Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Another issue has been revived in discussions this week concerning the McNamara legacy of positive significance, the manner in which he urged President Kennedy to employ a less strident response to the implantation of Russian missiles on Cuban soil.  

McNamara urged that a quarantine be employed against Russian incoming ships while aggressively pursuing diplomacy to end the superpower conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which could have resulted in a nuclear holocaust.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy in his book "Thirteen Days" that provided his insight and analysis during that crucial period when the leaders of the two nuclear superpowers, JFK and Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev, stood "eyeball to eyeball" with the nuclear precipice looming on the imminent horizon, made his most critical disclosure about a clash he had with former Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

Kennedy's disclosure in "Thirteen Days", that was corroborated by Acheson at the time, was that the attorney general and brother to the president responded to Acheson's advice that Russian missiles on Cuban soil be taken out in an air strike.

Kennedy countered that such a response would cause the world community to compare such an action to Pearl Harbor.  McNamara concurred with Robert Kennedy's position, one that ultimately prevailed.

McNamara's success in gaining JFK's support is now perceived by many international affairs experts as having prevented a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.  

This conclusion has been supported by the release of Soviet Union documents of that critical period, which revealed that, had the U.S. delivered such a military response, the USSR would have responded with a nuclear attack on the United States.

The hawkish posture of Acheson was later explained by John Kenneth Galbraith in a favorable review of the former secretary of state's 1970 memoir, "Present at the Creation."  

Galbraith explained a view that was shared by many in the Washington community in the late sixties that Acheson, the critical player who sold the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine to America's allies, assumed a later hawkish position in international affairs due to his response to an ideological cancer that plagued America in the fifties.

Acheson had served during the overthrow of the Chinese Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek and assumption of power by Mao Zedong's Communist forces.  

Though independent study reveals that the Chinese people felt great dissatisfaction toward the Nationalist regime, from which Mao's guerrilla forces capitalized through eventual overthrow, the forces of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon sought to make political capital.  

Acheson was also pilloried, as was Truman, for not allowing General Douglas MacArthur to cross the Yalu River and carry the Korean War into Communist China.

In the manner of that bleak period of the Republican right, the assault led by Nixon and McCarthy resulted in Acheson's patriotism being called into question.  It was a note of supreme irony that Acheson and George C. Marshall have been credited by the major body of western historians as having thwarted Communist post-World War Two designs through the implementation of the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine.

As Galbraith, as well as other insiders Washington insiders knew, the outrageous attacks on Acheson's patriotism took a psychological toll on the former secretary of state.  He tended to take a less diplomatically pragmatic and more militant and militaristic approach to international problems.

Examine the consequences.  Had Acheson prevailed and a holocaust ensued, a major catalyst would have been the consequences of the demagogic assault of the Nixon-McCarthy forces of the truculent American right.