February 23, 2007
Greatness at the Pentagon? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:55 AM EST I am not conversant enough with the various secretaries of defense (there have been 22 of them in the 60 years since the position was created in 1947) to have an informed opinion on which ones deserve to be labeled as great. It is somewhat amazing that anyone can run so vast an enterprise as the Pentagon, especially considering the huge permanent bureaucracy there, highly skilled at resisting changes they don’t like, and the constant interference of congressmen and senators, determinedly pushing whatever is good for their states and districts, regardless of the military’s needs. This website has a good rundown on each of them and so, perhaps, would be a place to start. Some of them had very short tenures. General Marshall served only slightly less than a year in the post and Elliot Richardson only four months. But I would like to say a good word for Charles E. Wilson, Eisenhower’s first secretary of defense, from 1953 to 1957, who is today chiefly remembered for a remark he never made, “What is good for General Motors is good for the United States.” I wrote about him and the origin of the misquotation in American Heritage in 1995, and that article can be found here. The Pentagon budget at the beginning of his tenure was 60 percent of the federal budget and equal to one eighth of GDP (today it is less than 20 percent of the budget and well under one twentieth of GDP). Wilson and Eisenhower were able to cut that very significantly, and using his considerable skills developed in running the world’s largest corporation, Wilson made the Pentagon a more efficient place. He deserves to be remembered for more than words that were put into his mouth by political opponents.
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