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[indistinct chatter]

Is this chart at a reasonable height for you?

Or do you want it lowered?

- [man] Fine. - All right.

Earlier tonight...

Let me first ask the TV. Are you ready?

All set? Okay.

[dramatic music playing]

[inaudible dialogue]

[inaudible dialogue]

[inaudible dialogue]

- [music fades] - [Robert] Let me hear your voice level.

- Make sure it's the same. - [man] How's my voice level?

- [Robert] That's fine. - [man] Terrific.

Now, I remember exactly the sentence I left off on.

I remember how it started. I was cut off in the middle.

Uh, you can fix it up.

I don't want to go back, introduce the sentence,

because I know exactly what I wanted to say.

- [man] Go ahead. - Okay.

Any military commander who is honest with himself,

or with those he's speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes

in the application of military power.

He's killed people unnecessarily.

His own troops or other troops.

Through mistakes, through errors of judgement.

A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even 100,000.

But he hasn't destroyed nations.

And the conventional wisdom is, don't make the same mistake twice.

Learn from your mistakes.

And we all do.

Maybe we make the same mistake three times,

but hopefully not four or five.

There'll be no learning period with nuclear weapons.

You make one mistake, you're gonna destroy nations.

[dramatic music playing]

In my life, I've been part of wars.

Three years in the U.S. Army during World War ll.

Seven years as secretary of defense during the Vietnam War.

Thirteen years at the World Bank. Across the world.

At my age, 85,

I'm at an age where I can look back

and derive some conclusions about my actions.

My rule has been, "Try to learn."

Try to understand what happened.

Develop the lessons, and pass them on.

[dramatic fanfare playing on TV]

[reporter] This is the secretary of defense of the United States,

Robert McNamara.

His department absorbs 10 percent of the national income of this country,

and over half of every tax dollar.

His job has been called the toughest in Washington.

McNamara is the most controversial figure that has ever held the job.

Walter Lippmann calls him not only the best secretary of defense,

but the first one who ever asserted civilian control over the military.

His critics call him "a con man,"

"an IBM machine with legs,"

"an arrogant dictator."

[pensive music playing]

[music fades]

[man] Mr. Secretary, I've noticed in several cabinet offices

that little silver calendar thing there.

Can you explain that?

[Robert] Yes, this was given by President Kennedy.

On the calendar are engraved the dates:

October 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,

21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27,

and finally 28, were the dates

when we literally looked down the gun barrel into nuclear war.

[ominous music playing]

[Robert] Under a cloak of deceit,

the Soviet Union introduced nuclear missiles

into Cuba,

targeting 90 million Americans.

The CIA said the warheads had not been delivered yet.

They thought 20 were coming on a ship named the Poltava.

We mobilized 180,000 troops.

The first day's air attack was planned at 1080 sorties,

a huge air attack.

[Robert] Kennedy was trying to keep us out of war.

I was trying to help him keep us out of war.

And General Curtis LeMay, whom I served under,

as a matter of fact, in World War ll, was saying:

"Let's go in. Let's totally destroy Cuba."

[music fades]

On that critical Saturday, October 27th,

we had two Khrushchev messages in front of us.

One had come in Friday night, and it had been dictated

by a man who was either drunk, or under tremendous stress.

Basically he said, "if you'll guarantee you won't invade Cuba,

we'll take the missiles out."

Then before we could respond, we had a second message

that had been dictated by a bunch of hard-liners.

And it said, in effect, "if you attack,

we're prepared to...

confront you with masses of military power."

So, what to do? We had the soft message, and the hard message.

At the elbow of President Kennedy was Tommy Thompson,

former U.S. ambassador to Moscow.

He and Jane, his wife,

had literally lived with Khrushchev and his wife upon occasion.

Tommy Thompson said, "Mr. President,

I urge you to respond to the soft message."

The president said to Tommy,

"We can't do that. That'll get us nowhere."

Tommy said, "Mr. President, you're wrong."

Now, that takes a lot of guts.

In Thompson's mind was this thought:

"Khrushchev's gotten himself in a hell of a fix."

He would then think to himself, "My God.

If I can get out of this with a deal that I can say to the Russian people:

'Kennedy was going to destroy Castro, and I prevented it."'

Thompson, knowing Khrushchev as he did, thought,

"Khrushchev will accept that."

And Thompson was right. That's what I call empathy.

We must try to put ourselves inside their skin,

and look at us through their eyes,

just to understand the thoughts

that lie behind their decisions and their actions.

Khrushchev's advisors were saying,

"There can be no deal

unless you somewhat reduce the pressure on us

when you ask us to reduce the pressure on you."

You...

[man] Also we had attempted to invade Cuba.

Well, with the Bay of Pigs.

That undoubtedly influenced their thinking. I think that's correct.

But more importantly, from a Cuban and a Russian point of view,

they knew what, in a sense, I really didn't know.

We had attempted to assassinate Castro

under Eisenhower and under Kennedy, and later under Johnson.

And in addition to that, major voices in the U.S. were calling for invasion.

[tense, pensive music playing]

In the first message, Khrushchev said this:

"We and you ought not pull on the ends of a rope,

which you have tied the knots of war.

Because the more the two of us pull,

the tighter the knot will be tied.

And then it will be necessary to cut that knot.

And what that would mean is not for me to explain to you.

I have participated in two wars,

and know that war ends

when it has rolled through cities and villages,

everywhere sowing death and destruction.

For such is the logic of war.

If people do not display wisdom,

they will clash like blind moles,

and then mutual annihilation will commence."

