life has been -- i mean, these libraries and these -- whatever center you call your thing, anyway -- it is not a library. but the -- the people all come back. it is just -- we are very lucky. we know it. there are people that are hungry and people that are homeless. people that can't read. and, you know if you know somebody who is lonely, go see them. i mean, there's just a lot of things we can do because -- we can read. we are certainly well fed. we have lots of people we love. i love my in-laws. i have two here. perfect. i mane, look at them. we are lucky. >> you know, i think nothing could say better when you ask the question would people run for public office. the experience of both of you and your family and the dignity

with which you carry both the offices and the time afterward suggests that it may be a tough vocation but it may be one of the best vocations in the world. politics still and has to be one of the most honorable vocations there are. we have to reach a time in this country again when our best people will be able to know what you two experienced. i mean, i know from reading your memoirs and listening to you today, however difficult there might have been moments in time, everything was overshadowed by making a difference, by the excitement of being there, and the love of the families being together during it. i am so glad to have been able to share this with you. and you are both very much alive. >> thank you so much. >> thank you for having us. >> thank you to everybody. thank you so much. thank you. you are watching american history tv. where every week we feature the lives and legacies of the

presidents and first ladies of the united states. sundays at 8:30 a.m., 7:30 p.m., 10:30 p.m. eastern on c-span 3. robert mcnamara served under presidents kennedy and johnson. next, a discussion of his leadership and the vietnam war. >> for millions of americans the vietnam war was the defining moment of their lives. today it serves as a watershed period in our history, the same way world war ii did for previous generations. this -- panel discussion this afternoon is of particular

interest to me. i was stationed with the first marine division for six months and then on the "u.s.s. sanctuary". so it is my pleasure now to turn the program over to john hoffman, deputy chief historian to the secretary of defense. he's on active duty and infantry office in field historian for 17 years. in his civilian career he served as deputy director of the museum division, chief of the army center for military history's contemporary studies branch and became deputy chief historian of the osd historical office in 2010. please welcome john hoffman.

thank you for hosting. i said, well, i will jump on that green aid for you. you don't have to do that. you can go to the national archives and she said no, no, i don't want to make you have to go on those transatlantic dead eye flights. so here i am today. i am very happy to be here today. it is a great cole april ration. we actually have a third partner here today in hosting this event. that is the texas tech vietnam center represented by steve maxner who will get introduced more fully later. before we get started i-want to thank a couple of people that

put this together. tom and quinn brewster of the national archives. dr. john carwin, second to the right, who represents our office. i don't object to vietnam being called mcnamara's war. i think it is a very important war and i am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever i can to win it it was very important war. he was not able to win the war but his reputation has become tied over the years. very closely to the u.s. failure in that conflict. it is part of the ongoing secretary of defense historical series put out by our office. it focus owes the roles of the secretaries and office of the

secretary of defense in developing and executing national defense policy. it is a sequel to mcnamara 1961 to 1965. we have the next four books in the series under way. various stages of progress. neil will take us through weinberger's tenure in the early 1980s. our goal has been to produce well-researched, balanced, objective thakts will stand the test of time. it will serve hopefully as useful information for current policy makers and finally inform the american public. we believe that ed's book is a great addition to this series. and although its focus is vietnam, he covers a lot of other important topics from dominican crisis in 196 5 to the six-day war in the middle east in 1967. and to the wider impact of vietnam on u.s. national defense posture. we hope we put together a program that's equal to this topic. john carland will serve it is a

moderator. he an historian who worked for 17 years for the u.s. army center of military history writing their seminole volume on 1965 and 1966 in vietnam. he spent another decade of hard labor at the foreign relations series of the united states. and state department, and doing their two books on the end of the vietnam war. semi retired now and works part time for us doing special projects like this. two of our presenters are dr. ed dray, the author. john will introduce both of them more fully later on. the final member of our panel, your foirs speaker, former secretary of defense harold brown. at the age of 21, phd in fist friction columbia university. he served as research scientist and then as senior science and research manager for the government. in 1965, he became secretary of the air force where he worked closely with mcnamara. leaving government in 1969,

returned in 1977 as president jimmy carter's secretary of defense. since 1981, he has been deeply involved in researching, speaking, writing on national security policy. we are grateful to have him leading off our panel today and look forward to hearing his personal perspective of secretary mcnamara's tenure. >> thank you very much. it is good to be with you this afternoon. i look forward to reading the current volume in the history of the office of the secretary of defense series. it may prepare me for what the third and future says about me. if i live long enough to read

that. when mcnamara left office in january of 1969, the members of his staff and service secretaries presented him with a large globe, and during a presentation, the citations we prepared said to the outstanding public servant of our time, and i think that correctly describes the first four years of bob mcnamara's service as secretary of defense. the next three were a tragedy.

