On this day in 1966, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara sent a top-secret memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson expressing his disillusionment with the war effort in Vietnam. The document came to light with the publication of the Pentagon Papers by several newspapers in 1971.

McNamara (1916-2009) told Johnson that he saw “no reasonable way to bring the war to an end soon.” He viewed the U.S.-led pacification drive, which held a high priority in the Johnson administration, as “a bad disappointment.” And he cited widespread agreement within the intelligence community that the bombing of North Vietnam, code-named Operation Rolling Thunder, had neither “significantly affected infiltration [of South Vietnam nor] cracked the morale of Hanoi.”

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McNamara foresaw a bleak future for the struggle against the communists, which had generated a rising tide of domestic anti-war protests. As he put it: “The prognosis is bad that the war can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion within the next two years. The large-unit operations probably will not do it; negotiations probably will not do it.”

The solution, McNamara advised, “lies in girding for a longer war and in taking actions [that] will in 12 to 18 months give clear evidence that the continuing costs and risks to the American people are acceptably limited, that the formula for success has been found and that the end of the war is merely a matter of time.”

In a subsequent memo, McNamara sent to Johnson in early November 1967, he recommended U.S. troop levels be frozen, the bombing of North Vietnam be halted and Washington hand over ground fighting operations to the South Vietnamese army. Johnson never responded. On Nov. 29, he announced that McNamara would be leaving the Pentagon to become president of the World Bank. He was replaced by Clark Clifford, a member of LBJ’s inner circle.

When he took office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy had named McNamara, a Republican, as defense secretary.

Initially, McNamara favored deepening the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. On visits to South Vietnam in 1962, 1964 and 1966, he repeatedly voiced optimism that the National Liberation Front and its North Vietnamese allies would soon abandon their attempt to overthrow the American-backed Saigon regime.

In a 1995 memoir, McNamara reviewed the anticommunist climate during his tenure as defense secretary, the alleged false assumptions that animated U.S. foreign policy, and military mistakes that led to the Vietnam debacle. In voluntarily confessing his own misjudgments, McNamara did not evade criticism.

“Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” The New York Times said in an editorial. “Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.”

SOURCE: “THE PENTAGON PAPERS” (1971)