Disarming the Devil

Abstract

In December 1963, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara announced significant cuts to US defense spending, a decision that would leave thousands of out of work in defense plants across the Northeast and much of the Sun Belt South. McNamara and President Lyndon B. Johnson had no designs for a large-scale reduction of US military forces or plans for universal disarmament; the defense cuts were “purely related to obtaining the maximum defense at the lowest possible cost, and had no relationship whatsoever to changing the strength of our defense forces.” Instead, the Johnson administration sought to revamp and streamline the American military in an effort to reduce tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. While liberals such as Senator George McGovern (D-SD) welcomed McNamara’s announcement, conservatives at the grassroots level and in Washington, DC, were incensed. Conservatives believed that the Soviet Union and global Communism were the premier threats to the United States and that military superiority was the only means to prevent a Communist attack. The American Right was unconvinced that McNamara did not desire universal disarmament of nuclear weapons. In McNamara, they saw evidence that liberals had accepted the notion that the arms race was obsolete and that they thus sought to weaken American military forces and expose America to Soviet aggression. To conservatives, the secretary of defense was the personification of liberalism run amok. McNamara’s actions, they believed, jeopardized US national security and were sure to result in the United States losing the Cold War.1