The influence of key White House figures such as McNamara on the escalation of American military involvement is an important topic of study given the current American administration's involvement in an arguably similar conflict in Iraq.
Born in San Francisco in 1916, Robert McNamara spent his early years in a competitive environment, due not only to shortages caused by the First World War baby boom, but also to his parents' fierce determination that he succeed. Graduating from high school in 1933, he experienced firsthand the character-altering hardship of the Great Depression. His stellar grades paved the way to an education at the University of California at Berkley and at Harvard, where his exposure to the concepts of justice, freedom, and the balancing of rights and obligation were so great as to, in his words, “remain with me to this day.” His university career also entailed two years of mandatory service in the Army ROTC, which, along with his service as an officer in the Eighth Air Force during the Second World War, contributed to his understanding of the American Armed Forces and taught him to rely on statistics to illuminate and explain events in combat situations.
After the war, McNamara began a career with the Ford Motor Company, rising meteorically through the ranks until, at the comparatively young age of 44, he became the corporation's president one day after John F. Kennedy's election in 1960. Less than two months later, Kennedy - whom he had never met - offered him the position of Secretary of Defense, which McNamara accepted despite his own objection: “I'm not qualified.” When he assumed his new position, he brought with him a group of civilians from the business world who shared his views that foreign policy, military strategy, and budgets could be managed through rational analysis and quantifiable statistics. By the time the crisis in Vietnam became a pressing concern to the Kennedy administration in late 1962, McNamara's role in the Cuban Missile Crisis had already established his position as a principal American policy-maker and a chief advisor to the president.
The Cuban Missile Crisis also served to strengthen McNamara's belief in the Domino Theory; he felt, as did many Americans, that a communist victory in one nation would cause neighbouring countries to fall as well. So deeply entrenched was this fear of communism that McNamara and the other policy-makers of 1963 and 1964 viewed even the neutralisation of South Vietnam as an option virtually synonymous with defeat, to be followed by an unavoidable communist takeover of the country, and eventual communist control over the rest of Southeast Asia. McNamara emphasised that any attempt to neutralize the country “would inevitably mean a new government in Saigon that would in short order be communist-dominated.” His view was almost unanimously supported in the White House and the Pentagon. C.I.A. Director John McCone, for instance, predicted that “the loss of the game in South Vietnam [due to neutralisation] would have too serious consequences to be acceptable”. McNamara's opinion was thus the majority view: any conceivable neutral Vietnam would soon become an enemy Vietnam.
Apart from neutralisation, the only other option considered by the administration - supporting, either passively or actively, a non-communist South Vietnam - seemed to the Secretary of Defense equally fallible. McNamara believed “the Vietcong were as strong in late 1963 as they had been a year or two years before.” As early as October, 1963, McNamara told Kennedy, “we must have a means of disengaging from this area, and we must show our country our means.” Months later, McNamara saw the situation as essentially unchanged. Receiving gloomy reports from high-level officials, such as the Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency's statement that “the government has apparently been unable to materially reduce the strength of the Vietcong in spite of the increased number of ARVN offensive operations”, McNamara held the clear view that the war was not being won militarily. Less than two weeks later, after his two-day visit to Vietnam in December, 1963, McNamara “came away dismayed” and warned Johnson that “a crisis was near”. He even “doubted that a significant addition of U.S. forces would affect the outcome.” By early 1965, McNamara stated that America's “current policy can only lead to disastrous defeat.” From his vantage point, the Americans were mired between a rock and a hard place.
Today, it might seem more sensible in such dire circumstances to pursue the neutralisation option as early as possible over increased military involvement; despite its equally grim consequences, this option offered the advantage of reducing the risk of American casualties and avoided the grave dangers of a shooting war. In fact, decades later, McNamara himself seems to have reached this same conclusion about neutralisation; though he is careful to avoid the personal pronoun “I”, he writes that, had Kennedy lived, the President would have pulled out of Vietnam because, however unattractive the option of withdrawal, staying would “ultimately lead to the same result, while exacting a terrible price in blood.” When the U.S. role was only advisory, McNamara stated that American combat troops might not be needed if there were a positive South Vietnamese effort, and that, conversely, “if there is not such an effort, U.S. forces could not accomplish their mission in the midst of an apathetic or hostile population.” McNamara could hardly have more explicitly expressed his opinion that U.S. combat troops could not alter the situation. Even as early as 1963, McNamara was a strong proponent of the Vietnamese fighting their own war. Live on CBS, he stressed the importance of recognising “it's a South Vietnamese war. It will be won or lost depending upon what they do.”
