What if Nixon Had Brought Back McNamara as Defense Secretary?
A group of Internet satirists that occasionally gives the Bush Administration advice about how to improve its image is expected to call for the return of Donald Rumsfeld to his former job as secretary of defense.
“The new secretary is so boring, I can’t even remember his name. It’s as if the Department of Defense has been sucked into a black hole, never to be heard from again,” said Blinkie Winterbun, executive director of the National Association of Internet Fake Journalists.
“When I read a couple of days ago that the new secretary, what’s his name, said that Guantanamo should be closed, I yelled out, ‘Right on, Dude!’ I was overjoyed to see such a brilliant piece of satire coming from a high government official,” Winterbun said. “Then I was horrified to realize he was in earnest. The new defense secretary really does want to close Guantanamo.”
Winterbun’s response was to convene the NAIFJ’s executive committee, which has advised the Bush Administration on such matters as finding humor in the Katrina recovery effort, an appropriate nickname for Gen.David H. Patraeus, efficiently satirizing Nancy Pelosi and how best to ridicule John Kerry without being too nasty and vituperative.
After two days of deliberations behind closed doors — with only occasional breaks to play darts — the committee concluded the best course for the Bush Administration would be to return Rumsfeld to his old job.
“The committee feels that no defense secretary has been able to inspire the American people and at the same time put a human face on the Department of Defense as well as Don Rumsfeld,” Winterbun said. “His ability to summarize a situation in a pithy and humorous but also sensitive and caring way became legend. Clearly, the nation badly needs more of this kind of leadership, particularly as we continue to tiptoe to an exit from the Iraq War.”
As part of its deliberations, the NAIFJ committee consulted with Gerald Strangleton, the renowned Vietnam War historian who specializes in the politics of the Johnson and Nixon administrations regarding that unpopular war. He reminded them of Johnson’s blunder of removing Robert McNamara as secretary of defense and Nixon’s misstep after he became president of not bringing McNamara back to head the Department of Defense.
“The committee’s deliberations on bringing back Rumsfeld were greatly swayed by the professor’s persuasive argument that the outcome of the Vietnam War would have been very different if McNamara had been secretary of defense under Nixon,” Winterbun said.