Word: pentagons
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...first Henry Ford, unlike his grandson, might have thought scholarly Robert McNamara, president of the Ford Motor Co., an odd choice to be top man in either Dearborn or the Pentagon. San Francisco-born, Bob McNamara was a sophomore Phi Beta Kappa at the University of California. He went on to Harvard Business School for a master's degree, taught there for three years after working briefly for the accounting firm of Price, Waterhouse & Co. Although 4-F (eye trouble) during World War II, McNamara wangled a captain's commission in the Army Air Forces, eventually joined...
McNamara was suggested for Defense by Manhattan Banker Robert Lovett, himself a onetime Secretary of Defense (1951-53), who had first been offered the job in the Kennedy Administration. The Pentagon, highly fond of retiring Secretary Thomas Gates, sighed at the thought of educating the fourth Secretary in eight years, and some recalled the memory of the lackluster regime (1953-57) of another automan, General Motors ex-President "Engine Charlie" Wilson. (In an echo of Wilson's oft-quoted remark, a newsman asked McNamara: "Do you believe that what's good for Ford is good for the country...
...will be dutifully efficient in following Jack Kennedy's lead; they also expect that his austere manner and lack of defense experience may lead to personal difficulties until he gets the feel of Washington and his new job. Once he does, it will be clearly good for the Pentagon and the U.S. if the man from Ford can go on making "an awful lot of right decisions...
...operation in the U.S. Government: the Defense Department, which devours more than half the federal budget. For a start, he asked Missouri's Senator Stuart Symington and a five-man committee of civilian experts to study ways and means of modernizing the organizational maze that winds through the Pentagon. It was a job with plenty of precedents, for critics have been suggesting revisions in the Defense Department ever since it was established...
Although Symington optimistically estimated that his plan would save $8 billion, it was not likely to find many backers either in the Pentagon or on Capitol Hill. Even President Eisenhower's mod erate efforts at service reorganization, approved by Congress in 1958, have yet to be given a thorough trial, and that crusty Democrat, Carl Vinson, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has made it clear that he thinks even the Eisenhower efforts...