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updated aliases category tags summary born died location relations
2026-10-12
Robert McNamara
Robert Strange McNamara
McNamara
Intelligence & Government
Person
DefenseSecretary
Vietnam
Cuba
Israel
WorldBank
Nuclear
FordMotorCompany
Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson whose tenure includes Operation Mongoose, the Northwoods memorandum, the Gulf of Tonkin incidents and the Pentagon Papers task force, followed by the World Bank presidency. 1916-06-09 2009-07-06 San Francisco, California, USA
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employed_by Ford Motor Company 1946 1961-01 member of the postwar management group nicknamed the Whiz Kids; named president in November 1960 1
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appointed Department of Defense 1961-01 1968-02-29 Secretary of Defense 3
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head_of World Bank 1968-04-01 1981-06-30 1
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participant_in Operation Mongoose 1962-08-10 attended the August 10, 1962 Special Group (Augmented) meeting 8
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participant_in Operation NORTHWOODS 1962-03-13 addressee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum forwarding the pretexts paper 13
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participant_in Gulf of Tonkin Incident 1964-08-03 Secretary of Defense; briefed congressional leaders on the destroyer attacks 22
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participant_in Pentagon Papers 1967-06-17 directed the formation of the OSD Vietnam Task Force 28
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participant_in Six-Day War 1967-06-01 met Israeli intelligence chief Meir Amit 32

Robert S. McNamara (June 9, 1916 to July 6, 2009) was United States Secretary of Defense under President John F. Kennedy and then under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and from April 1, 1968 to June 30, 1981 president of the World Bank.1 Before 1961 he was an Army Air Forces statistician and then an executive of the Ford Motor Company.2 In 1967 he directed the study of Vietnam War decision-making that became the Pentagon Papers, and he is named in accounts of the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty Incident and in Hersh's account of Israel's nuclear program.

Statistical Control, LeMay and Ford

In the 2003 film The Fog of War, McNamara said that as a Harvard Business School assistant professor during World War II he worked on a government contract to establish an officer candidate school for what the Air Force called "Statistical Control," selecting candidates by sorting a punch card for every person brought into the Air Corps through IBM machines. He said that a study of daylight bombing in Europe found that the 20 percent abort rate reflected fear of a 4 percent loss rate per sortie, and that Curtis LeMay, then a colonel commanding a B-24 group, answered the report by ordering that any plane that took off would go over the target or the crew would be court-martialed. McNamara said that in March 1945 he was on Guam in LeMay's command when "we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo," that he "was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it" by analyzing the efficiency of B-29 operations, and quoted LeMay as saying, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." McNamara added: "He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals."2

After the war McNamara joined a group of former Air Forces officers at Ford, which he said had just barely broken even from 1926 to 1946. The World Bank's history records that the management techniques of McNamara and his colleagues earned them the nickname "Whiz Kids," and that in November 1960 he was named president of Ford. After about one month in that position he was called to the Kennedy administration as Secretary of Defense.12

The Defense Department, 1961

A Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum dated January 27, 1961 was addressed to him as Secretary of Defense.3

Defense Intelligence Agency

In February 1961 McNamara advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff of his decision to establish a Defense Intelligence Agency, acting on the recommendations of the Joint Study Group that Dwight D. Eisenhower had appointed in 1960. The Joint Chiefs completed the concept plan by July. DoD Directive 5105.21, "Defense Intelligence Agency," was published on August 1, 1961, effective October 1, 1961.4 The Advanced Research Projects Agency initiated Project Agile in 1961, a portfolio of counterinsurgency research programs in Southeast Asia that ran through 1974 and included work on small arms, communications, surveillance and vegetation-clearing chemicals.5

Operation Mongoose and the Special Group (Augmented)

After the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Kennedy administration assigned the covert campaign against the government of Cuba to Operation Mongoose. Overall control of the operation was entrusted to a new group established for the purpose, called the Special Group (Augmented), a slightly expanded version of the NSC 5412 Special Group.6 The Church Committee recorded that McNamara was not a formal member of that group.7

At the Special Group (Augmented) meeting of August 10, 1962, which Dean Rusk chaired, McNamara questioned whether building up agents in Cuba would lead to actions that "would hurt the U.S. in the eyes of world opinion." The minutes state that this concern "led to the suggestion by General Taylor that we should consider changing the overall objective" of the operation, from overthrowing the Fidel Castro regime to causing its failure.8

