kind of results that General 

Maxwell Taylor, who proposed it, envisioned. The president preferred 

to deal with his most valued national security aides on a more personal 

basis and had little use for the NSC, let alone for any underlying 

support structure. Although Johnson did allow the SIG some degree 

of latitude in dealing with lesser problems, he denied it any large 

policy-shaping role on the most pressing challenges confronting the 

nation, such as Vietnam. The president’s action limiting the SIG’s 

reach was consistent with his personal style of decision making and 

reflected the broader reality that national security policymaking in 

the Johnson administration was organized around personal contacts 

and ad hoc arrangements.16

Crises Confronting the Johnson Administration

The secretary of defense’s deepening involvement in foreign affairs 

arose also from the nature of the overseas crises that confronted 

President Johnson between 1963 and 1969. Force was an essential 

component of U.S. foreign policy well before Johnson assumed the 

presidency due to the distinctly military character of the Cold War’s 

superpower competition for strategic influence. By the midpoint 

of his tenure, however, as the U.S. troop commitment in South 

Vietnam ballooned to more than a half million, military power 

defined the tenor and direction of U.S. foreign policy to an even 

greater extent than it had before. As the administration escalated 

the war in Vietnam, it began to evaluate other foreign crises—some 

of which, even absent a war in Southeast Asia, might have merited 

military action—in light of how intervention might affect both the 

conduct of the war and the increasingly delicate political balance 

the president had to strike in the face of a budding antiwar protest 

movement. In some cases, such as instability in the Dominican 

Republic in the spring of 1965 and the January 1968 seizure of 

the intelligence ship USS Pueblo by North Korea, the depth 

and intensity of U.S. involvement in Vietnam exacerbated top 

officials’ already ingrained tendency to see individual provocations 

elsewhere in the world as parts of a broader communist conspiracy. 

These realities made military power an indispensable component 

of Johnson’s diplomacy and further enhanced the secretary of 

defense’s foreign policy role as the administration confronted crises 

near and far.

Intervention in the Dominican Republic

Overshadowed by the concurrent buildup of U.S. forces in 

Vietnam, the military intervention in the Dominican Republic 
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during the spring of 1965 underscored the secretary of defense’s 

pivotal role in foreign affairs during Johnson’s presidency. 

The immediate cause of U.S. involvement was the president’s 

determination to prevent what he and his advisers believed was a 

communist-supported opposition movement from overthrowing a 

fledgling noncommunist government. By 1965 Johnson believed 

that he had, in his own words, “just about lived down the [1961] Bay 

of Pigs” fiasco. Emboldened, he resolved to do everything within his 

power to prevent communism from gaining another foothold in the 

Caribbean. At a deeper level, though, Johnson’s decision to intervene 

in the Dominican Republic also reflected the prominent role that 

military power had played for decades in U.S.-Dominican relations. 

Throughout the 30-year dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo 

y Molina, which ended in 1961, military ties had served as the 

diplomatic channel of first resort between the Dominican Republic 

and the United States. Trujillo had risen to power on the strength 

of contacts he had developed with American military officers, 

especially Marines, during the 1916–1924 U.S. occupation of the 

island nation. He owed much of the generous support he received 

from Washington throughout his decades in power to the fact 

that misgivings about his growing repressiveness, concentrated in 

the U.S. State Department, were often drowned out by American 

military voices that stressed his value as a regional ally. This enabled 

Trujillo to destroy systematically the seeds from which democracy 

might have sprouted after his fall. It is not surprising, then, that the 

United States looked first to military power when confronting the 

damaging effects of the post-Trujillo power vacuum that engulfed 

the Dominican Republic by 1965. Not only did military power 

seem like an appropriate tool for confronting communism in the 

hemisphere at that moment, by 1965, it had been the primary 

currency of U.S.-Dominican relations for more than four decades.17

One factor that might have acted as a check on the use of force 

in the Dominican Republic was Johnson’s dramatic escalation 

that same year of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam. However, the 

president and his close advisers, McNamara chief among them, saw 

the two situations in different parts of the world as manifestations 

of the same communist problem. “How,” Johnson asked his aides 

rhetorically, “can we send troops 10,000 miles away [to Vietnam] 

and let commies take over right under our noses” in the Caribbean? 

Far from seeing the Dominican challenge as a distraction from 

Vietnam, Johnson and McNamara saw it as a necessary and 

even vital endeavor in the nation’s Cold War struggle against 

communism. Accordingly, the president devoted so much time 

and personal attention to Dominican affairs in the earliest days 

of the crisis (late April 1965) that Secretary Rusk jokingly referred 

to him as “the desk officer for the Dominican Republic.” As was 

his preference, Johnson managed the crisis not through formal 

structures and procedures, but by convening an ad hoc working 

group. Rusk and the State Department had lead responsibility, 

but from the beginning all involved agreed that military power—

whether engaged in hostilities or merely in a show of force—would 

be the United States’ primary diplomatic instrument for achieving a 

favorable resolution. Given Johnson’s well-documented reluctance 

to engage with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this gave Secretary 

McNamara the central role in one of the most urgent foreign policy 

crises to face the early Johnson administration.

McNamara quickly dove into the problem of identifying forces he 

could commit to a U.S. response. Almost immediately, on 25 April 

1965 the administration dispatched a naval squadron with orders 

to evacuate U.S. citizens whose lives or property were threatened 

by the spiraling violence. Shortly thereafter, Johnson approved the 

landing of a small Marine contingent to protect Americans and 

escort them to the safety of the ships waiting offshore. As the first 

marines landed, an influx of intelligence reports and dispatches 

from the U.S. embassy in Santo Domingo (some, as scholars have 

since noted, of dubious quality) confirmed the president’s suspicion 

that communist elements had infiltrated the antigovernment rebels. 