[music fades]

I want to say, and this is very important:

At the end, we lucked out.

It was luck that prevented nuclear war.

We came that close to nuclear war at the end.

Rational individuals.

Kennedy was rational.

Khrushchev was rational.

Castro was rational.

Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies.

And that danger exists today.

[ominous music playing]

The major lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is this:

The indefinite combination of human fallibility

and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.

Is it right and proper

that today there are 7500 strategic offensive nuclear warheads,

of which 2500 are on 15-minute alert

to be launched by the decision of one human being?

[music fades]

It wasn't until January, 1992,

in a meeting chaired by Castro in Havana, Cuba,

that I learned 162 nuclear warheads,

including 90 tactical warheads,

were on the island at the time in this critical moment of the crisis.

Uh...

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

And Castro got very angry with me, because I said,

"Mr. President, let's stop this meeting. This is totally new to me.

I'm not sure I got the translation right."

Mr. President, I have three questions.

Number one, did you know the nuclear warheads were there?

Number two, if you did,

would you have recommended to Khrushchev,

in the face of a U.S. attack, that he use them?

Three, if he had used them, what would've happened to Cuba?

He said, "Number one, I knew they were there.

Number two, I would not have recommended to Khrushchev.

I did recommend to Khrushchev that they be used.

Number three, what would happen to Cuba? It would've been totally destroyed."

That's how close we were.

[man] And he was willing to accept that?

Yes. Oh, and he went on to say,

"Mr. McNamara, if you and President Kennedy

had been in a similar situation, that's what you would've done."

I said, "Mr. President, I hope to God we would not have done it."

Pull the temple down on our heads? My God.

[dramatic music playing]

In a sense, we'd won.

We got the missiles out without war.

My deputy and I brought the five chiefs over.

We sat down with Kennedy, and he said, "Gentlemen, we won.

I don't want you ever to say it, but you know we won, I know we won."

And LeMay said, "Won? Hell, we lost.

We should go in and wipe them out today."

LeMay believed that ultimately

we're gonna confront these people in a conflict with nuclear weapons,

and by God, we better do it when we have greater superiority

than we will have in the future.

At the time, we had a 17-to-1 strategic advantage

in nuclear numbers.

We'd done 10 times as many tests as they had.

We were certain we could retain that advantage

if we limited the tests.

The chiefs were all opposed.

They said, "The Soviets will cheat."

I said, "How will they cheat?"

You won't believe this, but they said,

"They'll test them behind the moon."

I said, "You're out of your mind."

I said, "That's absurd."

It's almost impossible for our people today

to put themselves back into that period.

In my seven years as secretary,

we came within a hairsbreadth of war with the Soviet Union

on three different occasions.

Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year,

for seven years as secretary of defense, I lived the Cold War.

During the Kennedy administration, they designed a 100-megaton bomb.

It was tested in the atmosphere. I remember this.

[music fades]

Cold War?

Hell, it was a hot war.

I think the human race needs to think more about killing,

about conflict.

Is that what we want in this 21st century?

[ominous music playing]

[music fades]

[pensive music playing]

My earliest memory is of a city exploding with joy.

It was November 11, 1918.

I was 2 years old.

You may not believe that I have the memory, but I do.

I remember the tops of the streetcars

being crowded with human beings

cheering, and kissing, and screaming.

End of World War I. We'd won.

But also celebrating the belief of many Americans,

particularly Woodrow Wilson, we'd fought a war to end all wars.

His dream was that the world could avoid great wars in the future.

Disputes among great nations would be resolved.

I also remember that I wasn't allowed

to go outdoors to play with my friends

without wearing a mask.

There was an ungodly flu epidemic.

Large numbers of Americans were dying, 600,000.

And millions across the world.

[music fades]

My class in the first grade was, uh, housed in a shack, a wooden shack.

But we had an absolutely superb teacher.

And this teacher gave a test to the class every month,

and she re-seated the class based on the results of that test.

There were vertical rows.

She put the person with the highest grade in the first seat in the left-hand row.

And I worked my tail off to be in that first seat.

Now, the majority of the classmates were whites, Caucasians, so on.

WASPs, if you will.

But my competition for that first seat were Chinese, Japanese, and Jews.

On Saturday and Sunday, I went and played with my classmates.

They went to their ethnic schools.

They learned their native language, they learned their culture, their history.

They came back determined on Monday to beat that damn Irishman.

But they didn't do it very often.

[man] One congressman called you "Mr. I-Have-All-the-Answers McNamara."

There's been suggestion from some congressmen that you come up there,

in spite of the weight of their experience,

prepared to give them simple little lessons in things.

Is that your attitude?

No. Perhaps they don't know how much I don't know.

And there is much indeed.

I do make a serious effort

to prepare myself properly, uh, for these congressional discussions.

I suppose I spend, perhaps, 100 or 120 hours

in testifying before Congress each year.

And each hour of testimony requires, uh, three to four hours of preparation.

[man] What about the contention that your attitude is sometimes arrogant?

You never admit you were wrong. Have you ever been wrong, sir?

Oh, yes, indeed. My heavens.

I won't tell you when I've been wrong. If you don't know, I won't tell you.

But, oh, on countless occasions.

I applied to Stanford University. I very much wanted to go.

But I couldn't afford it, so I lived at home and I went to Berkeley.

Fifty-two dollars a year tuition.

I started Berkeley at the bottom of the Depression.

Twenty-five million males were unemployed.

Out of that class of 3500,

three elected to Phi Beta Kappa at the end of the sophomore year.