The question of assassination is where the record divides. William Harvey, the Central Intelligence Agency officer whose Task Force W ran the Mongoose operation, testified in 1975 that McNamara raised the subject at the August 10 meeting with the words "shouldn't we consider the elimination or assassination of Fidel?" Asked whether he was guessing about the speaker, Harvey said, "No, I am not guessing . . . to the best of my recollection, it was surfaced by Robert McNamara." Harvey also testified that his recollection agreed with his memorandum of August 14, written shortly after the meeting.9 McNamara testified that although he did not recall assassination being discussed at the meeting, he did remember opposing any assassination attempt or plan when he spoke with John McCone several days later.10 McCone testified that McNamara agreed Edward Lansdale's August 13 memorandum to Harvey should be withdrawn, and that, with no independent recollection, he could reconstruct from the documents that it was McNamara who made the suggestion.910 The Church Committee also recorded a 1975 account by Goodwin, a White House aide, of a task force meeting at which McNamara said that "Castro's assassination was the only productive way of dealing with Cuba." Goodwin testified that he had been misquoted and did not say "it was definitely McNamara."11

Operation Northwoods

On March 6, 1962 Lansdale, chief of operations of Mongoose, wrote that "in response to direction" he was asking the Defense representative, General Craig, "to give me a brief but precise description of pretexts which the JCS believes desirable if a decision is ultimately made to use direct military intervention," and asked the State Department's Goodwin for a companion statement of the pretexts State considered desirable.12

The Joint Chiefs of Staff sent McNamara a memorandum dated March 13, 1962, signed by Lyman Lemnitzer as chairman, with the subject "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS)." It stated that the Joint Chiefs had considered the attached memorandum for the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, which responded to that office's request, and recommended that it be forwarded "as a preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes." The memorandum added that "it is assumed that a single agency will be given the primary responsibility for developing military and para-military aspects of the basic plan," and recommended that this responsibility "for both overt and covert military operations be assigned the Joint Chiefs of Staff."13 The paper is the Joint Chiefs document known as Operation NORTHWOODS.

The attached paper (JCS 1969/321, Top Secret, Special Handling, Noforn) stated that its suggested courses of action rested on the premise that intervention "will result from a period of heightened US-Cuban tensions which place the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances," and that "world opinion, and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere." It stated that the premise would hold only so long as there could be reasonable certainty that intervention would not directly involve the Soviet Union, and that "all projects are suggested within the time frame of the next few months." Its recommendations were that the paper not be forwarded to commanders of unified or specified commands, to U.S. officers assigned to NATO activities, or to the chairman of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Military Staff Committee. A draft memorandum for the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, appended to it, stated that a plan built from the suggestions "would enable a logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility on a large scale, directed at other countries as well as the United States," and that "inasmuch as the ultimate objective is overt military intervention," primary responsibility for the military and para-military aspects should go to the Joint Chiefs.13

The annex, "Pretexts to Justify US Military Intervention in Cuba," listed the proposed courses of action. They included a series of "well coordinated incidents" at Guantanamo (among them rumors spread by clandestine radio, friendly Cubans in uniform landed "over-the-fence" to stage an attack, "Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires," and "Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims"); a "Remember the Maine" incident in which "We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba" or blow up an unmanned vessel near Havana or Santiago; and a "Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," including "sink[ing] a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated)." Others were a simulated "Cuban-based, Castro-supported" filibuster against a neighboring Caribbean nation; harassment of civil aircraft by U.S. pilots flying MIG-type aircraft, including "An F-86 properly painted"; and a staged shoot-down of a chartered civil airliner, in which an aircraft at Eglin Air Force Base painted as a duplicate of a registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary in the Miami area would be substituted for the real one, loaded with passengers "all boarded under carefully prepared aliases," while the real aircraft, converted to a drone, flew the filed route and transmitted a "MAY DAY" message on the international distress frequency before being destroyed by radio signal. A further scenario had four or five F-101 aircraft flown toward Cuba so that a pre-briefed pilot could broadcast that he had been jumped by MIGs, after which a submarine or small surface craft would disburse F-101 parts and a parachute off the Cuban coast. A second enclosure recorded the Joint Chiefs' statement of March 7, 1962 that "determination that a credible internal revolt is impossible of attainment during the next 9-10 months will require a decision by the United States to develop a Cuban 'provocation' as justification for positive US military action."13