At the White House, Johnson’s working group worried that the 

initial Marine landing was insufficient and that the deteriorating 
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tactical situation required a more vigorous response. The president 

approved the landing of an additional 500 marines on 29 April, and 

later that same day, acting at McNamara’s behest, the Joint Chiefs 

directed remaining elements of the 6th Marine Expeditionary Unit 

and two battalions of paratroopers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne 

Division to deploy.18

From beginning to end, McNamara demonstrated an awareness of 

the intervention’s diplomatic and political sensitivities befitting his 

role as the president’s key foreign affairs adviser. His determination 

to prevent the Dominican Republic from, in Johnson’s words, “going 

communist,” led him to recommend applying “overwhelming 

force” to the brief operation—more than 22,000 troops at the 

peak. At the same time, the secretary was attuned to the concerns of 

Latin American nations, many of which were predisposed to seeing 

Washington’s response less as a justifiable response to the communist 

threat than as a return to the gunboat diplomacy that defined interAmerican relations in the early decades of the twentieth century. As 

the second week of the crisis dawned, McNamara advised President 

Johnson that additional deployments to the Dominican Republic 

should be accompanied by a call on Latin American nations, 

through the Organization of American States (OAS), to join the 

U.S. effort to restore stability and bring sustainable governance 

to the Dominican Republic. Although in his view a substantial 

commitment of U.S. forces had been necessary to avert a collapse 

to communism, McNamara recognized that U.S. and global public 

opinion would not support an open-ended commitment in the 

Caribbean as American involvement in Vietnam deepened. The 

sooner a sustainable cease-fire could be reached, and the sooner the 

United States could transition a major share of the responsibility 

for monitoring that cease-fire to a coalition of partner nations, he 

reasoned, the better.19

The announcement of a negotiated cease-fire on 30 April and the 

establishment of an Inter-American Peace Force (or IAPF, headed 

by a Brazilian officer and consisting of forces from Brazil, Costa 

Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Paraguay) in late May enabled 

the Johnson administration to slow its buildup of forces and begin 

planning for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. In June, as the pace 

of U.S. withdrawals accelerated, Johnson turned to McNamara—

clearly his most trusted hand on overseas matters—to provide 

a retrospective that the administration could use to explain and 

defend its intervention before the American public and the world. 

The secretary’s assessment stressed that the initial U.S. deployments 

had been intended to protect American citizens and property in 

the Dominican Republic, and that the administration had approved 

subsequent infusions of forces both to establish internationally 

recognized security zones between the warring factions and to secure 

vital lines of communications through unstable areas. The limited 

number of American forces that would remain as part of the IAPF, 

McNamara concluded, would be there to stem the tide should the 

fighting between loyalists and rebels resume and destroy the ceasefire agreement. The reasons the secretary highlighted to explain 

Washington’s intervention, especially the need to protect American 

citizens and property, were certainly valid. However, they were also 

incomplete. His assessment avoided the most important cause that 

drove Johnson’s decision to act: the administration’s underlying 

fear of “another Cuba” emerging in the hemisphere. In avoiding 

this central issue, McNamara was attempting to shield the Johnson 

administration from the criticisms of Latin Americans who remained 

skeptical of U.S. motivations for intervening. Rather than dwelling 

on the Cold War imperative, he crafted a narrow, defensible case 

intended to ruffle as few feathers as possible while permitting the 

administration to refocus its energy from the Dominican operation 

to the more urgent problem that confronted the United States in 

Vietnam. In doing so, McNamara demonstrated a keen sensitivity 

to the political dimensions of national defense and foreign affairs 

and further enhanced his credibility on overseas matters with 

President Johnson.20
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The Pueblo Crisis

The secretary of defense also factored prominently in Washington’s 

response to North Korea’s 23 January 1968 seizure of an American 

electronic intelligence collection ship, the Pueblo, which had been 

operating in international waters off the Korean Peninsula. From 

the beginning, President Johnson and Secretary McNamara viewed 

North Korea’s action as part of a broader communist plot approved, 

if not orchestrated, by Moscow to divert U.S. military resources 

and attention from the fight in Vietnam, pressure South Korea to 

withdraw its support for the American war effort there, and generally 

hasten U.S. strategic exhaustion. The defense secretary believed that 

a response that could be construed as weak internationally would 

therefore give communist aggression a window of opportunity 

to “prolong the Vietnam war substantially.” However, neither 

McNamara nor Johnson believed that a strong response necessarily 

required military action. Instead, both recognized that a show of 

military power in the region would lend weight to U.S. efforts to 

forge a diplomatic solution. Accordingly, on 24 January, the day 

after the seizure, McNamara recommended a general deployment 

of air and sea forces to the area of the Korean Peninsula, along 

with a presidential call-up of military Reserves and a mandatory 

extension of enlistments. These recommendations went further 

than Clifford, the defense secretary-designate who would take over 

for McNamara a month later, thought prudent. He was uncertain 

that the Pueblo had remained entirely outside North Korea’s 

territorial waters throughout its mission and was convinced that, 

even if it had, significant American deployments in the region to 

redress the injustice of the seizure had the potential to provoke a 

conflict the United States could ill afford to wage.21

Although his drift away from Johnson’s Vietnam policy had 

diminished McNamara’s standing in the White House by early 

1968, in this situation the defense secretary’s counsel held sway 

with the president. By the end of that first day, McNamara had 

convinced Johnson to approve the deployment of approximately 

250 Air Force and Marine fighter jets and bombers to the Korean 

theater along with the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. In addition, 

the United States would resume intelligence collection of the sort 

the Pueblo had been conducting before its seizure and would make 

a private diplomatic overture to Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin to 

request assistance in securing the release of the ship and its crew from 

North Korean captivity. Sensing that military power was perhaps 

his greatest source of diplomatic leverage, Johnson went one step 

further than McNamara on force levels, ordering the aircraft carrier 

USS Kitty Hawk to Korea from Southeast Asian waters and urging 

the secretary to immediately dispatch 300 additional aircraft to 

the peninsula. Throughout the deliberations surrounding these 

deployments, Johnson, McNamara, and the Joint Chiefs stayed 

focused on the diplomatic objective, the return of the Pueblo’s crew, 

and sought to minimize the risk of armed conflict.22

In practice, however, this was a difficult thing to accomplish. 

Years of deep resentment and mistrust (and the absence of formal 

diplomatic relations) between the United States and North Korea 

had left displays of military power as the only real instrument 

of diplomacy between the two nations. However, attempts to 

strengthen the U.S. hand by dispatching more forces to the region 

could increase the risk of armed conflict. It was this eventuality that 

Clifford, who continued to urge caution, injected into the debate. 

Keenly aware that his administration was walking a diplomatic 

high-wire, Johnson ordered that aircraft deployments be carried 

out at a reduced pace to avoid the appearance of provocation. 

