Challenge: POTUS Robert McNamara (R-MI)

POD 1955. No WWIII or everyone preceding him in the OTL line of succession being killed or otherwise removed from office.
 
TR: Yes. IOTL McNamara was Texarkana's Ambassador to the Camelotian Kingdom. (aka LBJ's liaison to the Kennedys, whom McNamara was personally very close to)
 
I dunno how feasible it is. McNamara professed to have little interest in politics before Kennedy, and even then he only took the SecDef job after being personally lobbied by him. He seemed settled at Ford.
 
I'm gonna have nightmares tonight cause a you

POD 1955. No WWIII or everyone preceding him in the OTL line of succession being killed or otherwise removed from office.
With the exception of OTL Dubya, I cannot imagine ANY POTUS less likely to take advice and more likely to keep his own council. He was (IS) the living definition of the armchair general (and admiral). During the Cuban Missile Crisis he, the Secretary of Defense, was in the Pentagon ordering about individual destroyers as if he were a US Navy Rear Admiral. It got to the point he was giving direct orders to individual ship captains. If ever you could see Vietnam coming over the horizon, this was it. What the HELL does a car manuafacterer know about naval warfare? He was brought in to improve the structure of the Pentagon and improve efficiency, not play Lord Nelson. Remind you of a certain SecDef being escorted out of the White House 4 years ago?:p
 
Re nightmares: you could at least wait for a possible POTUS Karl Rove TL. ;) But I'm very patient. Coming back to my OP: one possibility discussed in 1963 was moving McNamara to Foggy Bottom and Bobby to the Pentagon. There are few men who that building despised more than the two Roberts in the Kennedy Administration. Apart from Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Rummy.
 
No.

No.

No.

FUCK NO.

McNamara was underqualified for the job. He was the very definition of a guy who had no idea what he was doing most of the time. The Ford Edsel was his idea (and it flopped badly, costing Ford an estimated $250 million - in 1958 dollars), and his time as SecDef, well, he got the US into Vietnam, which should be bad enough......

As a car guy, I hate the man. As a history guy, I think the man got WAY too far for his intelligence level.
 
As I said, would you prefer Bob and Bobby switch jobs in 1964, as was discussed? Which would resemble Rahm Emanuel being allowed absolute freedom of political maneuver and speech and cause civil servants to either take the Pledge or keep their heads down. Among other things, that means COIN-wankage on a massive scale.
 
I just wish that he never be there in the first place, RB. He'd have taken the heat for the Edsel flop and been fired. IOTL, his replacement was a young man with the last name Iacocca, who would both create the idea of the Pony Car in the early 1960s and then, fifteen years later, go on to save Chrysler from bankruptcy.

I loathe McNamara and everything he stood for as an auto executive. He was a penny-pinching over-analyzing moron, the sort of people who dramatically fucked up the way American automakers do business.
 
Wrong Forum

Re nightmares: you could at least wait for a possible POTUS Karl Rove TL. ;) But I'm very patient. Coming back to my OP: one possibility discussed in 1963 was moving McNamara to Foggy Bottom and Bobby to the Pentagon. There are few men who that building despised more than the two Roberts in the Kennedy Administration. Apart from Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Rummy.
POTUS Karl Rove TL? Sorry, but that belongs in the ASB Forum along with the POTUS TL's for Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Richard Mellon-Scaife, Rupert Murdoch, Lucianne Goldberg, Jonah Goldberg, Sarah Palin, Linda Tripp, Tucker Carlson, Bey Buchanan, Matt Drudge, and absolutely EVERYONE named Bush.:p
 
TM: Initially they wanted Bob Lovett, but age and health dictated a no. Then they discussed keeping Ike's Tom Gates on with RFK as Undersecretary, but that didn't work out for obvious reasons. Then they went for McNamara. Finally, by 1963, JFK came to this proposed (1 of 2) Cabinet shuffle.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
What the HELL does a car manuafacterer know about naval warfare?

Note: he did have one large difference from Rumsfeld in that he served in the military during an active war. One could make a very good argument that the strategic bombing campaign in Japan was in no small part out of his noggin.
 
