(edited transcript)
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Hey everyone, welcome back. I’m Julian Zelizer of The Long View, and this is Then and Now.
JONATHAN ALTER:
And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
So, Jon, I was watching Secretary Hegseth’s testimony about the budget request for Iran, which raised a lot of questions about how much this will cost. It also raised questions about whether the Pentagon is being forthcoming — not only about the costs, but about how many people have been injured and about press access altogether.
Of course, I thought back to Vietnam. In 1966 and 1967, we now know that Secretary Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson were hiding information from Congress and the public, both about what they knew the war would cost as they made budget requests and about the military challenges the operation would pose, which they were privately well aware of.
I was thinking about how to put these two moments together and how that history might inform our thinking about what’s going on today.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Well, first of all, if you compare McNamara to Hegseth, McNamara has about 300 IQ points on Hegseth, and he’s not a complete turkey like Hegseth.
McNamara was one of what they called “the best and the brightest.” During the Vietnam War, before he realized it was a problem and left government in 1967, he helped lead JFK and LBJ into the war. Part of the way he did that was by lying—not just publicly, but privately—to people at OMB about how much it would cost.
I looked up the figures. Defense spending between 1964, when the escalation really began, and 1968 increased by 57 percent and accounted for 10 percent of GDP, which is much higher than today.
These were supposedly the smartest people in the country—the “Whiz Kids”—yet they led the United States step by step into the Vietnam War.
With Iran, things have happened on a much more accelerated timetable, but we’ve seen the same kind of dramatic underestimation of what this war was going to cost. So Hegseth has had to go back to Congress and admit that he needs tens of billions of dollars more. I think the original estimate was that it would cost under $20 billion, and now it’s expected to exceed $100 billion. That’s a big change.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Some useful history — and some useful lessons — to think about today as we hear what the administration is saying about where this is headed.
Anyway, that’s Then and Now. Jon, thanks for talking.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Thanks a lot, Julian.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
All right. See you next week. Bye-bye.