At the same time, he launched diplomatic initiatives aimed at 

signaling the United States’ intent to find a peaceful resolution. On 

25 January 1968, he directed U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg 

to request an urgent meeting of the U.N. Security Council. When 

two days of deliberations yielded little in the way of demonstrable 

progress, the president took the extraordinary step of approving 

direct negotiations with Pyongyang through the Military Armistice 

Commission at the border enclave of Panmunjom.23
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Secretary of Defense Clifford and his staff remained at the center 

of the contentious, months-long negotiations that followed. The 

fundamental issue was North Korea’s demand for, and the United 

States’ steadfast refusal to give, an apology for violating North Korea’s 

territorial waters. Clifford joined Rostow and Rusk in rejecting 

that demand. However, as time wore on, the seed of a compromise 

emerged from the Pentagon’s resurgent Office of International 

Security Affairs. The Assistant Secretary of Defense for ISA, Paul 

C. Warnke, proposed giving Pyongyang the apology that it desired 

in order to secure the Pueblo crew’s release—on the assumption 

that, once the crew was free, American authorities could confirm 

that the ship had never left international waters and then retract 

the apology. The fact that this basic approach prevailed underscores 

the enduring importance of the secretary of defense to U.S. foreign 

policy during the Johnson administration. For his part, during his 

last month on the job McNamara worked seamlessly within the 

ad hoc advisory group President Johnson convened to manage the 

U.S. response. He orchestrated the essentially diplomatic buildup 

of U.S. military forces in the Korean area and performed effectively 

despite the fact that, by the waning days of his Pentagon tenure, his 

relationship with the president had eroded over Vietnam. As did 

the Dominican intervention three years earlier, McNamara’s efforts, 

and the central roles both he and Clifford played in resolving the 

Pueblo crisis, underscore the degree to which Johnson relied on his 

secretaries of defense when confronting crises overseas.24

McNamara’s Managerial Innovations

Bolstered by personal connections to the president and prominent 

roles in international crises, the secretary of defense’s growing role in 

foreign policy during the Johnson administration was reinforced by 

McNamara’s managerial innovations within the Pentagon. During 

the Kennedy years McNamara established mechanisms such as the 

PPBS and the Office of Systems Analysis, which institutionalized his 

direction, authority, and control over DoD’s day-to-day activities 

and enhanced his reputation relative to his cabinet peers. It was his 

concurrent effort to strengthen ISA, however, that most directly 

supported the secretary of defense’s growing influence in overseas 

matters. McNamara’s well-established status as first among equals 

on Johnson’s foreign policy team ensured that ISA would remain at 

the center as the Johnson administration confronted early foreign 

policy challenges—none more pressing than the question of how 

to contain communism in Southeast Asia. Leading ISA through 

this consequential period was John McNaughton, a lawyer and 

McNamara confidant who had served as deputy assistant secretary 

for arms control and as DoD general counsel before taking over 

ISA from William P. Bundy in early 1964. His close personal 

relationship with McNamara solidified ISA’s position, as the 

secretary later recalled, as “one of the two or three most significant 

posts in the whole department” during the Kennedy-Johnson 

years. This proximity and the depth of the analytical talent he 

supervised would make McNaughton and ISA the secretary’s most 

influential sources of advice on the difficult problem the United 

States confronted in Vietnam.25

An able debater, McNaughton publicly defended the administration’s 

position on Vietnam at each and every turn. This public stance helped 

give rise to the notion that he was McNamara’s “right-hand man” 

for what was increasingly being called “McNamara’s war.” Indeed, 

when the New York Times released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, it 

made McNaughton appear manipulative and a leading advocate of 

going to war in Southeast Asia. When McNaughton’s long-secret 

private journal surfaced in the mid-2000s, however, it validated the 

contrary observation that journalist David Halberstam had made 

in his 1972 best seller, The Best and the Brightest, that McNaughton 

harbored “profound doubts” from the outset of the war. Indeed, no 

one individual was more influential than McNaughton in slowly 

turning McNamara against the very escalatory Vietnam policy he 

had done so much to design and implement.26

The United States had already begun to intensify its involvement 

in Vietnam by the time McNaughton took the reins of ISA in the 
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summer of 1964. The war was quickly becoming “Americanized,” 

even though the first large infusions of U.S. combat troops would 

not arrive for another year. McNaughton believed the United 

States should not become more deeply involved because the 

South Vietnamese government lacked popular support among its 

own people. Moreover, he maintained, with each passing day, as 

the United States got more deeply involved in the war, it would 

become harder and harder to pull out. Eventually, he feared, the 

commitment would become its own justification. “Each day we 

lose a little control,” McNaughton told presidential aide Michael 

Forrestal that spring, because “each decision that we make wrong, or 

don’t make at all, makes the next decision a little bit harder because if 

we haven’t stopped it today, then the reasons for not stopping it will 

still exist tomorrow, and we’ll be in even deeper.”27

At a time when U.S. policymakers were justifying involvement on the 

basis of the “domino theory,” McNaughton was an outspoken critic 

of such geopolitical reductionism. The struggle over Vietnam was 

only a small portion of a long tug-of-war over Asia, he believed, and 

it had to be recognized that in some locales the odds were against the 

United States, whereas elsewhere they were more favorable. “We do 

not believe that the loss of South Vietnam and Laos would be followed 

by the rapid, successive communization of the other states of the Far 

East,” McNaughton wrote in an internal memorandum in June 1964. 

His view remained largely unaltered by the Gulf of Tonkin incident 

later that summer even though, because of his position, he had to aid 

in the selection of bombing targets for the retaliatory air strikes that 

followed. This stands as an early example of what Townsend Hoopes, 

McNaughton’s principal deputy in ISA, later called “a detectable 

distinction between his public and private positions” on Vietnam. 

McNaughton would express his views on the folly of intensifying U.S. 

military action in Vietnam privately with McNamara, but, personally 

devoted to the secretary and convinced that he could do more longterm good from inside the national security establishment than he 

could by leaving, he remained “punctilious in his public support of 

the administration” and its approach in Southeast Asia.28

McNaughton intensified his internal lobbying against increased 

U.S. involvement in Vietnam following Johnson’s landslide victory 

in the 1964 presidential election, taking care at every turn to avoid 

contradicting the still-optimistic McNamara at any meetings they 

attended together. As early as December, he urged that the United 

States should seek a negotiated settlement, even on unfavorable 

terms, because the Saigon government “had almost no legitimacy in 

the eyes of its citizens.” Moreover, he argued, further Americanizing 

the war would make the operational situation worse and, contrary 

to arguments advanced by hawks about the need to intensify the 

war in order to preserve U.S. credibility, would hurt rather than 

help the global reputation of the United States. McNaughton’s voice 

was not the only one McNamara heard being raised against the 

war. Formal estimates from the intelligence community supported 

McNaughton’s views about the unpopularity of Saigon’s ruling class. 