A Joint Secretariat decision note on the paper records that the Joint Chiefs approved the recommendations in its paragraph 8 and that, because the Commandant of the Marine Corps had expressed direct concern, the provisions of Title 10, U.S. Code, section 141(b) applied.13 The National Security Archive posted the fifteen-page document on April 30, 2001, after James Bamford described it in his book Body of Secrets.14

On March 16, 1962, three days after the memorandum, President Kennedy met with McCone, General Maxwell Taylor, Roswell Gilpatric, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy and Lemnitzer to discuss the Mongoose guidelines. U. Alexis Johnson's handwritten note records that "The President also expressed skepticism that in so far as can now be foreseen circumstances will arise that would justify and make desirable the use of American forces for overt military action," and that "no decision was expressed or implied approving the use of such forces although contingency planning would proceed."15 At the April 11, 1962 meeting of the Special Group (Augmented), according to McCone's notes, the "JCS paper on pretext or provocative actions was discussed" and McCone wrote that "We should have and review this paper as it is considered to be a very thoughtful and useful document." The question of manufacturing MIG-type planes was raised at the same meeting.16

Cuban Missile Crisis

On October 27, 1962, at the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, McNamara reported on that day's daylight reconnaissance missions, one of which had aborted for mechanical reasons, with one plane overdue and several reported to have met ground fire. He again recommended night reconnaissance missions. The President delayed a decision on night flights pending a full report on the daylight mission.17 In The Fog of War McNamara said that LeMay, whom he had served under in World War II, was saying "Let's go in, let's totally destroy Cuba," and that after the crisis LeMay told Kennedy, "Won? Hell, we lost. We should go in and wipe 'em out today."2

Diem and the 1963 Coup

On October 2, 1963 McNamara and General Taylor reported to Kennedy on the military campaign and the political situation in Saigon. Their conclusions included that "there is no solid evidence of the possibility of a successful coup, although assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem or Ngo Dinh Nhu is always a possibility."18

Gulf of Tonkin

On August 3, 1964 the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Peter Solbert, sent McNamara a memorandum on the aftermath of the USS Maddox engagement. It listed as possible further actions the aerial mining of North Vietnamese naval bases or harbors, further covert Operation 34-A missions against those bases, and, on the suggestion of Ambassador Maxwell Taylor in Saigon, the destruction of Swatow boats on the high seas.19

On the telephone at 10:30 a.m. on August 3, Johnson and McNamara discussed the congressional briefing. McNamara proposed explaining the covert naval operations to Congress: "And we're going to, and I think I should also, or we should also at that time, Mr. President, explain this Op Plan 34-A, these covert operations. There's no question but what that had bearing on."20 John Prados wrote that McNamara took the position in later public hearings that he was unaware of any such link.21

At a meeting of congressional leaders on August 4, 1964, McNamara began his briefing: "The first indication we had of another attack on the destroyers, the Maddox and Turner Joy, was received at 7:30 A.M. today."22 In a telephone call at 9:43 a.m. that day, Johnson and McNamara discussed retaliation. McNamara said of the destroyer: "this ship is allegedly, uh, to be attacked tonight."21

In February 1968 McNamara was still Secretary of Defense and again served as the administration's lead witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the 1964 incidents. He told the committee that the question of provocation had been "fully explored" at the 1964 hearings. Prados wrote that McNamara cited Naval Security Group intercepts made aboard the Maddox, described them in general terms, and declined to leave copies with the committee.21

Infiltration, the Jason study and the barrier

On January 24, 1966 McNamara sent Johnson a memorandum on the military outlook in South Vietnam. It estimated that the enemy could generate in the North and infiltrate to the South "an average of 200 tons of supplies a day depending on the season," despite anti-infiltration efforts.23

From June 13 to June 22, 1966 more than forty scientists met in Wellesley, Massachusetts for briefings on the war organized by the JASON Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses under a Defense Department contract. In a letter to McNamara of June 23, 1966, George Kistiakowsky reported that the group had reached "a large measure of consensus on several tentative inferences." In late August the four study groups submitted reports to McNamara that, according to the editors of the Foreign Relations volume, concluded that the bombing of North Vietnam was ineffective and recommended construction of a barrier as an alternative means of checking infiltration.24 On September 15, 1966 McNamara wrote to the Director of the Defense Communications Agency, General Starbird, that an infiltration interdiction system "is to be designed, produced, and put in place in South Vietnam and Laos as a matter of highest priority," named him Director of Joint Task Force 728 with the objective of having the system in operation by September 15, 1967, and said that the concept came from the study "Air-Supported Anti-Infiltration Barrier" (August 1966) by the Jason Division. He told Starbird to use an advisory group of non-governmental experts, including Kistiakowsky.25 On November 14, 1966 he told Johnson that the ground portions of the barrier, fences, wire, mines and sensors supported by artillery, aircraft and mobile troops, would run about 30 kilometers west from the South China Sea, with intermittent ground barriers to the west and an air barrier beyond whose character had not been decided.26

