, October 29, 1962: Roswell Gilpatric at second from President Kennedy's left Gilpatric joined the new Kennedy administration in 1961 as part of the wave of Kennedy appointments. His appointment was unusual: he was one of the few Pentagon leaders handpicked by the new president. Fearing that the new
Secretary of Defense,
Robert S. McNamara, was inexperienced in Washington's ways, Kennedy chose Gilpatric to add experience to his Defense team. McNamara was known as a "whiz kid", a Midwestern industrial production
wunderkind. But Kennedy sensed that McNamara would need a strong lieutenant who was savvy in the ways of Washington. Kennedy chose Gilpatric as the Pentagon's number two, passing over
Paul Nitze, Gilpatric's old classmate from
Hotchkiss, who had wanted the job. It was a propitious appointment: within a few months, the dashing Eastern lawyer and his Midwestern boss were finishing each other's sentences. McNamara frequently started out with the expression: "Ros and I...." As the Cuban crisis began to unfold, Gilpatric was appointed to the
EXCOMM team, the top-level working group appointed by Kennedy to assess the Soviet missile threat in Cuba. At one point during the tense standoff of the
Cuban Missile Crisis,
McGeorge Bundy was arguing for United States bombing of Cuba to eliminate the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack. McNamara countered, arguing that there should be no bombing because the Soviet Russian response was unpredictable. It was at this critical moment that Gilpatric stepped in to settle the argument. "Essentially, Mr. President," Gilpatric was recorded telling Kennedy, "this is a choice between limited action and unlimited action, and most of us think it is better to start with limited action." It was Gilpatric's intervention that changed the direction of the discussion, according to Harvard professor and former
Department of Defense official
Graham T. Allison, who authored a book,
Essence of Decision, about the crisis. Proposing the blockade was McNamara and Gilpatric's solution to providing President Kennedy with a strong response – but short of the airstrike that McGeorge Bundy and others were pushing. By crafting their solution, and with the normally reticent Gilpatric speaking up forcefully for it, the two managed to change the thrust of policy. The President followed Gilpatric and McNamara's recommendation. Gilpatric was not always so dovish. He often took a hard line against the
Communist threat, and was not above using force in other matters of international security. In the Eisenhower administration, Gilpatric headed a secret task force charged with "preventing Communist domination of Vietnam." Gilpatric argued forcefully for U.S. commitment to halt the Communist threat in
South Vietnam. In his position with the Kennedy administration, Gilpatric later signed off on the overthrow of the
Diem government. Gilpatric was also a member of a special task force which hatched
"Operation Mongoose", a dirty tricks campaign aimed at destabilizing the government of
Fidel Castro in
Cuba. At the same time, Gilpatric showed that he could be intellectually flexible on occasion. When it came to the admission of
China into the
United Nations, for instance, Gilpatric argued forcefully in a letter to
The New York Times, written during his Eisenhower years, that the United States should stop trying to block the Communist country's admission into the international governing body. "By no longer trying to block Communist China's admission to the United Nations the United States might be able to bring about a reduction in tensions in southeast Asia that would lessen the chances of further Communist 'nibbling' or 'brush-fire' type of aggression." Gilpatric did not always face an easy task while acting as go-between for the Pentagon generals and the White House. For example, Kennedy developed such an intense dislike of General
Curtis Lemay that every time his name came up, Kennedy went ballistic. "I mean he just would be frantic at the end of a session with LeMay", Gilpatric recalled, "because, you know, LeMay couldn't listen or wouldn't take in, and he would make what Kennedy considered ... outrageous proposals that bore no relation to the state of affairs in the 1960s. And the President never saw him unless at some ceremonial affair, or where he felt he had to make a record of having listened to LeMay, as he did on the whole question of an air strike against Cuba. And he had to sit there. I saw the President right afterwards. He was just choleric." It was Gilpatric's calm demeanor and good judgment, wrote
Robert F. Kennedy, that led his brother the President to rely on Gilpatric, especially in times of crisis. When McNamara met the Brooklyn-born lawyer at Kennedy's suggestion, according to historian
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., he found Gilpatric "easy, resourceful and intelligent, and the partnership was immediately sealed." Gilpatric made himself an "indispensable" figure in the Kennedy administration, wrote longtime JFK aide
Ted Sorensen. ==Alleged lover of Jackie Kennedy==