However, his was the “most consistent and persistent” voice lobbying 

the secretary against escalation, and as one recent assessment has 

concluded, no other administration insider put the situation in 

starker terms that could not be easily rationalized away.29

Quick to deduce President Johnson’s inclinations and preferences 

and keen on preserving his favored place within the White House 

inner circle, McNamara remained committed to a policy of military 

escalation throughout 1965 and into 1966. He and Johnson’s other 

key foreign affairs advisers believed that the application of carefully 

calibrated, graduated pressure, which had supposedly worked so well 

during the Cuban missile crisis, would persuade North Vietnam to 

forego its ambition to unify the country. McNaughton was openly 

critical of this thinking, believing that few strong parallels could 

be drawn between the two situations. As high as the stakes were 

in Cuba in 1962, Soviet vital interests had not been involved, and 

all the military equities had been overwhelmingly in the United 

States’ favor. In Vietnam, he argued, it was not evident that vital 

U.S. interests were at stake, while U.S. superiority in the military 

balance on the ground was “by no means clear.”30
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Although McNamara generally continued to advocate intensifying 

the U.S. war effort, he did respond positively when McNaughton 

proposed opening the door to negotiations for a political settlement 

by declaring a unilateral cease-fire during the 37-day bombing halt 

in late 1965 and early 1966. The secretary had recently returned 

from a fact-finding mission to Vietnam and had been shocked by 

the extent of the casualties the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment 

had suffered in battle with North Vietnamese main-force units in 

the remote Ia Drang Valley the previous November. McNamara’s 

support for a cease-fire was short-lived, however, as he quickly 

abandoned the idea when faced with staunch opposition from 

Bundy, the national security adviser. Although the defense secretary 

put the odds of a military victory in Vietnam at no better than onein-three now, he was still telling the president what he wanted to 

hear, that the war could be won on the battlefield.31

McNaughton’s faith in metrics and the analytical rigor that defined 

ISA’s work under his leadership endeared him to McNamara, 

whose own passion for statistical analysis and desire to chart the 

war’s progress quantitatively were well known. As time wore on, 

the ISA chief grew increasingly certain that the facts and figures 

pouring into Washington from the field did not tell the whole story 

and did not serve as an accurate barometer of U.S. progress in 

Vietnam. The fundamental issue, in his view, was that the North 

Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (NLF, also known as 

Viet Cong) forces fighting against the United States were more 

interested in ridding their country of foreign occupiers than they 

were in championing the spread of communism. The tenacity with 

which the North Vietnamese Army and NLF fought, McNaughton 

believed, sprang from a deep well of nationalism that no politically 

acceptable quantity of American blood and treasure could 

overcome. His consistently pessimistic reports throughout 1966 

and early 1967 corroborated the bleak returns that the defense 

secretary was receiving from his commanders in the field. Over 

time, McNaughton’s persistence—and, after his tragic death in an 

airplane crash in July 1967, that of successor Paul Warnke—eroded 

McNamara’s belief that the United States could achieve its aims in 

Vietnam at an acceptable cost.32

McNamara to Clifford

McNamara’s conversion on Vietnam led Johnson to replace him 

in early 1968 with longtime political associate and friend Clark 

Clifford, whom the president believed would offer stronger support 

to the administration’s policy. However, McNamara’s departure 

developed slowly because the secretary remained unwilling to 

express his growing doubts about U.S. prospects for winning the 

war to President Johnson for fear that doing so would alter their 

close relationship. As McNaughton’s diary notes, the issue actually 

began to come to a head in 1966. That year began with McNamara 

offering a stout defense of U.S. policy in Vietnam in nationally 

televised hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 

Privately, however, McNamara had begun to express skepticism 

not only about the efficacy of U.S. bombing efforts, but about 

the entire American war effort. Yet the secretary, still unwilling to 

acknowledge that the policy he had done so much to forge was not 

working, remained upbeat about U.S. prospects in meetings with 

President Johnson. McNamara kept his doubts private through 

the spring of 1966, even as an internal rebellion threatened the 

viability of yet another South Vietnamese government. Echoing 

his earlier assessments, McNaughton again made the case for 

disengagement, arguing that this latest bout of internal instability 

and the unwillingness of successive South Vietnamese regimes to 

undertake genuine reforms gave Washington ample grounds for 

pulling back. A winning military effort could not be built on a 

foundation of political quicksand, he maintained. Increasing force 

deployments in order to gain bargaining leverage was folly, he 

concluded, if Washington was not truly willing to compromise. 

The first cracks in McNamara’s relationship with the president 

appeared in November 1966, when the president overruled the 

secretary’s advice on bombing targets within North Vietnam 
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in favor of targets recommended by the Joint Chiefs. Although 

the president quickly reversed course, Johnson’s decision served 

as a first indication that the secretary of defense’s once-unrivaled 

influence and power was on the wane. Indeed, the next month, 

targets in Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor that had previously been 