Of those three, one became a Rhodes scholar,

I went to Harvard,

the third went to work for $65 a month, and was damn happy to have the job.

The society was on the verge of, uh...

I don't want to say revolution.

Although, had Roosevelt not done some of the things he did,

it could've become far more violent.

In any event, that was what I was thrown into.

I never heard of Plato and Aristotle before I became a freshman at Berkeley.

And I remember the professor, Lowenberg, the freshman philosophy professor.

I couldn't wait to go to another class.

[pensive music playing]

I took more philosophy courses,

particularly one in logic and one in ethics.

The stress on values.

Something beyond one's self.

And a responsibility to society.

After graduating the University of California,

I went to Harvard Graduate School of Business for two years,

and then I went back to San Francisco.

I began to court this young lady that I'd met when we were 17

in our first week at Berkeley:

Margaret Craig.

And I was making some progress after eight or nine months.

I proposed and she accepted.

She went with her aunt and her mother on a trip across the country.

She telegraphed me,

"Must order engraved invitations to include your middle name.

What is it?"

I wired back, "My middle name is Strange."

She said, "I know it's strange, but what is it?"

Well, I mean, it is Strange. It's Robert Strange McNamara.

It was a marriage made in heaven.

At the end of a year, we had our first child.

The delivery costs were $100,

and we paid that $10 a month.

Those were some of the happiest days of our lives.

And then the war came.

[dramatic music playing]

I'd been promoted to assistant professor.

I was the youngest assistant professor at Harvard.

And on a salary, by the way, of $4000 a year.

Harvard Business School's market was drying up.

The males were being drafted or volunteering.

So the dean, being farsighted, brought back a government contract

to establish an officer candidate school

for what was called Statistical Control in the Air Force.

We said to the Air Force, "We won't take anybody you send up here.

We're gonna select the people."

You have a punch card

for every human being brought into the Air Corps.

We're gonna run those punch cards through the IBM sorting machines,

and we're gonna sort on age, education,

accomplishment, grades, et cetera.

We were looking for the best and brightest.

The best brains, the greatest capacity to lead,

the best judgment.

The U.S. was just beginning to bomb.

We were bombing by daylight.

The loss rate was very, very high.

So they commissioned a study.

And what did we find?

We found the abort rate was 20 percent.

Twenty percent of the planes that took off from England

to bomb targets in Germany turned around before they got to the target.

That was a hell of a mess. We lost 20 percent of our capability.

A form called Form 1-A, something like that, was a mission report.

If you aborted a mission, you had to write down why.

We get all these things and analyze them.

And we finally concluded:

It was baloney.

They were aborting out of fear.

Because the loss rate was 4 percent per sortie.

The combat tour was 25 sorties.

Didn't mean 100 percent would be killed, but a lot of them were. They knew that.

They found reasons to not go over the target.

So we reported this.

[music fades]

One of the commanders was Curtis LeMay.

Colonel in command of a B-24 group.

He was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in war.

But he was extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal.

He got the report. He issued an order.

He said, "I will be in the lead plane on every mission.

Any plane that takes off will go over the target,

or the crew will be court-martialed."

The abort rate dropped overnight.

That's the kind of a commander he was.

[announcer on radio] Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.

[President Truman] My friends, on this Christmas Eve,

there are over 10 million men

in the Armed Forces of the United States alone.

One year ago, 1, 700,000 were serving overseas.

By next July 1st, that number will rise to over 5 million.

Plenty of bad news for the Japs in the not-too-far-distant future.

[dramatic music playing]

The U.S. Air Force had a new airplane, named the B-29.

The B-17s and B-24s in Europe

bombed from 15, 16,000 feet.

The problem was that they were subject to antiaircraft fire,

and to fighter aircraft.

To relieve that, this B-29 was being developed

that bombed from high altitude, and it was thought

we could destroy targets much more efficiently and effectively.

I was brought back from the 8th Air Force,

and assigned to the first B-29s,

the 58th Bomb Wing.

We had to fly those planes from the bases in Kansas to India.

Then we had to fly fuel over the hump into China.

[music fades]

[somber music playing]

The airfields were built with Chinese labor.

It was an insane operation.

I can still remember them hauling these huge rollers

to crush the stone, make them flat.

Somebody would slip, the roller would roll over him,

everybody would laugh, and go on.

We were supposed to take these B-29s-- There were no tanker aircraft.

We were to fill them with fuel,

fly from India to Chengdu, offload the fuel, fly back to India,

make enough missions to build up fuel in Chengdu,

fly to Yawata, Japan, bomb the steel mills,

and go back to India.

We had so little training on this problem of maximizing efficiency,

we actually found, to get some of the B-29s back,

instead of offloading fuel, they had to take it on.

[music fades]

To make a long story short,

it wasn't worth a damn.

And it was LeMay who really came to that conclusion,

and led the chiefs to move the whole thing to the Marianas,

which devastated Japan.

[tense, pensive music playing]

LeMay was focused on only one thing:

Target destruction.

Most Air Force generals could tell you how many planes they had,

how many tons of bombs they dropped, or whatever it was.

But he was the only person that I knew

in the senior command in the Air Force who focused solely

on the loss of his crews per unit of target destruction.

I was on the island of Guam,

in his command, in March of 1945.

In that single night,

we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo.

Men, women, and children.

[man] Were you aware this was going to happen?

Well, I was...

I was part of a mechanism that, in a sense, recommended it.

I analyzed bombing operations, and how to make them more efficient.