you might say a shakespearean tragedy. tragedy for him as well as for president johnson and most of all, most important, for the country. in the -- during those first four years, bob mcnamara revolutionized the department of defense and by setting up a process for planning, programming, budgeting, as it was then called, he produced an example that other parts of the government have since tried with varying degrees of success to emulate. to rationalize the processes of governing and budgeting. like all such attempts, they

abandoned by the limitations of human nature in general and of government in particular. but then the department of defense at least persisted and i think made it much more efficient and effective than it otherwise would be. that approach was possible because of the centralization of power in the office of the secretary of defense that president eisenhower had pushed so hard for and succeeded in getting through the defense reorganization act of 1958. but it took someone like mcnamara and some of the people he brought in with him to turn that into an effective operating

system. the second term, three years, 1965, and '67, '66, '67, and -- the vietnam years, are a lesson in the limits of quantitative thinking. especially when the underlying situation is unwinnable. the end of the vietnam war is viewed in different ways by different people. my friends, henry kiss injer, jim schlessinger, said the war was actually won. but the congress by cutting off aid to the south vietnamese doomed what had been a success to failure. this is sort of a -- approach,

the term stab in the back that the germans used between the two wars to describe what had happened to german military in world war i. but at the same time, henry kissinger is on record as having said at one point in process, let's at least have a decent interval before we collapse -- before they collapse. so vietnam war in retrospect was unwinnable because of the nature of vietnamese society and south vietnamese government. my own introduction to bob mcnamara happened in february of 1961. i had known packard as

department secretary briefly because we had been on a board together. and he offered me the job when i first walked into his office. i said gee, i'm not really ready for that right now. he said, well, you have to take things when they are offered or maybe -- maybe they won't come back to you again. i took that lesson. at the beginning, i think hay saw me as an engineer and looked instead to his systems analysis group with whom he felt an empathy because he had been an operations analyst during world war ii. as a consequence of considerations early on of the nike system and the whole issue

of mutual deterrence, he -- turned to the office i ran as part of the office of secretary of defense that -- office of director of defense research and engineering, to play a bigger role in programmed decisions. early on, mcnamara was still learning about issues of grand strategy. for example, i guess early in 1961, he had espoused the idea of limitation, nato speech in athens, that somehow you could have a nuclear war and damage limit, limited damage on both sides. he learned fairly quickly, however, that once you went down that road, two things would

happen. first of all, there was no limit to the amount of money you would spend in trying to -- the damage. second, it wouldn't work. the damage would not, in fact, be limited. and so he made a later speech at ann arbor and explaining that we instead should move to mutual assured destruction as a way of deterring the other side. we would be deterred as well from engaging in our nuclear war. that had the unfortunate acronym m.a.d. but proved to be sane instead. bob was highly organized. he used to look at written material and preferred written material to can briefings. he would write on them in his barely legible left-handed scrawl but those of us who worked with him gradually came to be able to decipher those and

they always made a lot of sense. so much so that i subsequently myself adopted that same approach of inside and outside the defense department of taking written material, scrawling comments on it, and sending it back. i think that bob had planned to stay only four years. and that reinforced his natural tendency to be -- to limit socialization. he made a mistake, i think, and admitted it to me afterwards by not speaking at any of the military academy, graduation commissioning ceremonies. and he said part of the reason was that he had only planned to stay for four years and he felt it was not worth that time if he had known he would stay longer.

and it would have improved his relationships with some of the uniformed military, he would have behaved differently. i saw him at least weekly in a formal way through my own service, as detectivor of defense research and engineering and air force secretary. and he came through as a decisive executive at work. but on social occasions, he was actually quite different. i remember an evening in which -- he was very unassumed. not -- hard driving automobile executive that he had been at ford or displayed on the job at the defense department. i remember an evening when he took us to the -- took my -- he and marge, his wife, took me and my wife to the arena theater.