off limits were bombed. Deep divisions over war-fighting strategy 

that had been bubbling just beneath the administration’s surface 

finally burst into the open in the summer of 1967, during hearings 

conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Preparedness 

Investigating Subcommittee. While McNamara gamely defended 

the doctrine of limited war before the public, as he had before 

(the bombing targets advocated by the Joint Chiefs could easily 

lead to Chinese intervention, he asserted), the secretary of defense 

lacked the self-assured, some would say arrogant, demeanor that 

had characterized his appearances before Congress many times 

before. McNamara’s performance prompted rumors that the close 

relationship between the president and his defense secretary, an 

article of faith in Washington dating back to the beginning of the 

Kennedy administration, had begun to fray.33

Adding fuel to the fire was the fact that, shortly before the hearings 

convened, McNamara had advanced one of his most clear-cut 

disengagement initiatives of the war: a draft presidential memorandum 

he sent to Johnson on 19 May 1967, declaring the war unwinnable 

in a traditional sense and urging a progressive de-escalation of all 

military operations and a more vigorous search, with the offer of 

concessions, for a negotiated settlement. In later years McNamara 

attributed the elusiveness of such a settlement to several causes, not 

the least of which was flawed coordination between Washington and 

U.S. commanders in Saigon. But it was also true that McNamara 

was not forthright with the president early enough when he sensed 

that the limited strategy he had championed was failing. As historian 

Edward Drea concludes, McNamara, to his discredit, “officially went 

along with the administration’s expansion of the conflict,” providing 

ground reinforcements and support for the air war long after he had 

become convinced of the futility of U.S. strategy. 34 

President Johnson’s hopes that Clifford would faithfully toe the 

administration’s line on Vietnam were dashed shortly after his 1 

March 1968 swearing-in as secretary of defense. Clifford concluded 

just days into his tenure that U.S. policy on Vietnam required 

dramatic change. Central to the new secretary’s rapid conversion 

were the efforts of McNaughton’s successor as assistant secretary 

for ISA, Paul Warnke, a self-described opponent of the war whom 

McNamara had brought into his inner sanctum amid his own 

growing disillusionment. The setback of the Tet Offensive in late 

January had exposed the naiveté of previously upbeat military 

assessments of the war’s progress and gave the pessimistic views that 

had long been emanating from ISA fresh credibility. A personal 

friend of Clifford’s (and later his law partner), Warnke supplied 

much of the substantive analysis that the secretary used in his private 

meetings with President Johnson to rebut JCS proposals for wider 

military action and to persuade the president to open unconditional 

negotiations. Johnson, irked at being second-guessed, began to look 

on Warnke and his ISA staff, in Clifford’s words, as “an infectious 

virus” that had poisoned the thinking of two of his top advisers—

first McNamara, and then Clifford. Yet for Johnson, it was easier to 

concentrate his wrath on Warnke, someone he barely knew, rather 

than on his friend, Clifford. In any case, by taking some of the heat 

of Johnson’s anger, Warnke may have helped to preserve Clifford’s 

relationship with the president—thereby improving the chances, 

in the long run, that ISA’s recommendations for turning the war 

around would be adopted.35

In terms of Vietnam policy, Clifford’s brief stewardship was 

almost indistinguishable from what might have occurred had 

McNaughton lived and ascended to the top job. Back in the pivotal 

year of 1965 Clifford had written the president an eloquent dissent 

from what ultimately became U.S. policy, warning Johnson against 

introducing ground troops into Vietnam. Along with George Ball, 

Clifford had been among the very first people to warn Johnson 

that Vietnam “could be quagmire” and could turn into “an open 

end[ed] commitment on our part that would take more and more 
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26 27

ground troops, without a realistic hope of victory.” Subsequently, 

however, in his role as Democratic Party elder, Clifford had 

developed a more hawkish reputation vis-à-vis the war with his 

perspective almost indistinguishable over time from the president’s. 

In general, through the years of intensifying U.S. involvement, 

Clifford had been an advocate of keeping up the pressure on the 

North via bombing, avoiding rash actions that could widen the war 

to include China, and seeking peace talks on favorable terms. Paul 

Nitze, who served as deputy secretary of defense from mid-1967 

through the end of the Johnson administration, wrote that Clifford 

had become a “fire-breathing hawk” on Vietnam by the time he 

took the Pentagon’s reins from McNamara in late February 1968—

an overstatement, for sure, but one grounded in truth. It was on 

this basis of Clifford’s expressed views on Vietnam, after all, that 

Johnson implored him to become defense secretary.36

The development that drove Clifford’s retreat from hawkishness as 

secretary more than any other was a request from General William 

Westmoreland, commander of the Military Assistance Command 

Vietnam (MACV), for 205,179 additional troops in the wake of the 

Tet Offensive. Clifford’s first order of business as secretary was to 

provide the president with a full review of U.S. policy in Vietnam, 

and in particular, to evaluate the validity of Westmoreland’s request. 

When the new secretary of defense queried the Joint Chiefs about 

what the United States could expect to achieve from such a large 

infusion of manpower, he discovered that his military leaders 

had little idea what difference additional troops would have on 

the outcome of the war. They saw no evidence that the enemy’s 

will was weakening, or that the flow of men and materiel from 

the North could be stopped, and they believed that winning, in a 

traditional sense, would be impossible given the limitations that the 

Johnson administration had imposed on fighting the war. Beyond 

that, Clifford concluded, a request for such a massive amount of 

manpower conflicted with the administration’s public line that the 

Tet Offensive, while disruptive, had not dealt a crippling blow to the 

U.S. war effort. The secretary’s exchange with the Joint Chiefs over 

Westmoreland’s request shattered any lingering optimism about 

Vietnam that he may have brought with him to the Pentagon.37

Clifford’s close personal association with Johnson quickly 

established him as the president’s most important foreign policy 

adviser as the difficult year of 1968 unfolded. The struggle to 

alter the course of the war in Vietnam consumed his brief tenure. 

Unambiguously and outspokenly, the new defense secretary sought 

to extricate the United States from the war as swiftly as possible, 

even to the disadvantage of the South Vietnamese government, 

which he scathingly criticized as corrupt and obstructionist. In 

this role he clashed not only with the president, but with Rusk, 

Westmoreland, and General Creighton Abrams (Westmoreland’s 

successor as commander of MACV), who, in his words, stuck to a 

“more-of-the-same-approach.” Deputy Secretary of Defense Nitze 

noted that Clifford “spent much more time on the telephone with 

the president or over in the White House” than McNamara had late 

in his tenure and that the war left the secretary with “precious little 

time” to direct the Defense Department’s sprawling operations. 

As a result, Clifford delegated even more day-to-day Pentagon 

management tasks to his deputy than had been the norm under his 

predecessors while he focused on Vietnam and communications 

with the White House and the Congress.38

Conclusion

The growing importance of the secretary of defense to foreign 

affairs that marked Kennedy’s time in office continued unabated 

during the Johnson administration. The relationship between 

McNamara, the supremely self-confident defense secretary who 

had been Kennedy’s most trusted national security aide, and the 

new president intensified through 1964 and 1965 as Johnson 

confronted critical decisions about whether to expand the U.S. 

military commitment in South Vietnam. Their close association 

reinforced Johnson’s highly personal style of decision making and 

freed him to manage foreign and defense affairs outside formal 
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28 29

policy channels. While Johnson’s faith in McNamara would later 

erode over the latter’s change of heart on Vietnam, through the 

critical years of the war’s escalation the president rarely acted on 

any foreign policy matter without consulting his Pentagon chief. 

Together with his unprecedented longevity in office, McNamara’s 

outsized influence on the United States’ seminal foreign challenge 

of the 1960s helped redefine the position of secretary of defense as a 

central figure in the development and conduct of U.S. foreign policy. 

The secretary’s deepening involvement in foreign affairs also resulted 

from the nature of the crises that demanded Johnson’s attention 

outside of the war in Vietnam. By the mid-1960s the military nature 

of the Cold War’s superpower competition had made force a central 

feature of U.S. foreign policy. Growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam 

amplified this dynamic and caused the Johnson administration to 

evaluate other crises through the military prism of that broader 

conflict. In the Dominican Republic (1965), where Johnson feared 

the emergence of a Castro-like regime, and in the seizure of the USS 

Pueblo by North Korea (1968), the administration saw the forces of 

international communism conspiring to threaten American efforts 

at containment in Southeast Asia. In the Dominican Republic crisis 

McNamara played an essentially diplomatic role, orchestrating the 

rapid deployment of more than 22,000 American troops to bolster 

that nation’s fledgling noncommunist government while laboring 

to convince skeptical Latin American nations to send troops. Nearly 

three years later, with the war in Vietnam at a low ebb, McNamara 

and designated successor Clark Clifford directed a buildup of naval 

and air forces in and around the Korean Peninsula. Their efforts 

provided essential support to the diplomatic effort that eventually 

ended the standoff. Both responses underscored the importance of 

military power to U.S. diplomacy and helped cement the secretary 

of defense’s position at center stage in managing overseas affairs.

