1776 keeps him in the top rank of our scholars. his book entitled lbj, a different kind of war creates an almost perfect perch from which they can review the book. that's what he is going to do for us now. thank you very much, john for that kind introduction. one of the nice things about doing affairs like this. getting together with old friends and i see a number in the audience and nice to spend time over the next couple of days. it's also been quite an experience to come back in this building. i spend the summer of 1966 here exactly where i could not begin to identify for you.

i went through various elevators and other areas. i was working on that lease and when i sat down and went to the register, there was one other guy working in the room and when i sat at the register, i saw to my horror, he was working on the lease. the desertation book and that sort of thing. well, we moved around each other for a couple of days and finally one of us had the nerve to make an introduction and started talking and it turned out that his study ended march 11th, 1941 when the lind lease act was pass and mine began on that day. that was the beginning of a 50-year friendship. it's very nice to be back here. secretary of defense robert that mara came to personify the

united states commitment in vietnam and indeed in many ways the ethos of the 1960s. he was the can do man in thes can do society in the can do era in the memorable phrase. during the kennedy and early johnson years he managed the american commitment in vietnam almost as a desk officer. whether going through vietnam in army fatigues and statistics to show progress or presiding at a press conference and pointner hand, he came to embody what was known as secretary brown suggested as mcnamara's war. whatever the difficulties of the moment he exuded a certainty that promised effectual success. we now know his public confidence far outlasted the emergence of profound private doubts about both the winnability of the war and the

purposes. his departure from the pentagon at the height of the offensive in 1968 as much i think as lbj's march 31st speech of that year. that marks the glorious end of annera. as the war provoked increasingly nasty divisions in the united states, mcnamara became a target for critics from both left and right. unaware of his tightly constrain and largely internalized descent, they viewed him as the techno krat whose behind faith in statistics plunged into a kwag mire. the alleged refusal to give the freedom and the means to win the

war winnable. only the name jane fonda is likely to provoke more anger than that of robert mcnamara. the publication of his memoire in 1995 and his admission that in his word, we were wrong, terribly wrong ignited the war over the war yet again. for both sides, raising the issue of how the secretary of defense could have stuck with the war, he could have come to see as futile, if not indeed wrong. the book i am privileged to discuss focuses on one of the most controversial men and one of the most controversial events of an e.r.a. is ripe with controversy. the title of the book is chosen as that mara, cliffords and the burtens. burtens are an appropriate word

to describe the trevails at the defense department 1965 to 1969. the burdens of the floor were each of the 547 pages of the book. they have packed ever issue discussed. they destroyed that mara's dreams of bringing the pentagon and the budget under some rational control. they tarnished his reputation in ways from which he would never recover. they took a huge toll on him personally as is evidenced from comparing photos say a 1963-64 or in 1969. it's very difficult as you might imagine to do justice to such a large and important book in a short period of time. what i will do is offer a few remarks to give you an idea of what it's about and what it seeks to do and how well it does

it. let me say first that in the words of my teenage grandchildren, the research is flat out awesome. i love to read footnotes. they have 100 pages of very, very fine print. i know the source material for the chapters very well and i can state that these chapters are firmly ground in the essential documentary sources. i did note one thing. i would like to know more about simply out of curiosity and earlier frustrating experiences of declassification back in the 90s. dod documents are cited in the vietnam chapters and others.

at least in the former not as much as one might expect in a book dealing with the department of defense. so i wonder first if the dod documents noted and cited here are available to scholars or if they are still classified. no that mara papers are cited obviously raise my curiosity whether any such collection exists. finally that larger and perhaps a pertinent question based on experiences of declassification panels with state and cia back in the 90s. in those days, dod seemed to us in regard to access and declassification sometimes a tougher nut to crack even the cia. i am wondering whether that has changed or put another way, maybe more politely, whether the status of dod documents on the

vietnam war today. that's off my chest and i can go ahead and talk about the book. let me affirm at the out set, it is admirably comprehensive, the coverage is wonderfully comprehensi comprehensive. lyndon johnson once adamantly insisted that vietnam was not his war. it was america's war. i think there is a lot of truth in that. but the war dominated his presidency and continues to shape his reputation. it should come as no surprise that more than half of a chapter in this book focus on vietnam. how we got there, what we did, why we fail and the consequences there of. and of course the subjects dealt with in other chapters and defense budget, for example. obviously our influenced and critical ways by vietnam. this said, i think it's essential when looking at these