In late 1967 McNamara sent Johnson a memorandum on pacification that set out a "five-pronged" strategy. One prong was a barrier "across the trails of Laos."27

Pentagon Papers

On June 17, 1967 McNamara directed that a task force be formed to study the history of United States involvement in Vietnam from World War II to the present. His guidance to the task force was that the studies be "encyclopedic and objective." Its chairman, Leslie Gelb, wrote in the final report that with six full-time professionals the task force was to finish in three months, and that a year and a half later, with six times six professionals, it was done with thirty-seven studies and fifteen collections of documents in forty-three volumes. McNamara gave the task force access to Office of the Secretary of Defense files; it had access to CIA materials and some State Department cables, no access to White House files, and guidance that prohibited personal interviews with principal participants.28 The report was commissioned by McNamara in 1967, and portions were leaked to the press in June 1971. On the 40th anniversary of the leak the National Archives and Records Administration, with the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon presidential libraries, released the complete report without redactions, about 7,000 pages in 48 boxes, in the form in which Gelb presented it to Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford on January 15, 1969.29

Departure from the Defense Department

Johnson spoke at a farewell ceremony for McNamara at the Pentagon on February 29, 1968, and on March 1, 1968 swore in Clifford as Secretary of Defense.3031 The World Bank's history states that McNamara's thinking on the war gradually diverged from Johnson's and that Johnson nominated him as the next World Bank president.1

Six-Day War

On June 1, 1967 McNamara met Israeli intelligence chief Meir Amit, the director of Mossad, who was in Washington from May 31 to June 2. A memorandum for the record, written by Rufus Taylor, records that Amit told McNamara he was personally going to recommend that Israel act, that Israel's mobilization could not be sustained for long, and that the Israelis could take the Sinai with about 4,000 casualties if they had air superiority. The memorandum records McNamara asking how many casualties Israel would take, and assuring Amit that the information would go no further than the top officials who needed it.32

In 1992 Amit recalled that the meeting lasted 40 minutes, that McNamara asked how long a war would last, and that he replied "Seven days." Amit also quoted McNamara as saying that "the president knows that you are here and I have a direct line to the president."32

Israel and Abraham Feinberg

Abraham Feinberg, a pro-Israel fundraiser, is recorded by Seymour Hersh as intervening directly with McNamara to insist that the United States should not interfere with Israel's nuclear activities. In Hersh's account McNamara cryptically acknowledged the basic problem of Israel's existence as a question mark in history, which Hersh read as a reason for Israel's desire for a nuclear bomb.33 Hersh placed McNamara in the discussions of Israel's nuclear program and of the sale of advanced U.S. fighter aircraft to Israel.33

Foreign Relations volumes show Feinberg as a channel in later Israeli aid business. In June 1966 Walt Rostow told Johnson that Feinberg had brought in Shimon Peres, the former Israeli defense minister, and that McNamara had given formal concurrence in a June 27 memorandum to Rostow on a related loan.34 In April 1967 Rostow's covering memorandum on an Israeli aid package bore Johnson's handwritten note asking that it be put on his desk for when the Feinberg appointment was ready. The editorial note for the same period records that Secretaries Rusk and McNamara were asked for their views on the Israeli policy paper.35

The USS Liberty attack

In an affidavit released in October 2003, Ward Boston states that the president of the Navy's 1967 Court of Inquiry into the attack on the USS Liberty, Admiral Isaac C. Kidd Jr., told him that McNamara and President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the court to conclude that the attack was a case of mistaken identity.36 A. Jay Cristol quotes McNamara's July 1967 statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "it was the conclusion of the investigatory body headed by an Admiral of the Navy [Isaac C. Kidd, Jr.] in whom we have great confidence that the attack was not intentional. I read the record of investigation and I support that conclusion."37