I.e., not more efficient in the sense of killing more,

but more efficient in weakening the adversary.

I wrote one report,

analyzing the efficiency of the B-29 operations.

The B-29 could get above the fighter aircraft,

and above the air defense, so the loss rate would be much less.

The problem was,

the accuracy was also much less.

Now, I don't want to suggest that it was my report

that led to-- I'll call it the firebombing.

[music fades]

It isn't that I'm trying to absolve myself of blame for the firebombing.

I don't want to suggest that it was I

that put in LeMay's mind that his operations were totally inefficient

and had to be drastically changed.

But anyhow, that's what he did.

He took the B-29s down to 5000 feet,

and he decided to bomb with firebombs.

[dramatic music playing]

I participated in the interrogation

of the B-29 bomber crews that came back that night.

A roomful of crewmen and intelligence interrogators.

A captain got up, young captain, said,

"Goddamn it, I'd like to know who the son of a bitch was

that took this magnificent airplane, designed to bomb from 23,000 feet

and he took it down to 5000 feet, and I lost my wingman.

He was shot and killed."

LeMay spoke in monosyllables.

I never heard him say more than two words in sequence.

It was basically, "Yes, '' ''No, '' ''Yep,"

or "Hell with it."

That was all he said.

And LeMay was totally intolerant of criticism.

He never engaged in discussion with anybody.

He stood up.

"Why are we here?

Why are we here?

You lost your wingman.

It hurts me as much as...

it does you.

I sent him there.

I've been there. I know what it is.

But you lost one wingman,

and we destroyed Tokyo."

Fifty square miles of Tokyo were burned.

Tokyo was a wooden city.

When we dropped these firebombs, it just burned it.

[music fades]

[man] The choice of incendiary bombs.

Where did that come from?

I think the issue is not so much incendiary bombs.

I think the issue is,

in order to win a war, should you kill 100,000 people in one night?

By firebombing or any other way?

LeMay's answer would be, clearly, "Yes."

"McNamara, do you mean to say that instead of killing 100,000,

burning to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in that one night,

we should have burned to death a lesser number, or none?

And then had our soldiers cross the beaches in Tokyo

and been slaughtered in the tens of thousands?

Is that what you're proposing? Is that moral? Is that wise?"

Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb

if LeMay was burning up Japan?

And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities.

Fifty-eight percent of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland.

Fifty-eight percent of Cleveland destroyed.

[dramatic music playing]

Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. Fifty-one percent of New York destroyed.

Ninety-nine percent of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama.

Forty percent of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya.

This was all done before

the dropping of the nuclear bomb.

Which, by the way, was dropped by LeMay's command.

Proportionality should be a guideline in war.

Killing 50 to 90 percent of the people

in 67 Japanese cities,

and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs,

is not proportional, in the minds of some people,

to the objectives we were trying to achieve.

I don't fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb.

The U.S.-Japanese War was one of the most brutal wars

in all of human history.

Kamikaze pilots, suicide, unbelievable.

What one can criticize

is that the human race prior to that time, and today,

has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it, "the rules of war."

Was there a rule then that said you shouldn't bomb,

shouldn't kill, shouldn't burn to death 100,000 civilians in a night?

LeMay said, "if we'd lost the war,

we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals."

And I think he's right.

He and, I'd say, I

were behaving as war criminals.

[music fades]

LeMay recognized that what he was doing

would be thought immoral

if his side had lost.

But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

[ominous music playing]

[President Johnson] Okay, Bob.

[man] At some point, we have to approach Vietnam,

and I want to know how you can best set that up for me.

Yeah, well, uh...

That's a hard, hard question.

I think, uh...

I think we have to approach it in the context of the Cold War.

But first I'll have to talk about Ford.

I've got to go back to the end of the war.

[dramatic music playing]

I had a terrible headache.

So, Marg drove me in to the Air Force Regional Hospital.

A week later, Marg came in,

many of the same symptoms.

It's hard to believe, and I haven't heard of another case,

where two individuals, husband and wife,

came down, essentially, at the same time with polio.

We were both in the hospital on V-J Day.

[music fades]

A friend of mine said,

"We're gonna find a corporation in America that needs the advice and capabilities

of this extraordinary group of people I'll bring together.

You gotta be part of it."

I said, "To hell with it. I'm going back to Harvard.

That's what Marg and I want. I'll spend my life there."

He said, "Look, Bob, you can't pay Marg's hospital bills.

You're crazy as hell."

He said, "By the way,

the company that most needs our help in all the U.S. is Ford."

I said, "How'd you learn that?"

He said, "I read An article in LIFE magazine."

Of the top 1000 executives at Ford Motor Company,

I don't believe there were 10 college graduates.

And Henry Ford ll needed help.

[pensive music playing]

They were gonna give us tests.

Two full days of testing.

Intelligence tests, achievement tests, personality tests, you name it.

This sounds absurd, but I remember one question on one of the tests was:

"Would you rather be a florist or a coal miner?"

I had been a florist.

I worked as a florist during some of my Christmas vacations.

I put down coal miner. I think the reasons are obvious to you.

This group of 10 people had been trained

in the Officer Candidate School at Harvard.

In some tests, we had the highest marks that had ever been scored.

In other tests, we were in the upper 1 percentile.

From 1926 to 1946,

including the war years,

Ford Motor Company just barely broke even.

It was a god-awful mess.

I thought we had a responsibility to the stockholders.

And God knows,

you cannot believe how bad the situation had been.

[music fades]

They had no market research organization.

I set one up. Manager said, "What do you want me to study?"

