"A RACE TOWARD REASONABLENESS

THE ESSENCE OF SECURITY by Robert S. McNamara. 176 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

Everyone admires efficiency, but no one can readily tolerate an efficient man. He is, after all, a rebuke to others. As a result, most efficient men diplomatically try to appear less efficient than they are. Not Robert McNamara. The ablest of the nation's Secretaries of Defense refused to play "Lovable Bob" for Congressmen, some of whom did not forgive him. Now he is running something of the same risk with his reading public. The Essence of Security is not the gossipy memoir or the in-fighter's recollection that many readers might prefer. Rather it is a businesslike assembly of "policy statements," a kind of memo to the American people, culled from recent reports and speeches. McNamara is regrettably reticent on Viet Nam. But the book reveals not only a highly humane character behind the supposedly cold surface but a deep and liberal concern about excessive nuclear armaments and a too militaristic di rection of U.S. policy.

Still, McNamara cannot suppress the virtue or vice of his efficiency altogether. He is too coldly crisp when he ticks off his punch-card proofs--one, two, three--that the U.S. possesses "assured-destruction forces." He seems most himself when speaking of the Department of Defense as the "greatest single management complex in history." Nothing gives him more evident satisfaction than having pruned logistics expenses by $14 billion in five years through his "planning-programming-budgeting system." In the end, his standard is efficiency, and his integrity lies in remaining loyal to it.

Mexican Standoff. And yet, what too many of his critics have failed to see is that this paragon late of the Pentagon is far from being narrow or insensitive. He can stress the excellent record of the Defense Department on open housing. He can enlarge his concept of security to include economic as well as military values. He knows that "solid friends and implacable enemies are no longer so easy to label"--that tags like "free world," "Communism," and "Iron Curtain" are becoming "increasingly inadequate." He steadily argues that there can be no true security for the world as long as such problems as poverty, racism and illiteracy remain unsolved or just half solved.

He realizes that the arms race has approached its outward limits. "A nation can reach the point at which it does not buy more security for itself simply by buying more military hardware," he cautions, "and we are at that point." The U.S. and the Soviets, he suggests, have reached a Mexican standoff: "It is futile for each of us to spend $4 billion, $40 billion or $400 billion--and at the end of all the spending ... to be relatively at the same point of balance on the security scale that we are now . . . What the world requires is not a new race toward armament, but a new race toward reasonableness."

If the U.S. were to respond to the Soviet anti-ballistic-missile system with a massive ABM system of its own, it would fall again into the "action-reaction phenomenon," he contends. The Johnson Administration obviously agrees; the Pentagon now plans to build only the "thin" anti-Chinese defense ABM screen that McNamara proposed (TIME, July 5). He adds: "The blunt fact remains that if we had had more accurate in formation [in 1961] about planned Soviet strategic forces, we simply would not have needed to build as large a nuclear arsenal as we have today."

Slightly Shaken. This is not the most engaging book that could have been written by McNamara, who can be a very engaging man. Yet in its very self-effacement--in its responsibility toward issues rather than personalities--the book does give a fair measure of the man. He emerges like a slightly shaken chairman of the board who considers it his duty to share his sense of crisis with the stockholders. "We in government have the obligation to explain our decisions," McNamara concludes, "for we know the consequences if we fail."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.