The Administration: O Positive

It started as a standard McNamara-style speech: loaded with projections, statistics, computerized comparisons. But as the Secretary of Defense plunged deeper into his oration, the 600 members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, meeting in Montreal, began to realize that this was a different speech by a different Robert Strange McNamara. Its message not only had little to do with military hardware, but, even more surprising, was fundamentally concerned with the suffering majority of mankind—a subject that has not conspicuously engaged the Secretary's attention or exactly matched his image during his five years at the Pentagon.

First, McNamara startled his audience by rejecting the notion that U.S. security depends entirely on "a vast, awesome arsenal of weaponry." Then, roving far from his Washington beat, he made an eloquent plea for a compassionate diplomacy, aimed essentially at the deprived and backward countries of the world—the "hungering half of the human race," whose "mounting frustrations are likely to fester into eruptions of violence and extremism." Said McNamara: "Security is not military hardware—though it may include it. Security is not traditional military activity—though it may encompass it. Security is development. If security implies anything, it implies a minimal measure of order and stability."

Building Bridges. The U.S. must help new nations, he said, but added wisely that economic aid is "futile unless the country in question is resolute in making the primary effort itself." Communist subversion of new nations is always a threat, but McNamara vowed soberly that "it would be a gross oversimplification to regard Communism as the central factor in every conflict throughout the underdeveloped world."

He suggested that "there is nothing to be gained from our seeking an ideological rapprochement" with Communist countries. Instead, he urged that the U.S. "build bridges" to end "the isolation of great nations like Red China, even when that isolation is largely of its own making." Americans, he said, might thus arrest "potentially catastrophic misunderstandings and increase the incentive on both sides to resolve disputes by reason rather than by force." The differences could be spanned with "properly balanced trade relations, diplomatic contacts and, in some cases, even by exchanges of military observers."

At one point McNamara even skimmed daringly close to saying that the U.S. has no moral or legal obligation to defend such beleaguered regimes as that of South Viet Nam. "Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the U.S. is, should or could be the global gendarme," he said. "The U.S. has no mandate from on high to police the world and no inclination to do so. There have been classic cases in which our deliberate nonaction was the wisest policy of all. Where our help is not sought, it is seldom prudent to volunteer. Military force can help provide law and order—but only to the degree that a basis for law and order already exists in a developing society."