I said, "Find out who's buying the Volkswagens.

Everybody says it's a no-good car.

It was only selling about 20,000 a year, but I want to know what'll happen.

Is it gonna stay the same, or go down, or go up?

Find out who buys them."

He came back six months later, he said,

"Well, they're professors, and they're doctors, and they're lawyers.

They're obviously people who can afford more."

That set me to thinking about what we in the industry should do.

Was there a market we were missing?

[pensive music playing]

At this time, nobody believed Americans wanted cheaper cars.

They wanted conspicuous consumption.

Cadillac, with these huge, ostentatious fins,

set the style for the industry for 10 or 15 years.

That's what we were up against.

We introduced the Falcon as a more economical car,

and it was a huge success profit-wise.

We accomplished a lot.

I said, "What about accidents? I hear a lot about accidents."

"Oh, yes, we'll get you some data on that."

There were about 40-odd thousand deaths per year from automobile accidents,

and about a million, or a million-two injuries.

I said, "What causes it?" He said, "It's obvious.

It's human error and mechanical failure."

I said, "if it's mechanical, we might be involved. Dig into this.

If it's mechanical failure, I want to stop it."

Well, he said, "There's really very few statistics available."

I said, "Damn it, find out, what can we learn?"

He said, "The only place that knows anything about it

is Cornell Aeronautical Labs."

They said, "The major problem is packaging."

They said, "You buy eggs. You know how eggs come in a carton?"

I said, "I don't buy eggs. My wife does it."

"Well," they said, "you ask her,

when she puts that carton down on the drainboard when she gets home,

do the eggs break?"

I asked Marg. She said, no.

Cornell said, "They don't break because they're packaged properly.

Now, if we packaged people in cars the same way,

we could reduce the breakage."

[pensive music playing]

We lacked lab facilities,

so we dropped human skulls in different packages

down the stairwells of the dormitories at Cornell.

Well, that sounds absurd,

but that guy was absolutely right.

It was packaging which could make the difference.

In a crash, the driver was often impaled on the steering wheel.

The passenger was often injured because he'd hit the windshield,

or the header bar, or the instrument panel.

So in the 1956 model Ford,

we introduced steering wheels that prevented being impaled,

we introduced padded instrument panels,

and we introduced seat belts.

We estimated if there would be 100-percent use of the seat belts,

we could save 20-odd thousand lives a year.

Everybody was opposed to it.

You couldn't get people to use seat belts.

But those who did saved their lives.

[dramatic music playing]

Now, let me jump ahead.

It's July, 1960.

[music fades]

John Bugas, vice president, Industrial Relations,

clearly had his eyes on becoming president.

I'm the group vice president in charge of all of the car divisions.

Henry was a night owl. He always went out on the town.

It's 2 a.m. or something. He said, "Bob, come up, have a nightcap."

I said, "I don't want one. I'm going to bed."

John said, "I'll come up, Henry."

Henry said, "I didn't ask you. I asked Bob."

He said, "Bob, come on up." So I finally went up.

That's when he asked me to be president.

[dramatic music playing]

I was the first president in the history of the company

that had ever been president other than a member of the Ford family.

And after five weeks, I quit.

The telephone rang.

A person comes on and says, "I'm Robert Kennedy.

My brother, Jack Kennedy, would like you

to meet our brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver."

Four o'clock, Sarge comes in. Never met him.

And he said, "I've been authorized by my brother-in-law, Jack Kennedy,

to offer you the position of secretary of the treasury."

I said, "You're out of your mind.

I know a little about finance, but I'm not qualified."

"Anticipating you might say that,

the president-elect authorized me to offer you secretary of defense."

I said, "I was in World War II for three years.

But secretary of defense? I'm not qualified."

He said, "Anticipating that, would you do him the courtesy

of agreeing to meet with him?"

So I go home. I meet with Marg.

If I could appoint every senior official in the department,

and if I could be guaranteed I wouldn't have to be part

of that damn Washington social world.

She said, "Well, why don't you write a contract with the president?

If he'll accept those two conditions, do it."

My total net worth at the time was on the order of 800,000,

but I had huge unfulfilled stock options worth millions.

I was one of the highest-paid executives in the world.

And the future was brilliant.

We had called our children in.

Their life would be totally changed.

The salary of a cabinet secretary then was $25,000 a year.

So we explained to the children, they'd be giving up a few...

They could care less.

Marg could care less.

[auspicious music playing]

It was snowing.

The Secret Service took me in the house by the back way.

I can still see it. There's a loveseat.

Two armchairs with a lamp table in between.

Jack Kennedy's in one armchair and Bobby Kennedy's in the other.

"Mr. President, it's absurd.

I'm not qualified."

"Look, Bob."

He said, "I don't think there's any school for presidents either.

Let's announce it now. I'll write the announcement."

So he wrote out the announcement, we walk out the front door.

All of these television cameras, and press, till hell wouldn't have it.

That's how Marg learned I had accepted. It was on television, live.

All right, why don't we do some pictures afterwards?

I've asked Robert McNamara

to assume the responsibilities of secretary of defense.

And I'm glad and happy to say that he has accepted this responsibility.

Mr. McNamara leaves the presidency of the Ford company,

at great personal sacrifice.

[Robert] That's the way it began.

You know, it was a traumatic period.

My wife probably got ulcers from it.

May even ultimately have died from the stress.

My son got ulcers. It was very traumatic.

But they were some of the best years of our life,

and all members of my family benefited from it.

It was terrific.

[ominous music playing]

October 2nd.

