McNamara’s appreciation of the military problems in Vietnam was intimately connected to economic developments in Washington. A continued balance of payments deficit and an unsettled domestic economic picture heightened the administration’s sense of vulnerability. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) exerted new pressure on the Military Assistance Program (MAP) that funded operations in Vietnam. With Dillon, McNamara worked on a Cabinet Committee on the Balance of Payments that recommended significant troop redeployments around the world. The JCS and State Department stymied their efforts. In this context, McNamara met with the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was especially critical of the growing commitment in Vietnam. McNamara chose a counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam because it was cheaper as it relied on local forces. As Galbraith and others recommended, McNamara moved to downgrade the relative importance of South Vietnam to US security and to emphasize that the conflict was an internal insurgency. He used the pressures on the MAP to accelerate the phaseout of the US presence in South Vietnam.

In October 1963, McNamara went to Vietnam with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Maxwell Taylor. On his return, the administration convened a series of NSC meetings that culminated in a press release that the United States would withdraw by 1965. The end point for the withdrawal plans and for the announcement were not victory in the traditional sense but instead something more ambiguous: “until the insurgency has been suppressed or that national security forces of the Government of South Viet-Nam are capable of suppressing it.” Over the last few months and especially in October, McNamara was concerned with what he found in Vietnam where existing programs were deficient or lagging. Withdrawal was not premised on success but instead on a predetermined training program that fit with McNamara’s priorities at the OSD. He insisted on a public announcement as a bureaucratic move aimed at neutralizing those who might interrupt the CPSVN. A separate announcement that 1,000 troops would be withdrawn by December 1963 was aimed at quieting SFRC criticism that the United States was bogged down in Vietnam.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was inclined to favor “tougher” military responses that promised victory. He understood the intricacies of the policy that he had inherited but changed it. He promoted Rusk to the detriment of other advisors who had supported a counterinsurgency program and who left, including Hilsman, Michael Forrestal and Ted Sorensen. McNamara initially resisted expanding the commitment in Vietnam. In a presidential election year, he was sent on two trips to South Vietnam, in March and May, that were designed to placate possible critics of Johnson’s policies, including the JCS, Ambassador Lodge, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) and the SFRC. Johnson pressed his Secretary to give the Chiefs “something” militarily. In response, McNamara looked for “disavowable actions” and eventually moved to support a bombing program as a substitute for deploying ground troops.