I'm John Batcher with Tevi Troy, who's writing very carefully about the new book, McNamara at War,

from the Talban brothers, William and Philip.

Tevi now takes us right into the Johnson administration, which is an accident of the tragedy

of the assassination of the president.

And what is significant here is that the two men have nothing in

common, Kennedy and Johnson. And yet McNamara worked for both. I don't know why he did that.

Do you, Tebby, does it make sense now? Yeah, I'd say there are two waves. The first wave is

immediately after the tragic assassination, Lyndon Johnson asks all of the Kennedy people to stay on. Even people who are

very closely associated with Kennedy people like Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger, he asked

them to stay on initially. And they do. But after a few months, they realized that it is not

the Kennedy administration. They're not going to have the same roles. And they kind of melt away. Now, McNamara did not have that kind of longstanding association with Kennedy.

So he wasn't really a Kennedy person per se, although he did become very close to Jackie,

and he became very close to Bobby Kennedy. But he wasn't a Kennedy person before the administration

started.

And so he stays initially on out of loyalty to this country because Johnson asked him to stay.

But then he doesn't feel like he needs to melt away with the rest of the Kennedy people.

He's also very effective.

Johnson comes to rely on him. There's a great story in the book that when he was asked why McNamara stepped up so much in the Kennedy

administration, it was said because Dean Rusk, who was the Secretary of State, when he was

asked when he was asked a question by Kennedy, he would, him and hain, it wouldn't really have an

answer, and McNamara would come in and have a definitive answer. And then Rusk put it out that

he didn't like to give his thoughts in front of all the other people. And then someone else said,

...