I had returned from Vietnam.

At that time, we had 16,000 military advisors.

I recommended to President Kennedy and to the Security Council

that we establish a plan and an objective

of removing all of them within two years.

[music fades]

Kennedy announced we were going to pull out all of our military advisors

by the end of '65, going to take 1 000 out at the end of '63,

and we did.

But...

there was a coup in South Vietnam.

Diem was overthrown.

And he and his brother were killed.

I was present with the president

when together, we received information of that coup.

I've never seen him...

more upset.

He totally blanched.

President Kennedy and I had tremendous problems with Diem,

but my God.

He was the authority. He was the head of state.

And he was overthrown by a military coup.

And Kennedy knew, and I knew, that to some degree,

the U.S. government was responsible for that.

[somber music playing]

I was in my office in the Pentagon

when the telephone rang,

and it was Bobby.

The president had been shot in Dallas.

Perhaps 45 minutes later, Bobby called again,

and said the president was dead.

Jackie would like me to come out to the hospital.

We took the body to the White House about whatever it was, 4 a.m.,

and called the superintendent of Arlington Cemetery.

And he and I...

Uh...

walked over those grounds.

They're...

They're hauntingly beautiful grounds.

White crosses, row on row.

And finally I thought I'd found the exact spot,

the most beautiful spot in the cemetery.

I called Jackie at the White House and asked her to come out there.

She immediately accepted.

That's where the president is buried today.

A park service ranger came up to me, and said that he...

He had...

escorted President Kennedy on a tour of those grounds,

a few weeks before.

And Kennedy said,

that was the most beautiful spot in Washington.

That's where he's buried.

[music fades]

I will do my best.

That is all I can do.

I ask for your help,

and God's.

[President Johnson]

[President Johnson] I'll tell you what I would say.

Well, I think this:

[somber music playing]

[music fades]

[Herlihy] Make no bones of this.

Don't try to sweep this under the rug.

We are at war in Vietnam.

[crowd applauding]

And yet the president

and his secretary of defense continues to mislead

and misinform the American people,

and enough of it's gone by.

[crowd cheering and applauding]

[dramatic music playing]

[Robert] On August 2nd,

the destroyer Maddox reported it was attacked

by a North Vietnamese patrol boat.

It was an act of aggression against us. We were in international waters.

I sent officials from the Defense Department out,

and we recovered pieces that were clearly identified as North Vietnamese shells

from the deck of the Maddox.

There was no question in my mind that it had occurred.

But, in any event, we didn't respond.

And it was very difficult. It was difficult for the president.

There were very, very senior people, in uniform and out,

who said, "My God, this president is..."

They didn't use the word "coward," but in effect,

"He's not protecting the national interest."

Two days later the Maddox and the Turner Joy, two destroyers,

reported they were attacked.

There were sonar soundings. Torpedoes had been detected.

Other indications of attack from patrol boats.

We spent about 10 hours that day trying to find out what in the hell had happened.

At one point the ship's commander said, "We're not certain of the attack."

Another point they said, "We're positive."

Then finally, late in the day, Admiral Sharp said,

"Yes, we're certain it happened."

I reported this to Johnson,

and as a result,

there were bombing attacks on targets in North Vietnam.

Johnson said, "We may have to escalate.

I'm not gonna do it without Congressional authority."

And he put forward a resolution,

the language of which gave complete authority to the president

to take the nation to war:

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

Now let me go back to the August 4th attack.

[ominous music playing]

- Yup. - [Sharp] No, I don't... Wait a minute.

- [Burchinal] Right. - [Sharp]

[Moore]

- [Sharp] - [Burchinal] Yeah.

[Sharp] No doubt about that.

It was just confusion.

And events afterwards showed

that our judgment that we'd been attacked that day was wrong.

It didn't happen.

And the judgment that we'd been attacked on August 2nd,

which we'd made, was right.

We had been.

Although that was disputed at the time.

So we were right once, and wrong once.

Ultimately, President Johnson authorized bombing in response

to what he thought had been the second attack.

It hadn't occurred, but that's irrelevant to the point I'm making here.

He authorized the attack on the assumption it had occurred.

And his belief that it was a conscious decision

on the part of the North Vietnamese political and military leaders

to escalate the conflict,

and an indication they would not stop short of winning.

[tense, pensive music playing]

We were wrong.

But we had in our minds a mindset that led to that action.

And it carried such heavy costs.

We see incorrectly, or we see only half of the story at times.

- [man] We see what we want to believe. - [Robert] You're absolutely right.

Belief and seeing...

They're both often wrong.

[music fades]

We Americans know,

although others appear to forget,

the risk of spreading conflict.

We still seek no wider war.

[dramatic music playing]

[Robert] We introduced what was called Rolling Thunder,

which, over the years, became a very, very heavy bombing program.

Two to three times as many bombs as were dropped

on Western Europe during all of World War ll.

[young Robert] This is not primarily a military problem.

It's a battle for the hearts and the minds of the people of South Vietnam.

As a prerequisite to that,

we must be able to guarantee their physical security.

[music fades]

[ominous music playing]

[dramatic music playing]

...at the rate we're going.

[man 1 on TV] It was announced today that total American casualties in Vietnam

now number 4877,

including 748 killed.

[man 2 on TV] Secretary of Defense McNamara,

on each of his seven inspection trips to Vietnam,

has found some positive aspect of the course of the war there.

The most vivid impression I'm bringing back is that

we've stopped losing the war.

The North Vietnamese, we believe, have nine regiments of their army...