The secretary’s rise in foreign affairs stemmed also from the strength 

of certain managerial innovations McNamara implemented within 

the Pentagon. Most important was the Office of International 

Security Affairs, which McNamara continued to invest with new 

resources, stature, and influence. ISA’s rise was tied closely to 

Assistant Secretary of Defense for ISA John McNaughton, who 

quickly became McNamara’s closest aide. McNaughton’s most 

significant contribution came from his persistent attempts to 

convince the defense secretary to reverse course on Vietnam. He 

believed that the Johnson administration’s approach of applying 

graduated pressure had no chance of ultimately defeating the 

North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. In time, McNaughton’s case, 

always argued privately, began to square more and more clearly 

with the frustrating progress reports McNamara received from U.S. 

commanders on the ground in South Vietnam. By mid-1967 the 

secretary began pushing a reluctant President Johnson to disengage 

from the war that he, McNamara, had done so much to escalate. 

McNaughton’s successor, Paul Warnke, played a similar role visà-vis Clark Clifford, who surprised the president by opposing 

further escalation after he succeeded McNamara in early 1968. 

ISA’s influence on the eventual shift in Johnson’s Vietnam policy 

toward disengagement was clear. More broadly, the support ISA 

provided to both McNamara and Clifford aided the secretary of 

defense’s institutional rise in foreign affairs. By the time Johnson 

handed power to president-elect Richard Nixon in January 1969, 

his administration had reinforced the institutional precedent set 

during the Kennedy years: the secretary of defense was a central, 

indispensable contributor in the development and execution of 

U.S. foreign policy.
30 31

Notes

1 On the devolution of the NSC under Kennedy (continued under 

Johnson), see Edward J. Drea, McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of 

Vietnam, 1965–1969, vol. 6 of Secretaries of Defense Historical Series 

(Washington, DC: OSD Historical Office, 2011), 15–18. 2 On the growing divide between DoD’s civilian and military leaders 

during the Vietnam War, see H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon 

Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to 

Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). 3 For good overviews of McNamara’s efforts to reform the Pentagon’s 

policy operations, and for background on the young, generally civilian 

“Whiz Kids” he recruited, see Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, 

How Much is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961–1969 (New 

York: Harper & Row, 1971); David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest

(New York: Random House, 1972); and Lawrence S. Kaplan, Ronald D. 

Landa, and Edward J. Drea, The McNamara Ascendancy, 1961–1965, vol. 

5 of History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense series (Washington, 

DC: OSD Historical Office, 2006). 4 For Johnson’s remarks to the joint session of Congress, see “Address 

Before a Joint Session of the Congress,” 27 Nov 1963, Public Papers of 

the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–64, Book I

(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), 8–10. For 

Johnson’s early career and rise to the vice presidency, see Robert Dallek, 

Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908–1960 (Oxford: 

Oxford University Press, 1992). For Johnson’s Senate career, see Robert 

Caro, Master of the Senate (New York: Knopf, 2002). Both Dallek and 

Caro stress Johnson’s enduring preference for domestic affairs. 5 The conspicuous exception in Johnson’s drive to retain Kennedy’s 

advisers was Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Roger 

Hilsman, who had been Kennedy’s point-man in the U.S.-backed 

overthrow of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem just weeks 

before Johnson was thrust into the presidency. For Johnson’s view of 

Hilsman, see Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the 
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32 33

Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971), 

29. On Hilsman’s exit from the administration, see Kaplan, Landa, and 

Drea, McNamara Ascendancy, 504. Halberstam writes that Johnson 

made “an all-out effort to keep Kennedy people of all sizes, shapes, and 

persuasions” in early in 1964, but that Hilsman was an exception—

“Johnson did not like him, did not like his bumptiousness, the policies he 

had followed and the enemies he had made . . . he simply had to go.” See 

Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 374.

6 In his memoir, Johnson wrote that “McNamara carried more 

information around in his head than the average encyclopedia.” See 

Johnson, Vantage Point, 20.

7 On Clifford’s background and longstanding relationship with 

Johnson, see John Acacia, Clark Clifford: The Wise Man of Washington

(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009). See also Clark Clifford, 

Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991). 

The “Liberty incident” refers to the attack on the U.S. intelligence ship 

Liberty by Israeli warplanes during the 1967 Six Day War. At Johnson’s 

direction, Clifford led an inquiry following the attack that found the 

attack to be accidental. See Drea, McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens 

of Vietnam, 446–454. Prior to offering Clifford the position of secretary 

of defense, Johnson had tried to bring him into the administration as 

attorney general, director of Central Intelligence, and under secretary of 

state. See Acacia, Clark Clifford, 246. 

8 See Drea, McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 10–15. 

On Johnson’s distrust of the military, see also McMaster, Dereliction of 

Duty, 52–53.

9 For “mild-mannered,” see Bart Barnes, “Dean Rusk, ’60s 

Foreign Policy Leader, Dies,” Washington Post, 22 Dec 1994, A1. In his 

1965 retrospective on the Kennedy administration, Arthur Schlesinger 

writes, “With reluctance, because he still liked Rusk and thought he had 

useful qualities, he [President Kennedy] made up his mind to accept his 

resignation after the 1964 election and seek a new Secretary. He always had 

the dream that a McNamara might someday take command and make the 

[State] Department a genuine partner in the enterprise of foreign affairs 

(though he also said that he had to have a McNamara at Defense in order 

to have a foreign policy at all).” See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand 

Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 

1965), 1017. In his memoir, Johnson wrote that he “knew Rusk was a 

loyal, honorable, hard-working, imaginative man of conviction, and I 

decided to ask him to remain as my Secretary of State.” He also noted 

that Rusk “served me with distinction and great ability. He stood by me 

and shared the President’s load of responsibility and abuse. He never 

complained. But he was no ‘yes man’. He could be determined, and he 

was always the most determined when he was telling me I shouldn’t do 

something that I felt needed to be done.” See Johnson, Vantage Point, 20.

10 On fissures within the State Department and on DoD’s analytical 

responsiveness (especially the Office of International Security Affairs), see 

Erin R. Mahan and Jeffrey Larson, eds., The Ascendancy of the Secretary 

of Defense: Robert S. McNamara, 1961–1963 (Washington, DC: OSD 

Historical Office, 2013), 9, 13–17.

