"Yes, Mr. President!"; Wielding new and wide-ranging executive-branch powers, George W. Bush has underlined the role of an exclusive club: the Cabinet members, West Wing staffers, and other official and unofficial advisers who help each president write the history of their day.

Publication: Vanity Fair

Publication Date: 01-APR-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Byline: Todd Brewster

Robert S. McNamara sits forward in his chair and wags a finger at me. "I will tell you what leadership is," he says, his crisp diction reminiscent of the press conferences he held during the Vietnam War. "It's Jack Kennedy refusing to risk nuclear war when nearly everyone in the room is telling him to."

McNamara, now 90, is referring to an episode during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. "I don't remember the exact time of the meeting," says the defense secretary for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, "[but] my recollection is that at least some of the Russian missiles were already in Cuba and ... more were on the way. We knew they would be there by Monday. And everyone, it seemed-the Joint Chiefs, [Truman-administration eminence] Dean Acheson, [key military adviser] Maxwell Taylor-was telling Kennedy to order a strike now, to take out the missiles ... even if it did have the potential to trigger an all-out nuclear conflict. Kennedy listened to the overwhelming advice of his so-called experts"-McNamara pauses, leaning back to add a touch of drama-"and then he ordered the blockade instead."

Like many of the men in Kennedy's Cabinet, McNamara-named head of the Ford Motor Company just five weeks before the president-elect persuaded him to run the Pentagon-agreed to put his life on hold, sacrifice his personal wealth, and forgo corporate perks to serve his president and his nation, and all for a humbling $25,000 a year. In McNamara's case, loyalty came at an even steeper price. In time, he would be reviled as a warmonger, watch his effigy burned on college campuses, and withstand a level of stress that he now acknowledges may have led to his first wife's early death. You'd think that he would look back at his time in office and regard it as a dark episode colored only by private remorse and national tragedy. But, oh, no. "The best years of our life," he said of his Kennedy White House tenure, in Errol Morris's compelling 2003 documentary, The Fog of...

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