[man 3 on TV] Some of the men had a little training

in a state park in Kentucky before coming here.

It did not prepare them for the thicket of trees,

spiked vines, thorn bushes,

almost perpendicular cliffs, 90-degree temperature, insects...

[man 4 on TV] This has changed from a nasty little war

to a nasty middle-sized war.

The Vietnamese are still doing most of the fighting,

and most of the dying,

but week after week, American casualty figures go up...

[President Johnson] Now, America wins the wars that she undertakes.

Make no mistake about it.

And we have declared war on tyranny and aggression.

If this little nation goes down the drain and can't maintain independence,

ask yourself what's gonna happen to all the other little nations.

[ominous music playing]

[Robert] Let me go back one moment.

In the Cuban missile crisis, at the end,

I think we did put ourselves in the skin of the Soviets.

In the case of Vietnam,

we didn't know them well enough to empathize.

There was total misunderstanding as a result.

They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power,

and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam

to our colonial interests,

which was absolutely absurd.

And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War.

Not what they saw it as, a civil war.

[pensive music playing]

There aren't many examples

in which you bring two former enemies together

at the highest levels,

and discuss what might have been.

I formed the hypothesis that

each of us could have achieved our objectives

without the terrible loss of life.

And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.

The former foreign minister of Vietnam,

a wonderful man named Thach, said, "You're totally wrong.

We were fighting for our independence. You were fighting to enslave us."

We almost came to blows. That was noon on the first day.

"Do you mean to say it was not a tragedy for you

when you lost 3,400,000 Vietnamese killed,

which on our population base is the equivalent of 27 million Americans?

What did you accomplish?

You didn't get any more than we were willing to give you at the beginning.

You could've had the whole damn thing: Independence, unification."

"Mr. McNamara, you must never have read a history book.

If you had, you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese or the Russians.

Didn't you know that?

Don't you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for 1000 years?

We were fighting for our independence. We'd fight to the last man.

We were determined to.

No amount of bombing or U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us."

[pensive music playing]

What makes us omniscient?

Have we a record of omniscience?

We are the strongest nation in the world today.

I do not believe we should ever apply

that economic, political, or military power unilaterally.

If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there.

None of our allies supported us.

Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain, or France.

If we can't persuade nations with comparable values

of the merit of our cause,

we'd better reexamine our reasoning.

Americans suffered their heaviest casualties

of the war in Vietnam last week:

543 killed in action.

Another 1247 were wounded and hospitalized.

The deaths raise the U.S. total in the war so far to 18,239.

South Vietnamese put their losses for the week at 522 killed.

Communist losses were not reported.

Contributing to those record casualties has been steady Communist bombardment

of the Marine outpost at Khe Sanh.

There, the North Vietnamese have been tightening their ring around...

[dramatic music playing]

Military expects a full-scale assault.

[man] To what extent did you feel that you were the author of stuff,

or that you were an instrument of things outside of your control?

Well, I don't think I felt either.

I just felt that I was serving at the request of a president

who'd been elected by the American people.

And it was my responsibility to try to help him, uh...

to carry out the office as he believed was in the interest of our people.

[dramatic music playing]

What is morally appropriate in a wartime environment?

Let me give you an illustration.

While I was secretary,

we used what's called Agent Orange in Vietnam.

A chemical that strips leaves off of trees.

After the war, it is claimed that that was a toxic chemical,

and it killed many individuals,

soldiers and civilians exposed to it.

Were those who issued the approval to use Agent Orange criminals?

Were they committing a crime against humanity?

Let's look at the law.

Now, what kind of a law do we have that says

these chemicals are acceptable in war, and these chemicals are not?

We don't have clear definitions of that kind.

I never in the world would have authorized an illegal action.

I'm not really sure I authorized Agent Orange. I don't remember it.

But it certainly occurred.

The use of it occurred while I was secretary.

[pensive music playing]

Norman Morrison was a Quaker.

He was opposed to war, the violence of war, the killing.

He came to the Pentagon,

doused himself with gasoline.

Burned himself to death below my office.

He held a child in his arms, his daughter.

Passersby shouted, "Save the child!" He threw the child out of his arms.

And the child lived, and is alive today.

His wife issued a very moving statement:

"Human beings must stop killing other human beings."

And that's a belief that I shared.

I shared it then. I believe it even more strongly today.

How much evil must we do in order to do good?

We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities.

Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil,

but minimize it.

I remember reading that General Sherman, in the Civil War,

the mayor of Atlanta pleaded with him to save the city.

And Sherman essentially said to the mayor,

just before he torched it and burned it down,

"War is cruel.

War is cruelty."

That was the way LeMay felt.

He was trying to save the country.

He was trying to save our nation.

And in the process,

he was prepared to do whatever killing was necessary.

It's a very, very difficult position for sensitive human beings to be in.

Morrison was one of those.

I think I was.

[dramatic music playing]

Fifty thousand people came to Washington

to demonstrate against the war.

About 20,000 of them marched on the Pentagon.

The Pentagon is a very, very difficult building to defend.

We placed troops carrying rifles around it.

U.S. marshals in front of the soldiers.

But I told the president, not a rifle would be loaded

without my personal permission.

And I wasn't gonna grant it.

[indistinct shouting]

[man] What effect did all of this dissent have on your thinking?

I mean, Norman Morrison is '65. This is '67.

Well, it was a very tense period.

Very tense period for my family, which I don't want to discuss.

[man] How was your thinking changing during this period?

I don't think my thinking was changing.

We were in the Cold War.

And this was a Cold War...

uh, activity.

