Robert Pursley, 97, Dies; Pentagon Aide Turned Critical of Vietnam War

New York Times

5 days ago

Lt. Gen. Robert E. Pursley, a top aide to three secretaries of defense in the 1960s and early '70s, who played a behind-the-scenes role in shaping policy as an unlikely critic of the Vietnam War — so much so that his telephones were tapped by the paranoid Nixon White House — died on July 24 at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 97.
His granddaughter Sarah Bowman confirmed his death.
General Pursley, an Air Force figure little known outside the Defense Department, was the senior military assistant, or top uniformed aide, to defense secretaries in Democratic and Republican administrations between 1966 and 1972.
His job was effectively to be chief of staff to the defense secretary, and he served under Robert S. McNamara and Clark M. Clifford in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and Melvin R. Laird during President Richard M. Nixon's first term.
'He was valued for his policy advice,' Paul Ignatius, an assistant secretary of defense under President Johnson, said in an interview. 'More than most, he had a reputation not only for integrity, but also he was just smart as hell.'
All three defense secretaries whom General Pursley served lost faith in the likelihood of America's winning the Vietnam War, and they battled with presidents and White House hawks who were committed to military victory — whether to save face, to stand up to the Soviet Union in the Cold War or, as a dubious General Pursley put it, to 'hang the coonskin on the wall.'
He was drawn into the policy disputes in 1967, when the cerebral Mr. McNamara, chief architect of America's escalation in Vietnam, returned from a weekend at Amherst College, where he had fielded tough questions from students. He realized he didn't know enough about the war's origins and tasked then-Colonel Pursley, who recounted the episode in 1995 in a Pentagon oral history, with creating an encyclopedic history of the war.
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