years to keep in mind that mcnamara and dod and the government had to deal with many other critical issues. the book i will say very briefly simply does that. there chapters dealing with military budgets and not a subject i must confess i find personally compelling, but that is essential, especially in time of war. that mara's budget expertise was supposed to be the hall mark of his management of the pentagon and as this big illustrates, paying for what one top johnson administration once said with no apparent sense of the paradox what called vietnam an all out limited war. without mobilization and tax increases required all sorts of financial ledgers that eventually got mc that mara in

trouble with congress. there chapters are many other important topics. the dominican republic on 1965. the issue of arms control agreements and nuclear proliferation treaty and assumed these were nixon things and in fact they were, but they began during the johnson administration. nato experienced huge challenges during the year as a result of the departure from the alliance, the concerns imposed by vietnam and growing economic woes in the united states. these problems are very well covered in chapters dealing with nato. the chapter on the mideast focuses on the six-day war and properly notes how this conflict changed greatly for the worst the nature and commitments in

that troubled region. the discussion of israeling inment in the united states and executing the strike against egypt had for me something of a chilling effect in light of where we stand today with israel and iran. i would have liked to have seen more about the great streets back in the history of the 60s. even if it were in the realm of educated speculation. there was a chapter dealing with domestic issues. the draft. the coverage is comprehensive and those of us who are already tending to focus on vietnam to remind us of how many other difficult and different challenges that mara and dod faced in these years.

it culminates with a kapter on 1968, a year for those of us who lived through it. that remains to be beyond belief when things caming to n so many ways and also came apart. a year that lasted five years and his counterpart called it a blur and claims to have survived with the help of as pin. for lbj it was like living a nightmare and you can go through the crisis of the pueblo and the goal prisz and the invasion of czechoslovakia and all of the things that are going on domestically including the assassinations of robert kennedy and martin luther king. let me turn now a little bit to the real essence and the substance. the book is wonderfully written,

clear, crisp. this is not your standard bland official history that simply recounts the events. clifford and to my mind, persuasive judgments. they provide a more balanced critique than you are likely to find from left to right. like others who attempted to assess his record, he acknowledges his genius, especially the ability to analyze complex problems and the workings of labyrinthian operations like the pentagon. he is one of the few secretaries to come closer to mastering the process. it is interesting to speculate how his reputation might look had he been spared the burdens had he left office in 1965.

history doesn't work that way of course. vietnam was thmcnamara's war. as it dominated his last years in office, for most of those years, he writes powerfully filled the role of deputy commander in chief to the president and played a key part to go to war on how the war would be fought and he oversaw the day to day conduct of the war. and the view of the fundamental flaw of mcnamara and johnson's management of the war was the absence of a coherent strategy to achieve the nation's aims. concerned about gaining a congressional support for his society, lbj hoped to contain the deteriorating situation in south vietnam without mobilizing the nation for war. without provoking a larger

conflict. this measured essentially political approach and also reflected theories of limited war currently among academic defense. they produced according to drey a balancing act that failed completely to take into account the unyielding, unremitting determination to prevail of the north vietnamese. johnson and mcnamara violated what many consider the first rule of war. the strategy and they managed

the process of escalation and sending and receiving of nuanced signals that was fundamental to the escalation and in fact, drey observes a momentum of its own. that mara feared but was unable to check. in his handling of the signals, they were supposed to either intimidate or entice them into negotiating a settlement and was often marked by the role. individual still counts.

that's how they explain the repetition 40 years later of this same experience by simply the fact of another texan in the white house and another slicked back secretary of defense. is there something more in the national character that lead us to behave in this way? without providing a way to pay for it. to be fair of course, this again is more lbj's doing than mcnamara's. primarily to protect his domestic programs. as drey points out, the president's economic advisers also naively believe they could manipulate the business cycle in ways that would pay for the war. without having to raise taxes. here of course the secretary of defense's job was to implement his boss's wishes. in doing so in drey's words, he

put his loyalty to his president above truth and transparency. he misled about the prospective cost and that's the minimum necessary for hardware and fell victim to the escalation of the war and also in turn produced shortages of critical items that provoked fury in the military. they set out to the countryside. the defense department also fails to create an equitable and effective method to raise the manpower to fight a steadily expanding war. this i think is an important

point to keep in mind. also the methods chosen to fight the war failed and the bombing, for example, is a case in point that drey focuses on. it's an on again off again gradually escalating sort of situation that in time alienates people in the united states on the left and the right. it brings north vietnam around. one episode involved here that i ask dr. drey about in which it intrigues me and sort of dismisses it that famous episode in 1967 where the joint chiefs actually discussed resignation in mosques. if he has anything to add, i

would be interested in this. it intrigued me for a long time. they address the consequences of what he calls this ill begotten war. it devastated the u.s. economy under cutting the strength of the dollar. disrupting domestic programs and creating undreamed of in those days deficits. triggering an inflation that would have the nation for the next two decades. negatively affected many of the other areas touched on in the book and arms controls with soviets and nato's defense capabilities and a war then to demonstrate the credibility of u.s. commitments and left the nation's instruction in tatters. his final assessment is unsparing.

