The Secretary's Stand

"Before I came to Washington," Secretary McNamara said last month to Senator Thurmond and a jeering clutch of old ladies wearing "pro-blue" badges, "I was paid $400,000 a year to take responsibility for the second biggest business enterprise in the world. I learned there, and I believe today, that it is not sound management practice to pin the blame on subordinates for responsibilities which are mine."

This sort of talk is new to the Executive branch. It was in 1954, not so long ago, that Army Secretary Stevens was demonstrating his utter incapacity for responsible administration before McCarthy's subcommittee and 20 million television viewers. Scott McCloed was running wild through the State Department ruining the careers and reputations of hundreds of its employees without a word of reproach from the Secretary of State. Chiefs ticked off their subordinates in public, and refused to support them against attack from the outside.

Yet McNamara, patient and courteous in the center of charges that his officers are being "muzzled" by Pentagon censors, has chosen to assume entire responsibility for the muzzling. Rather than subscribing to the extraordinary notion that the discipline of General Edwin Walker is the work of radical subversives within the Department, he has flatly stated it to be his own. He has, in short, refused to allow the martyrdom of General Walker.

Now this is not a comfortable course to follow at the precise moment when the elected representatives of the far right seem consciously to be seeking a martyr. Weary of delicacy and complexity in foreign affairs, they are, like Senator Goldwater, willing to assert that the cold war can be brought to a quick and satisfactory conclusion if only it is fought by men whose appearance is tougher and whose speech is harsher than Kennedy's, or Stevenson's, or Arthur Dean's. The reaction to General MacArthur's recall has shown how powerful a weapon against liberal treatment of diplomatic and military policy the victimized general can be. He has had too many guts, too much backbone, he must be dispensed with: it is a curiously compelling accusation.

In this context the actual questions of whether officers should be permitted to teach the jargon of the right and show "Operation Abolition" to their men seem relatively trivial. What matters is that McNamara's stand has illustrated with remarkable clarity that the government need not be defenseless against the McCarthys and the McCloeds; they are not agents of irresistible currents of history. Adherence to procedures with which every industrial executive is familiar is a useful safeguard against the demoralization of civilian and military officials who believe, as McNamara said after the Thurmond hearings, that the menace of Communism "comes more from Moscow than from me."