[dramatic music playing]

Some commentators have said the war is turning into a kind of stalemate...

No, no, I think on the contrary,

as General Westmoreland has pointed out, in recent weeks in Saigon,

the military operations, the large-unit military operations,

continue to show very substantial progress.

[Robert] One of the lessons I learned early on:

Never say never.

Never, never, never.

Never say never.

And secondly,

never answer the question that is asked of you.

Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you.

And quite frankly,

I follow that rule.

It's a very good rule.

[music fades]

[man] When you talk about the responsibility

for something like the Vietnam War,

whose responsibility is it?

It's the president's responsibility.

I don't want to fail to recognize

the tremendous contribution I think Johnson made to the country.

I don't want to put the responsibility for Vietnam on his shoulders alone.

But I do-- I am inclined to believe,

if Kennedy had lived he would've made a difference.

I don't think we would've had 500,000 men there.

Two very telling photographs.

One of them has Johnson like this:

You can just see him thinking, "My God, I'm in a hell of a mess.

And this guy is trying to tell me to do something

that I know is wrong, and I'm not gonna do.

But how the hell am I gonna get out of this?"

The other photograph, you can see me saying,

"Jesus Christ, I love this man, I respect him, but he's totally wrong.

What am I gonna do?"

Johnson couldn't persuade me, and I couldn't persuade him.

I had this enormous respect, and affection, loyalty,

to both Kennedy and Johnson.

But at the end, Johnson and I found ourselves poles apart.

And I said to a very close and dear friend of mine,

Kay Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post,

"Even to this day, Kay, I don't know whether I quit or was fired."

She said, "You're out of your mind. Of course you were fired."

[dramatic music playing]

November 1, 1967.

I presented a memo to Johnson that said,

"The course we're on is totally wrong.

We've gotta change it.

Cut back at what we're doing in Vietnam.

We gotta reduce the casualties."

And so on.

It was an extraordinarily controversial memo.

And I took it to him. I delivered it myself.

"Mr. President, nobody has seen this.

Not Dean Rusk, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Nobody."

"I know that it may contain recommendations

and statements that you do not agree with or support."

I never heard from him.

Something had to give.

There was a rumor that I was facing a mental breakdown.

I was under such pressure and stress.

I don't think that was the case at all.

But it was a really traumatic departure.

That's the way it ended.

[music fades]

Except for one thing.

He awarded me the Medal of Freedom

in a very beautiful ceremony at the White House.

And he was very, very warm in his comments.

And I became so emotional, I could not respond.

[audience applauding]

[young Robert] Mr. President...

I cannot find words to...

express what lies in my heart today.

I think I'd better respond on another occasion.

[dramatic music playing]

And had I responded, I would have said,

"I know what many of you are thinking.

You're thinking this man is duplicitous.

You're thinking that...

he has held things close to his chest.

You're thinking that...

he did not respond fully

to the desires and wishes of the American people.

I wanna tell you you're wrong."

Of course he had personal idiosyncrasies.

No question about that.

He didn't accept all the advice he was given.

On several occasions,

his associates advised him to be more forthcoming.

He wasn't.

People did not understand at that time there were recommendations and pressures

that would carry the risk of war with China, and of nuclear war.

He was determined to prevent it.

I'm arguing that he had a reason in his mind for doing what he did.

And, of course, shortly after I left,

Johnson concluded that he couldn't continue.

[man] At this point, how many Americans had been killed in Vietnam?

About 25,000.

Less than half of the number ultimately killed, 58,000.

[dramatic music continues]

[music fades]

[dramatic music playing]

Historians don't really like to deal with counterfactuals,

with what might have been.

They want to talk about history.

"How the hell do you know, McNamara, what might have been?

Who knows?"

Well, I know certain things.

[music fades]

What I'm doing is thinking it through with hindsight.

But you don't have hindsight available at the time.

I'm very proud of my accomplishments.

And I'm very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things, I've made errors.

[hopeful music playing]

We all make mistakes.

We know we make mistakes.

I don't know any military commander who is honest

who would say he has not made a mistake.

There's a wonderful phrase:

"The fog of war."

What "the fog of war" means is:

War is so complex,

it's beyond the ability of the human mind

to comprehend all the variables.

Our judgment,

our understanding,

are not adequate.

And we kill people unnecessarily.

Wilson said, "We won the war to end all wars."

I'm not so naive or simplistic

to believe we can eliminate war.

We're not gonna change human nature any time soon.

It isn't that we aren't rational. We are rational.

But reason has limits.

There's a quote from T.S. Eliot that I just love:

[music fades]

"We shall not cease from exploring,

and at the end of our exploration,

we will return to where we started,

and know the place for the first time."

Now that's, in a sense, where I'm beginning to be.

[pensive music playing]

[man] After you left the Johnson administration,

why didn't you speak out against the Vietnam War?

[Robert] I'm not gonna say any more than I have.

These are the kinds of questions that get me in trouble.

You don't know what I know about how inflammatory my words can appear.

A lot of people misunderstand the war,

misunderstand me.

A lot of people think I'm a son of a bitch.

[man] Do you feel in any way responsible for the war?

Do you feel guilty?

[Robert] I don't want to go into further discussion.

It just opens up more controversy.

I don't wanna add anything to Vietnam.

It is so complex that anything I say

will require additions and qualifications.

[man] Is it the feeling that you're damned if you do

and if you don't, no matter what?

[Robert] Yeah, yeah, that's right.

[music fades]

And I would rather be damned if I don't.

[dramatic music playing]