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In that regard, “a tailored response is the best way to minimize the risk of ‘escalation.’ ” The magazine left it to a then obscure Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger to spell out the implications. “[T]he security of the free world,” he opined, required that the United States have “military units capable of checking Soviet aggression at any scale of violence.” The editors of Life agreed wholeheartedly. And that meant the United States was going to need many more “foot soldiers than are now in uniform”—a view that comported precisely with the thinking of the new administration about to assume power in Washington.7

So the years of neglect that Taylor had called the army’s “Babylonian captivity” came to an end.8 No longer would the United States have to rely on SAC and the CIA as its sole instruments of power projection with the range of alternatives confined to all-out nuclear attack or covert “dirty tricks.” Conventional war fighting and unconventional counterinsurgency forces now formed part of the mix.

The intent, recalled Robert McNamara, the Ford Motor Company executive recruited to become Kennedy’s secretary of defense, was “to broaden the range of options by strengthening and modernizing the military’s ability to fight a non-nuclear war.”9 In the lexicon of the New Frontier, options ranked as a favored word. Flexible response was all about creating options.

Kennedy’s acolytes portrayed this as a dramatic departure from the past. In truth, it was anything but. Rather than overturning the national security paradigm of the 1950s, flexible response actually served to affirm it, even while incorporating into the Washington consensus those who had felt excluded.

During the Eisenhower era, there had never been enough money to go around. Flexible response promised more money more evenly distributed. Henceforth, every part of the national security establishment was going to have a part to play. In this sense, the administration’s real achievement was to eliminate the last remnants of internal resistance: Obstreperous army generals were now on board. Kennedy had renewed and enriched the U.S. global military presence, its power projection capabilities, and—as events quickly demonstrated—its penchant for intervention as well.

WHO’S IN CHARGE?

Largely concealed from the American public, but clearly evident within Washington, flexible response also raised key questions of control. Who exactly was to exercise the options that the administration’s defense reforms were making available? For Kennedy and his lieutenants the answer to that question was quite clear: They were intent on restoring to the White House the authority over national security issues that, in their view, had been severely compromised during the Eisenhower era. Reasserting presidential primacy necessarily implied bringing the CIA and SAC to heel.

In a sense, this effort had already begun. In December 1960, Eisenhower himself had taken a first step toward chipping away at SAC’s monopoly over nuclear war planning. The outgoing president ordered the Pentagon to draft a comprehensive new blueprint for nuclear war, a plan incorporating guidance issued from Washington, rather than simply reflecting SAC’s own preferences.10

In its first iteration, the resulting Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) was more symbolic than real. The struggle for control of the nation’s nuclear arsenal was only beginning, that struggle now pitting Secretary of Defense McNamara, an exceedingly smart man who, in his own words, saw “quantification as a language to add precision to reasoning,” against LeMay, who tended to go with his gut and knew that he had forgotten more about warfare than even the smartest civilian could learn, whatever the analytical tools applied. The McNamara who, at age forty-four, took office in January 1961 “had no patience with the myth that the Department of Defense could not be managed.”11 Dispelling that myth meant among other things showing Curtis LeMay who was boss.

McNamara’s arrival at the Pentagon marked the resumption of a relationship