his originality of the thinker is tireless energy. no one has approached the mastery of the enormity and complexity of the pentagon. ultimately he is bearing his name. again, i quote the daring inventive and dominating, he could not sur mount the obstacle that came to define his career coping with the vietnam war. for all his achievements, his choices that let to the vietnam disaster will forever remain his enduring leg as. the purpose of the series as stated in the forward is to reflect a sharper focus on the secretary of defense and immediate staff contributing to the policy of the presidents under which they served, mcnamara and the burdens of vietnam achieves this goal and

would argue it represents a major contribution to our understanding of one of the most tumultuous periods in history. they accompanied them to vietnam in the summer of 1997. while there for four days, we discussed with mostly lower level vietnamese and vietcong officials, major events 291961 and 1967. a full up to several conferences on the cuban missile crisis. a group oral history designed to elab rate of what we know about events and help us understand them better. in this case that mare was set on new missed opportunities for peace between 1961 and 67 that if we had just sat down with each other and been able to understand each other better,

the war could have ended with the cost of life. during the time we spent in preparation and in hanoi, i got to know the secretary a bit and found him engaging. sometimes more witty than i might have imagined. his legendary manager put me a much younger person not in bad shape to shame and his enthusiasm and commitment to the task was admirable. typically the schedule he set left no time free for sightseeing or anything of a frivolous nature. it was all work. luckily the first day we were there, the vietnamese government and that mara and the top people got into a spat about how much cnn could cover the conference and those of us who were flunkies got a wonderful day to see a lot of the fascinating

city. mcnamara himself significantly, i thought at the time seemed to have little interest in learning more about the nation and the people who had had such an influence on his life. i was also troubled by his view of history what seemed to me a rather mek niftic idea that certain lessons could be extracted and that could be applied with a level of exact tud with contemporary issues and produced successful policies. the conference produced a lot of interesting and exciting moments and learned new things. mcnamara found his views about opportunities and the vietnamese were not convinced, nor was i when i made my decent. to my grief if not my surprise, this was the penalty and i was not invited to a follow-up

conference in bellagio, italy. i learned to keep my mouth shut. his determine and impressive with the way they reflected and the problems that dogged his administration of the department of defense. thanks and congratulations and on a great book. . >> ed is the author of the book just reviewed. he obtained his ph.d. and served in the military in vietnam and had a career teaching and writing in the official military history world. he made substantial

contributions and improving the way we teach our military professionals and history and he has written a series of important books and articles. in addition being the author of the book under review and japan's imperial army and the rise and fall, that won the society for military history and the distinguished book award in 2010 and written in the service of the emperor essays on the imperial japanese army. he works the historian for the joint history office and chiefs of staff. ed? >> thank you. i would also like to thank secretary brown and professor herring for taking time to think

about mcnamara on the comments we would like to consider. the former osd historian was the person who hired me for this project. he oversaw the project and shaped it and edited and critiqued it and taught me a great deal about history and writing and the department of defense. george herring raised the point about the availability of sources that i used to academic and other scholars not in the defense community. unfortunately it's not a straight forward answer. many of the files that i worked with while i was in the office of the secretary of defense were held by the osd roars management

office. that office was preparing to transfer the files to the washington national record center. in maryland. there were also other osd records for the period a wading ex-sessioning and the roars administration at college park, maryland. the defense is that the records at suitland still belong to the originating agency. while those thunderstoformally o the archives and i know that several years ago, they were ex-sessioning osd documents from 1965 and perhaps from 1966. it's my understanding that they do not necessarily ex-session the collects in chronological order. speaking hypothetically after

the 1965 batch of osd documents, the next group of records to the ex-session might be for 1978. it's very complex and not an attempt to hide things. this is how the system works. there is another catch also. the osd comptroller files which were the basis for writing the budget history remain with the office of the historian of the secretary of defense because they are used as working papers not only for my projects, but related projects. as far mcnamara himself, he was unusual. he walked out the door and left his office files. there is a small collection of papers at the library of congress, but otherwise he left everything. it's