11 On Bundy’s departure and Rostow’s appointment, see Robert S. 

McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: 

Times Books, 1995), 235–236. For a deeper look at Bundy and his brother, 

William P. Bundy (assistant secretary of defense for international security 

affairs and, after February 1964, assistant secretary of state) during the 

Kennedy and Johnson administrations, see Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: 

McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms: A Biography (New 

York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 270–375.

12 For Rostow’s work on the Multilateral Force, see Kaplan, Landa, 

and Drea, McNamara Ascendancy, 385–420. For a recent treatment of 

Rostow, see David Milne, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam 

War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). For Rostow’s fervent support 

of continued escalation as Johnson’s national security advisor, see ibid., 

158–180. For characterization of Rostow as “a fervid, almost an exuberant 

hawk since the far, far JFK days” regarding Vietnam, see Eric F. Goldman, 

The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Knopf, 1969), 509–510. For 

McNamara quotes on Rostow, see McNamara, In Retrospect, 235.

13 On the devolution of the NSC as a formal policymaking body 

during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, see David C. 

Humphrey, “NSC Meetings During the Johnson Presidency,” Diplomatic 

History 18 (Winter 1994): 29–32; John P. Burke, Honest Broker? The 

National Security Advisor and Presidential Decision Making (College 

Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009), 56–104; David Rothkopf, 

Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and 

the Architects of American Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 80–85; 

and Bromley K. Smith, Organizational History of the National Security 

Council During the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations (Washington, 

DC: National Security Council, 1988), 23.
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34 35

14 On the Tuesday Lunch, see David C. Humphrey, “Tuesday Lunch 

at the Johnson White House: A Preliminary Assessment,” Diplomatic 

History 8 (Winter 1984): 81–101. See also Burke, Honest Broker? 314–

316; Rothkopf, Running the World, 99–100. Bromley Smith writes, 

“The first luncheon meeting was held . . . in August 1964. . . . Further 

lunches were scheduled irregularly at first with month-long lapses, but 

later, almost every Tuesday, sometimes immediately following scheduled 

NSC meetings.” See Smith, Organizational History of the National Security 

Council During the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, 63.

15 For Rostow’s assessment of the Tuesday Lunch, see Walt W. 

Rostow, Diffusion of Power: An Essay in Recent History (New York: 

Macmillan, 1972), 360. For McNamara’s, see Henry F. Graff, The Tuesday 

Cabinet: Deliberation and Decision on Peace and War Under Lyndon B. 

Johnson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 34. See also Robert 

McNamara, oral history interview by Walt W. Rostow, 8 Jan 1975, Oral 

History Collection, LBJ Presidential Library, Austin, TX.

16 The membership and duties of the SIG were similar to the NSC’s 

old Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), dismantled by McGeorge 

Bundy in the first weeks of the Kennedy administration in early 1961. 

David Rothkopf notes that, in the Eisenhower administration, the 

OCB existed “to ensure the implementation of policies” determined by 

presidential decisions taken at NSC meetings. The board “reported back 

to the NSC on the progress that was being made in implementing policies 

and on decisions taken to implement them.” See Rothkopf, Running the 

World, 67–68. On General Taylor’s review and the role he envisaged the 

SIG playing, see Maxwell D. Taylor, “New System for Coping with Our 

Overseas Problems,” Speech to the American Foreign Service Association, 

31 Mar 1966, in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Government 

Operations, The Secretary of State and the Problem of Coordination: New 

Duties and Procedures of March 4, 1966 (Washington, DC: Government 

Printing Office, 1966), 17–22. For NSAM 341, see National Security 

Action Memorandum 341, 2 Mar 1966, <www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/

archives.hom/nsams/nsam341.aspl>, accessed 21 May 2013. For the SIG 

not representing a change in the Johnson administration’s approach to 

managing foreign policy, see “Administrative History of the Department 

of Defense, 1963–1969” (MS, copy in OSD Historical Office), Section 1, 

256–257. On Ball’s view of the SIG, see Clark and Legere, The President 

and the Management of National Security: A Report (New York: Praeger, 

1969), 93–94; William I. Bacchus, “Obstacles to Reform in Foreign 

Affairs: The Case of NSAM 341,” Orbis 18 (Spring 1974): 270–271. Also 

see I. M. Destler, Leslie H. Gelb, and Anthony Lake, Our Own Worst 

Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy, rev. ed. (New York: 

Touchstone, 1985), 200–201. For General Taylor’s view of the SIG at the 

end of the Johnson administration, see Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and 

Plowshares (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), 360–362. For evidence that 

Vietnam and counterinsurgency were largely absent from the agendas of 

the SIG’s 39 total meetings (from 8 March 1966 to 13 June 1968), see 

“Administrative History of DoD,” Section 1, 258–261. For NSC insider 

assessment of the SIG’s impact, see Roy M. Melbourne, “Odyssey of the 

NSC,” Strategic Review 11 (Summer 1983): 57.

17 Under Trujillo, the city of Santo Domingo was renamed “Ciudad 

Trujillo.” For Johnson quote on living down the Bay of Pigs, see Drea, 

McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 293. On Trujillo’s 

dictatorship and close military relations with the United States, see Eric 

P. Roorda, The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the 

Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945 (Durham, NC: 

Duke University Press, 1998). For a good treatment of the 1965 U.S. 

intervention in historical context, see Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold 

War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 37–69.

18 Drea, McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 293–299.

19 For Johnson quotes and subsequent actions, see Drea, McNamara, 

Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 300–309. On Latin America’s 

collective memory of early twentieth century U.S. gunboat diplomacy, 

see Lester D. Langley, The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the 

Caribbean, 1898–1934 (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2002). See also 

Abraham F. Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention (Cambridge: Harvard 

University Press, 1972), 113–131. For a firsthand account from the U.S. 

commander on the ground, see General Bruce Palmer, Intervention in the 

Caribbean: The Dominican Crisis of 1965 (Lexington: University Press of 

Kentucky, 1989). For a recent assessment, see Russell Crandall, Gunboat 

Democracy: U.S. Interventions in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and 

Panama (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 35–104. 

20 Drea, McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 311–312.

21 This section on the Pueblo crisis is based on the account provided 

by Drea in McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 488. See 

also Mitchell B. Lerner, The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of 

American Foreign Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).

22 On deployments, see Drea, McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens 

of Vietnam, 488–489.