So McNamara as POTUS seems like an ASB scenario then. Still, we've had a POTUS Cheney (DudeAlmighty) and a POTUS Rumsfeld (me).
 
Day or Night?

Note: he did have one large difference from Rumsfeld in that he served in the military during an active war. One could make a very good argument that the strategic bombing campaign in Japan was in no small part out of his noggin.
Only if HE was the one to come up with the idea for switching from high-level (30,000ft) daylight HE bombing to mid-level (9,000ft) night time incendiary bombing. If not, then it's just another in a long list of McNamara screwups.:mad:
 
UT2020: McNamara was relieved of his Pentagon post primarily not because of incompetence, but because he became disloyal by late 1967, and LBJ knew it. We all know how LBJ felt on the subject of disloyalty. I think the taped campaign clip was the icing on the cake. Fortunately, LBJ's reaction is not preserved for posterity.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
Only if HE was the one to come up with the idea for switching from high-level (30,000ft) daylight HE bombing to mid-level (9,000ft) night time incendiary bombing. If not, then it's just another in a long list of McNamara screwups.:mad:

Actually, I saw a documentary that provided an answer you might not like. But in any case, that's not the point. I'm more worried about you at this moment.

Do you want some pills or something? There's some veins on your head twitching. ;)
 
Mac: UT's veins are not as protruded as much as LBJ's veins were when he found out McNamara had been aiding his nemesis. ;)
 

Ming777

Monthly Donor
IMHO, He had only one comparable man outside of the United States: Paul Helleyer. Both wanted to improve efficiencies. One did it by badly butchering the Canadian Forces and made them all wear army green. The other tried to make a Fighter-bomber into an interceptor, gave the army brand new UNTESTED M16s which jammed frequently, and did other thing worthy of a firing squad. JKJK

The only person who was worse was Sir Sam Hughes (WWI Canada). He supplied the ross rifle, cardboard soled boots, tried to bully everyone to favor his incompetant son in the army, and generally harmed soldiers lives.
 
Wile-E.-TheMann, Supergenius

No.
McNamara was underqualified for the job. He was the very definition of a guy who had no idea what he was doing most of the time. The Ford Edsel was his idea (and it flopped badly, costing Ford an estimated $250 million - in 1958 dollars), and his time as SecDef, well, he got the US into Vietnam, which should be bad enough......
As a car guy, I hate the man. As a history guy, I think the man got WAY too far for his intelligence level.
Peter Principle to the nth degree. The difference between McNamara and Quayle? Quayle knew he'd reached his level of incompetence, no later than the Bentson debate. No one could McNamara his job. He's telling Maxwell Taylor the missiles in Cuba don't materially affect our defense posture with the Soviets!:eek: "A missile is a missile." He only changed his tune when he realized even UN Ambassador Stevenson refused to go THAT far!

As far as Ford goes, you have to go further back. Edsel Ford had been groomed as Henry Ford's successor. But as one critic put it: "Every time Edsel tried to step into his fathers' shoes, daddy would jump right back into them." Henry Fords' staying on decade after decade, with his refusal to replace the Model T when the market demanded it, resulted in giving GM and Chrysler the opening they needed. Thus begat the Big Three, rather than the all powerful Ford. Seem silly? What's happened to Boeing's civilian airliner large scale competitors in the US? It took Edsel's death from H. pylori, and a threat from his wife of divorce if he didn't let go of the wheel. TheMann, you couldn't be more right. It's a story that happens to all corporations, sooner or later. The bottomliners/beancounters/accountants/financiers inevitably wind up taking over from the founders, the builders, the visionaries. Can anybody think of a better example today of what I mean than what happened to Circuit City? While Best Buy was rushing out to acquire Geek Squad and put them in all their stores, Circuit City was deliberately firing it's entire technical staff and replacing them with ex-hamburger flippers (Hey! Think how much money we'll save! We're paying these idiots minimum wage!). Uh-huh. And minimum service was what you got. No one could tell you anything about anything. The rest, including Circuit City, was history. Personally I always thought the executives at C.C. who came up with this move were secretly working for Best Buy's Division of Covert Operations.:D:D:D
 
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