The Chicago Tribune reported in 2007 that J. Q. Hart, a chief petty officer at a Navy relay station in Morocco, recalled hearing McNamara order Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis to recall the carrier aircraft sent toward the Liberty. Hart quoted McNamara as saying: "President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors." McNamara, then 91, told the Tribune he had "absolutely no recollection of what I did that day."38

World Bank presidency

McNamara took office as president of the World Bank on April 1, 1968. Commitments rose from about $1 billion in 1968 to more than $13 billion in fiscal 1981.1 McNamara coined the term "absolute poverty" in his 1973 Annual Meeting speech, and the Bank's history credits him with first setting out its twin goals of accelerating economic growth and reducing poverty.39

Footnotes

  1. World Bank Group Archives, "Robert Strange McNamara, 1916-2009," Past Presidents (Ford, "Whiz Kids," November 1960; president of the World Bank Group April 1, 1968 to June 30, 1981; commitment figures). https://www.worldbank.org/en/archive/history/past-presidents/robert-strange-mcnamara ↩︎

  2. Errol Morris, The Fog of War (2003), transcript, Errol Morris website (McNamara on Statistical Control, LeMay, the March 1945 Tokyo raid, Ford and the Cuban Missile Crisis, in his own words). https://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html ↩︎

  3. Joint Chiefs of Staff, memorandum to Secretary of Defense McNamara, January 27, 1961, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. X, Document 28. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v10/d28 ↩︎

  4. Defense Intelligence Agency, "Defense Intelligence Agency: A Brief History," pp. 1-2 (announcement August 2, 1961; DoD Directive 5105.21 issued August 1, effective October 1, 1961). https://irp.fas.org/dia/dia_history.pdf ↩︎

  5. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, "Project Agile," innovation timeline. https://www.darpa.mil/about/innovation-timeline/project-agile ↩︎

  6. Office of the Historian, editorial note preceding Document 270, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. X. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v10/d270 ↩︎

  7. U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, S. Rept. 94-465 (1975), p. 140. https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94465.pdf ↩︎

  8. Alleged Assassination Plots, S. Rept. 94-465, pp. 162-163, quoting the Special Group (Augmented) minutes of August 10, 1962, p. 2. ↩︎

  9. Alleged Assassination Plots, S. Rept. 94-465, p. 164 (Harvey and McCone testimony) and the Additional Views of Senator Howard H. Baker Jr., pp. 320-321, quoting Harvey, July 11, 1975, pp. 29-30 and 86, and McCone, June 6, 1975, pp. 33 and 38-39. ↩︎

  10. Alleged Assassination Plots, S. Rept. 94-465, pp. 164-165, citing McNamara testimony, July 11, 1975, pp. 7-8, and McCone testimony, June 6, 1975, p. 39. ↩︎

  11. Alleged Assassination Plots, S. Rept. 94-465, Additional Views of Senator Baker, p. 322, citing Goodwin testimony, July 18, 1975, pp. 33 and 35, and the 1975 article by Taylor Branch and George Crile III in which Goodwin is quoted. ↩︎

  12. Lansdale to Goodwin, March 6, 1962 (Top Secret; Sensitive), Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. X, Document 310. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v10/d310 ↩︎

  13. Joint Chiefs of Staff, memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba (TS)," March 13, 1962, signed by L. L. Lemnitzer, Chairman, with Enclosure A, its appendix and annex, Enclosure B, and the Joint Secretariat decision note, from JCS 1969/321 (Top Secret, Special Handling, Noforn; declassified 1997), pp. 1-15 of the National Security Archive copy; Enclosure A appendix paras. 3 and 5 and the annex at pp. 5-11, Enclosure B para. 2 at p. 12. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf ↩︎

  14. National Security Archive, "Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962," April 30, 2001. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20010430/ ↩︎

  15. Guidelines for Operation Mongoose and editorial note quoting U. Alexis Johnson's handwritten covering memorandum of March 16, 1962, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. X, Document 314. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v10/d314 ↩︎

  16. Memorandum by Director of Central Intelligence McCone on the April 11, 1962 meeting of the Special Group (Augmented), Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. X, Document 325. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v10/d325 ↩︎

  17. Office of the Historian, Document 94, Summary Record of the Eighth Meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, October 27, 1962, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. XI. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v11/d94 ↩︎

  18. Memorandum from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Taylor) and the Secretary of Defense (McNamara) to President Kennedy, October 2, 1963, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. IV, Document 167. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v04/d167 ↩︎

