He Had Better Be Right

Copper Calhoon, that beautiful but bitchy businesswoman, barked at her secretary: "Take a letter to--ah--what's his name in the Defense Department." Then she began dictating: "The manner in which you are running your office is a combination of Alice in Wonderland and the sort of strategy which resulted in Custer's last stand."

In putting such words into Copper's mouth, Cartoonist Milton Caniff insists that he has nothing against Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara; he is merely trying to keep his Steve Canyon comic strip topical. Well, that he is. For the chorus of criticism against McNamara is one of the liveliest conversational topics in Washington nowadays.

Most of McNamara's critics acknowledge that he is tremendously able, that he has taken charge at the Pentagon as no civilian has done before him. But they insist that he lacks "heart," has lowered service morale by his treatment of military leaders, relies too heavily on the advice of his civilian "whiz kid" aides and ignores the service professionals. Among the most outspoken critics: > Hanson W. Baldwin, veteran military affairs analyst of the New York Times, lit into McNamara last March in a Saturday Evening Post article under the bitter title: "The McNamara Monarchy. " Wrote Baldwin: "The 'unification' of the armed services sponsored by McNamara poses some subtle and insidious dangers--creeping dangers . . . that could present, in their ultimate form, almost as great a threat to a secure and free nation as an attempted military coup." In a column distributed to newspapers last month and then ordered killed by the Times News Service before publication, Baldwin said: "Weariness, mistrust, recrimination and mutual suspicion, particularly between many of the top civilian and military officials, prevail" in the Pentagon. Uniformed personnel feel, he said, that "top civilians in the Pentagon show too little warmth or sense of leadership, of loyalty down to their subordinates, or of the importance of the human being to the military services in the nuclear age." --

Former Air Force Chief of Staff General Thomas D. White, now a Newsweek military columnist and occasional contributor to other publications, recently wrote: "I am profoundly apprehensive of the pipe-smoking, tree-full-of-owls type of so-called professional 'defense intellectuals' who have been brought into this nation's capital. I don't believe a lot of these often overconfident, sometimes arrogant, young professors, mathematicians and other theorists have sufficient worldliness or motivation to stand up to the kind of enemy we face."

> Author and Syndicated Columnist S.L.A. Marshall, a retired Army brigadier general, wrote: "McNamara has lost the confidence of the armed services, the majority of the officer corps in the active forces, the majority of retired people and the majority of senior officers in the civilian components." Furthermore, contends Marshall, "there is intense dissatisfaction" with McNamara in Congress, "due to the feeling that he has arrogated powers not properly his, thereby reducing congressional review of defense issues to a rubber stamp." Protests Marshall: "The dignity of man at his work is a value which the Secretary does not understand."

-- House Republican Whip Leslie Arends. member of the Armed Services Committee, said: "I-Got-All-the-Answers McNamara is not a military strategist. He may know how to manufacture military weapons, but he has had no training and experience in how military weapons might be employed or their relative value in the formulation of our defense plans."

-- The Washington Star's Military Reporter Richard Fryklund wrote that service morale is low, and that "most military people believe Mr. McNamara does not understand people, that he is not interested in people . . . Mr. McNamara seldom visits the troops where they work and live ... It is rare that he sends a 'well done' to his troops ... A Defense Secretary with no heart is being equated with a Defense Department with no heart."

McNamara's defenders claim that most of the heat is coming from writers who have long sympathized with the military professionals or from those professionals themselves--the men who are understandably irked by McNamara decisions that jar them out of their accustomed ways. "An awful lot of this criticism is just a result of McNamara's very effectiveness." argues one of his top assistants. Yet these assistants also are urging McNamara to take note of the criticisms and to work harder at his personal relationships. The advice seems sound, since McNamara, who still has the full confidence of the President, has assumed greater centralized power than any previous Defense Secretary. This means that he had better be right in the sweeping decisions that he makes--for a legion of critics stand ready and eager to tear into him the moment they can prove him wrong.

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