Aug. 17, 1964 | Robert McNamara Q&A on National Defense

Aug. 17, 1964 - The Johnson Administration’s top officials dealing with international and security policy fired a broadside today at the views of Senator Barry Goldwater and the 1964 Republican platform.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, U.N. Delegate Adlai Stevenson, and Disarmament Director William C. Foster joined in the attack. They spoke at the opening of hearings on the Democratic platform.
The strongest words were McNamara’s. Without naming the Republican candidate, he coldly rejected Goldwater’s charges that defense planning was inadequate.
“Let me assure you,” McNamara said, “that our strategic forces are and will remain in the 1960s and the ‘70s sufficient to ensure the destruction of both the Soviet Union and Communist China under the worst imaginable circumstances accompanying the outbreak of war.
“There should be no doubt about this in the mind of any American. There is none in the minds of our enemies.”
McNamara called on the Democrats to make their “first pledge” in the platform a reaffirmation of the President’s sole authority over nuclear weapons. Goldwater’s forces rejected such a proposed plank at San Francisco last month.
In less than an hour of full-scale nuclear war, McNamara said, almost 100 million Americans would be killed. He said he considered his personal duty to assure communications for Presidential command over nuclear weapons “my most solemn obligation as Secretary of Defense.”
“The awesome responsibility to unleash such force,” McNamara went on, “can rest only on the highest elected official in this country — the President of the United States.”

Support this project at patreon.com/realtime1960s