and he drove his own car. i can't imagine that happening today. not only because people are different but because the times and circumstances are very different. in private, he was sometimes emotional. that didn't spill out publicly until well into the vietnam war. most famously, of course, at the ceremony at the white house in january of 1968 when president johnson awarded him a medal. and he -- mcnamara in trying to respond broke down and was not able to continue speaking. as i said, he was sometimes -- of course, after he left office,

that emotional side of him became much more kno known. and it's appeared in a movie "the fog of war." again and again, mcnamara displays very strong emotions. they were always there, but they were hidden. he was extremely loyal to the presidents he served. in fact, you could tell when he was espousing a position that had been imposed upon him by the president, which occasionally happened, you could tell, because he would be sitting at the table at which the armed

forces policy council would meet every monday. and when he was explaining that position, which you could tell by what he did that he didn't -- that had not been his original position. his voice -- he would speak louder and he would lean forward and pull his socks up. and that was a sign that that was not his choice, but he was loyal to it. that loyalty also appeared in the way he described the budgeting process. what he said was that there was no set limit on the budget. he had an agreement with the president that the strategy and the program would be set, and

the budget would be whatever that cost at the most efficient level. of course, when you say at the most efficient level, that's a big loophole. and increasingly, it became clear that budgetary restrictions did exist. especially after vietnam heated up and drew lots -- and drew immense costs, immense funding away from the rest of the program. mcnamara was good at cultivating people. how successful, of course, depends on what you think of those who he cultivated. he certainly groomed me and others for higher office later on. cy vance, who started as general counsel, became successively

army secretary, dep uty defense secretary, and later secretary of defense. paul minsa went through a later process, and so did i. i'd like to say a few things, just briefly about vietnam, which those who come after me will be addressing more directly. bob became skeptical of the vietnam war well before he stopped saying how great it was going. one thing that i remember is from early on, he was very dubious about reports from the field, even though he insisted on quantifying them and encouraged the systems analysis people to quantify what in the end was not really quantifiable.

he turned to the cia, for example, for separate inputs into what the situation was, and increasingly he believed those. he tried to find other ways to limit the war, and to make it more successful. one notable example was the so-called mcnamara line, which was an attempt to set up sensors along what became known as the ho chi minh trail, to pinpoint where the north vietnamese infiltrators and materiel kas coming from, and he set up a position to do that. and in the end it didn't work. i've since speculated that with

the capabilities that we now have, but did not then have, how much more capable -- how much better that would have worked. well, there are two problems, even now. one is that jungles aren't as easily penetratable as sensors as deserts are, and the other is that the big problem was not only the viet cong in the south and the infiltration and in the end invasion by the north vietnamese, it was the weakness and corruption of the south vietnamese government. as the vietnam war went on, mcnamara had less and less time for other matters. so the decisions were often passed down to the deputy

secretary of defense. and they didn't have quite the same quality. my conclusion from all of this is that four years is long enough. there's an old saying that, for a secretary of defense, there's an old saying that in washington, friends come and go, but enemies accumulate. and when they accumulate enough, your effectiveness goes down. moreover, as time goes by, you come to think that you've seen it all, and you mistake your familiarity with wisdom. it's hard to rethink things. it's hard to clean up your own mess. and i think bob mcnamara was a very successful, almost unprecedentedly successful

secretary of defense in his four years, and the last three were a tragedy. i have very little to say about clark clifford. he was only secretary for a year. and he devoted himself almost entirely to vietnam. and left the running of the department to paul mittsa, who was then deputy secretary of defense. clark was, i think, a very able advocate and he had all the talents of an actor, both in appearance and his ability at presentation. and he did help lyndon johnson start to get out of the war. thank you. [ applause ]

>> thank you, dr. brown, secretary brown. we're contextualizing robert mcnamara in the defense department and the vietnam war. this sets down a nice base line for our next two speakers. i will introduce those speakers, george herring and ed drea. this is an easy task for me, because they are two of the ablist practitioners of the historical craft today. first george. george herring has a virginia ph.d. he taught almost four decades at the university of kentucky. there he mentored many ph.d. thesis, and his students teach throughout the land teaching history of the vietnam war. george also served as editor of the best -- probably the best

journal doing diplomatic history, called diplomatic history. he also served as president of the society for historians of american foreign relations. but he made his greatest contribution, at least in my judgment, as a scholar. among his books are "america's longest war," which in four editions has sold well over half a million copies. and has been the basic text which so many undergraduates, thousands of undergraduates in our country have formed their view of the vietnam war. his managerial study of the american history foreign relations keeps him in the top rank of our scholars. his book entitled "lbj in vietnam: a different kind of war," creates an almost perfect perch from which