23 Ibid., 490–492.
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24 Ibid., 493–495.

25 On McNamara’s selection of aides, see Kaplan, Landa, and Drea, 

McNamara Ascendancy, 6–10. For a brief overview of the origins of 

Systems Analysis and ISA during the Kennedy administration, see Mahan 

and Larson, eds., Ascendancy of the Secretary of Defense. Nitze served as 

assistant secretary of defense for ISA until November 1963 when he 

became secretary of the navy. His successor, William Bundy, served for 

a very brief time (November 1963 to March 1964) before accepting an 

appointment in the State Department. McNaughton took over ISA in 

July 1964. On Nitze’s time at the head of ISA, see Nicholas Thompson, 

The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of 

the Cold War (New York: Picador, 2009), 170–194. On McNamara’s 

assessment of ISA’s influence, see Drea, McNamara, Clifford, and the 

Burdens of Vietnam, 5.

26 For more on the characterization of McNaughton as McNamara’s 

“right-hand man” on Vietnam, and for Vietnam as “McNamara’s 

War,” see Benjamin T. Harrison and Christopher L. Mosher, “John 

T. McNaughton and Vietnam: The Early Years as Assistant Secretary 

of Defense, 1964–1965, History 92 (October 2007): 308, 496. For 

Halberstam’s assessment of McNaughton vis-à-vis escalation in Vietnam, 

including the “profound doubts” McNaughton harbored about U.S. 

policy in Vietnam, see Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 362–

363. For a more recent assessment based on McNaughton’s diary—

which confirm Halberstam’s judgment—see Benjamin T. Harrison and 

Christopher L. Mosher, “The Secret Diary of McNamara’s Dove: The 

Long-Lost Story of John T. McNaughton’s Opposition to the Vietnam 

War,” Diplomatic History 35 (June 2011): 505–534.

27 Cited in Harrison and Mosher, “McNaughton and Vietnam,” 

501. Original quote in Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, 368.

28 For McNaughton’s view that “the loss of South Vietnam and Laos 

would be followed by the rapid, successive communization of the other 

states of the Far East,” see Harrison and Mosher, “McNaughton and 

Vietnam,” 499. For Hoopes’ assessment of McNaughton, see Townsend 

Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention (An Inside Account of How the Johnson 

Policy of Escalation in Vietnam Was Reversed) (New York: W.W. Norton, 

1973), 33–56 (see 51 for quote on McNaughton’s “punctilious” public 

support of the Johnson administration’s approach to Vietnam).

29 Harrison and Mosher, “McNaughton and Vietnam,” 502–503.

30 Harrison and Mosher, “The Secret Diary of McNamara’s Dove,” 

517–518.

31 Ibid., 511. For a critical assessment of U.S. decisions in the wake of 

the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, see George C. Herring, “The 1st Cavalry 

and the Ia Drang Valley, 18 October–24 November 1965,” in Charles 

E. Heller and William A. Stofft, eds., America’s First Battles: 1776–1965

(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 300–326. 

32 For McNaughton’s penchant for statistics and facts, see Townsend 

Hoopes, Limits of Intervention, 48–52 and Halberstam, The Best and the 

Brightest, 616–617. For quote on McNaughton’s modus operandi with 

respect to McNamara, see Harrison and Mosher, “McNaughton and 

Vietnam,” 499.

33 Harrison and Mosher, “The Secret Diary of McNamara’s Dove,” 

523–524.

34 On McNamara’s 19 May 1967 DPM, see Drea, McNamara, 

Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 138–139. On poor coordination, see 

McNamara, In Retrospect, 247–251. For conclusion on McNamara, see 

Drea, McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 534–535. 

35 On his selection as assistant secretary of defense for ISA, Warnke 

later said, “I was very much opposed to the Vietnam War. I made that 

clear to both Cy Vance and Bob McNamara. They said that that didn’t 

matter, that they were sure I could still contribute.” See Paul C. Warnke, 

interview by Maurice Matloff and Roger Trask, 10 Sep 1984, 10, OSD 

Historical Office Oral History Collection. On Clifford’s use of Warnke’s 

analysis in meetings with the president, see Pentagon Papers, IV: 263–264. 

For Johnson’s assessment of Warnke as an “infectious virus,” see Clifford, 

Counsel to the President, 492.

36 For the best recent treatment of the development of Clifford’s 

thinking on Vietnam, from his 1965 warning of a “quagmire,” to his 

hawkishness between 1966 and 1967, to his reversion upon becoming 

secretary of defense in 1968, see Acacia, Clark Clifford, 236–282 (see 239 

for “quagmire” quote). For Nitze’s characterization of Clifford’s views on 

Vietnam prior to becoming secretary of defense, see Paul H. Nitze, From 

Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision—A Memoir (New York: 

Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), 274.

37 On Westmoreland’s request for additional troops, see Acacia, 

Clark Clifford, 264.
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38 On the Clifford task force and his evaluation of JCS views of 

Westmoreland’s troop request, see Acacia, Clark Clifford, 264–265. See 

also Drea, McNamara, Clifford, and the Burdens of Vietnam, 536. Nitze 

wrote in his memoir that, because of the demands of Vietnam on Clifford’s 

time, the secretary “left the running of the Pentagon, for the most part, 

to me as his deputy, while he concentrated on the White House, the war 

in Vietnam, the Congress, and the press.” See Nitze, From Hiroshima to 

Glasnost, 274.

About the Author

Joel C. Christenson joined the OSD Historical Office as a contract historian 

in June 2013. He completed his Ph.D. in American history at West Virginia 

University, where his research focused on U.S. foreign relations and naval 

history. Prior to his doctoral work, Joel worked as a senior defense analyst 

for the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the 

U.S. Congress, and as a research associate at the Institute for Defense 

Analyses. Joel is a distinguished graduate of the Virginia Military Institute 

and holds master’s degrees from the University of Kentucky and George 

Mason University, as well as a Command and Staff Diploma from the 

U.S. Naval War College.

About the Editors

Erin R. Mahan has been Chief Historian for the Secretary of Defense since 

2010. Previously she worked in the Center for the Study of Weapons of 

Mass Destruction at National Defense University and in the Historian’s 

Office at the U.S. Department of State, where she was an editor of the 

Foreign Relations of the United States series. Dr. Mahan holds a Ph.D. in 

history from the University of Virginia.

Jeffrey A. Larsen is Director of the Research Division at the NATO Defense 

College in Rome. He previously served as president of Larsen Consulting 

Group and as a senior scientist with Science Applications International 

Corporation. He has been an adjunct graduate professor at the universities 

of Denver, Northwestern, and Texas A&M, and he served on the faculty 

of the U.S. Air Force Academy. Widely published, Dr. Larsen holds an 

M.A. in national security affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School and 

an M.A. and Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University. 
Cold War Foreign Policy Series • Special Study 5

40

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