Garrett Mcnamara Quotes

During his first week on the job, McNamara sat down with the Pentagon’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG), which had just completed an intensive study, known as WSEG Report #50, that found that a Soviet surprise attack on only five locations—the White House, the Pentagon, Camp David, Raven Rock, and Mount Weather—would likely destroy all of the nation’s command structure. Even simply hitting the first two would likely wipe out the military command structure, since Raven Rock and Mount Weather weren’t normally manned with senior personnel. “Both the Presidential and the SecDef-JCS levels of command are presently subject to operational incapacitation by the same events,” the report explained. Hitting all the nation’s major military commands and leadership sites would involve attacking just fourteen installations—a

McNamara’s Lincoln Continental had idled at the curb outside Kennedy’s house, its high-tech radio car phone keeping an open line to the Ford offices in Washington, which, in turn, had a long-distance line open to McNamara’s wife in Ann Arbor to relay the news of the job offer.