  19. Peter Solbert, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, memorandum to Secretary of Defense McNamara, August 3, 1964 (Top Secret; Sensitive), Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. I, Document 268. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v01/d268 ↩︎

  20. Telephone conversation, Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert S. McNamara, August 3, 1964, 10:30 a.m., transcript, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 132. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/tapes.htm ↩︎

  21. John Prados, "The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 Years Later," National Security Archive, posted August 4, 2004, citing the telephone conversation of August 4, 1964, 9:43 a.m. (Prados, ed., The White House Tapes, p. 193) and the McNamara testimony excerpts of February 20, 1968 (Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, National Security File, NSC Histories, box 39). https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/essay.htm ↩︎

  22. Notes of the Leadership Meeting, White House, August 4, 1964, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. I, Document 280 (notes by Walter Jenkins). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v01/d280 ↩︎

  23. Memorandum from Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Johnson, "The Military Outlook in South Vietnam," January 24, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. IV, Document 36. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v04/d36 ↩︎

  24. Letter from George B. Kistiakowsky to Secretary of Defense McNamara, June 23, 1966, with the editors' note on the JASON study groups, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. IV, Document 163. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v04/d163 ↩︎

  25. Memorandum from Secretary of Defense McNamara to the Director of the Defense Communications Agency (Starbird), "Infiltration Interdiction System for Vietnam," September 15, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. IV, Document 233. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v04/d233 ↩︎

  26. Memorandum from Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Johnson, "Anti-infiltration barrier between North and South Vietnam," November 14, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. IV, Document 307. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v04/d307 ↩︎

  27. "Pacification" study, Pentagon Papers, Part IV.C.8, printed page 99. https://nara-media-001.s3.amazonaws.com/arcmedia/research/pentagon-papers/Pentagon-Papers-Part-IV-C-8.pdf ↩︎

  28. Leslie H. Gelb, Final Report, OSD Vietnam Task Force (transmittal text; June 17, 1967 directive; "encyclopedic and objective"; thirty-seven studies, fifteen collections of documents in forty-three volumes), in the Pentagon Papers index volume. https://nara-media-001.s3.amazonaws.com/arcmedia/research/pentagon-papers/Pentagon-Papers-Index.pdf ↩︎

  29. National Archives and Records Administration, "The Pentagon Papers." https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers ↩︎

  30. Lyndon B. Johnson, "Remarks at a Farewell Ceremony at the Pentagon Honoring Secretary McNamara," February 29, 1968, The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-farewell-ceremony-the-pentagon-honoring-secretary-mcnamara ↩︎

  31. Lyndon B. Johnson, "Remarks at the Swearing In of Clark Clifford as Secretary of Defense," March 1, 1968, The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-swearing-clark-clifford-secretary-defense ↩︎

  32. Memorandum for the Record by Rufus Taylor, conversation between Major General Meir Amit and Secretary McNamara, June 1, 1967, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. XIX, Document 124, including the source note quoting Amit's 1992 remarks (Richard B. Parker, ed., The Six-Day War: A Retrospective, University Press of Florida, 1996, pp. 139-140). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d124 ↩︎

  33. Seymour M. Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (Random House, 1991), chapter 8. ↩︎

  34. Walt W. Rostow, memorandum to President Johnson, June 21, 1966, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. XVIII, Document 304. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v18/d304 ↩︎

  35. Rostow to Johnson, April 18, 1967 (Document 406), and editorial note on the Israeli aid agenda (Document 410), Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol. XVIII. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v18/d410 ↩︎

  36. Ward Boston Jr., affidavit as printed in the Congressional Record, Extensions of Remarks, October 11, 2004, pp. E1886-E1889, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2004-10-11/html/CREC-2004-10-11-pt1-PgE1886-3.htm; the same sentence is paragraph 16 of the declaration dated January 8, 2004, https://archive.org/download/boston-declaration/BostonDeclaration.pdf. ↩︎

  37. A. Jay Cristol, History News Network, June 12, 2007. Cristol quotes the testimony with ellipses and cites it as released by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1967. https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/why-you-shouldnt-pay-attention-to-the-claims-that- ↩︎

  38. "New revelations in attack on American spy ship," Chicago Tribune, October 2, 2007. Hart's and McNamara's statements are as the Tribune reported them. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2007/10/02/new-revelations-in-attack-on-american-spy-ship/ ↩︎

  39. World Bank, "History," statement on the 1973 Annual Meeting speech and the Bank's twin goals. https://www.worldbank.org/en/about/history ↩︎