Lt. Gen. Robert E. Pursley, a top aide to three secretaries of defense in the 1960s and early ’70s, who played a behind-the-scenes role in shaping policy as an unlikely critic of the Vietnam War — so much so that his telephones were tapped by the paranoid Nixon White House — died on July 24 at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 97.
His granddaughter Sarah Bowman confirmed his death.
General Pursley, an Air Force figure little known outside the Defense Department, was the senior military assistant, or top uniformed aide, to defense secretaries in Democratic and Republican administrations between 1966 and 1972.
His job was effectively to be chief of staff to the defense secretary, and he served under Robert S. McNamara and Clark M. Clifford in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and Melvin R. Laird during President Richard M. Nixon’s first term.
“He was valued for his policy advice,” Paul Ignatius, an assistant secretary of defense under President Johnson, said in an interview. “More than most, he had a reputation not only for integrity, but also he was just smart as hell.”
All three defense secretaries whom General Pursley served lost faith in the likelihood of America’s winning the Vietnam War, and they battled with presidents and White House hawks who were committed to military victory — whether to save face, to stand up to the Soviet Union in the Cold War or, as a dubious General Pursley put it, to “hang the coonskin on the wall.”
He was drawn into the policy disputes in 1967, when the cerebral Mr. McNamara, chief architect of America’s escalation in Vietnam, returned from a weekend at Amherst College, where he had fielded tough questions from students. He realized he didn’t know enough about the war’s origins and tasked then-Colonel Pursley, who recounted the episode in 1995 in a Pentagon oral history, with creating an encyclopedic history of the war.
The day-to-day job of compiling what became known as the Pentagon Papers — a classified history of the war showing years of government duplicity about how it began and how it was going — was delegated to Leslie H. Gelb, another Pentagon official. The history was leaked to The New York Times in 1971.
Mr. McNamara, who privately conceded that the war could not be won after the administration had sent half a million soldiers to the jungles of Vietnam, costing at least 16,000 American lives at the time, was forced out by President Johnson in 1967 after Johnson rejected the secretary’s advice to negotiate peace.
Mr. McNamara was replaced by Mr. Clifford, an insider’s insider who advised four presidents. After the Tet offensive of 1968 — a broad attack by North Vietnamese regulars and South Vietnamese guerrillas — Mr. Clifford, too, concluded that the war could not be won with arms.
Mr. Clifford asked General Pursley and Paul C. Warnke, an assistant defense secretary, to write an analysis of the war to shape his talking points in meetings with the president.
Their 20-page memo concluded that the North Vietnamese were willing to accept staggering losses far longer than the U.S. public would tolerate losing its own sons in combat. The memo contained the seeds of a policy that became known as Vietnamization — drawing down U.S. ground forces while turning over fighting to the South Vietnamese; it was eventually embraced by the Nixon administration.
In his 1991 memoir, “Counsel to the President,” Mr. Clifford referred repeatedly to the memo, describing General Pursley as “one of the most intelligent and broad-gauged military officers I have ever known.”
Battered by cratering approval over his handling of the war, Johnson decided not to seek re-election in 1968. Nixon, his successor, named Mr. Laird, a pro-war Republican congressman from Wisconsin, as defense secretary. Mr. Laird retained General Pursley, who was promoted to brigadier general, as his military assistant. He later earned his second star under Mr. Laird.
General Pursley accompanied Mr. Laird on his first visit to Vietnam, in March 1969. Like his predecessors, Mr. Laird also concluded that the war was unwinnable on the battlefield. U.S. combat troops should gradually withdraw, he believed, while the South Vietnamese army stepped up.
“During that visit we worked out the basic elements of what became the Nixon Administration’s Vietnamization Program, and Pursley wrote most it,” Mr. Laird later recalled, in nominating General Pursley in 2011 for an award from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., the general’s alma mater.
Mr. Laird clashed frequently with the Nixon White House, principally with the president’s national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, and Mr. Kissinger’s volatile military aide, Alexander M. Haig Jr. The defense secretary made clear his opposition to the White House’s decision to bomb North Vietnam as well as its covert bombing of Communist bases in Cambodia.
Moreover, the White House was at first “absolutely devastated” by Mr. Laird’s push for Vietnamization, General Pursley said in the Pentagon oral history.
“The decision had been made and was being implemented” by Mr. Laird, he added. “That created great consternation and very large problems between the Pentagon and the White House.”
One fallout from that adversarial relationship was that Mr. Pursley’s home and work phones were tapped on White House orders, after a leak to The Times in 1969 about the Cambodia bombing. General Pursley was the only Pentagon official among at least 17 people, including members of Mr. Kissinger’s staff, to be bugged.
There was never any evidence that he leaked to the press. Historians have concluded that his phone was most likely tapped because the White House wanted to spy on what the wayward Mr. Laird was up to.
General Pursley pointed the finger specifically at Mr. Haig as the one most likely to have ordered his bugging. “I think he saw a chance to give me a black mark,” he said in the oral history.
In the 2008 biography “With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace, and Politics,” by Dale Van Atta, Mr. Laird recalled that when General Pursley visited the White House in May 1972, General Haig pulled out a notebook “in which he said he had been collecting a list of grievances against Pursley since early in the Nixon administration.”
The notebook was the last straw for General Pursley. He announced his resignation.
Mr. Laird appointed him commander of the Fifth Air Force and U.S. forces in Japan. The job came with a promotion to three-star general. He retired in 1974.
Robert Edwin Pursley was born on Nov. 23, 1927, in Muncie, Ind., and was raised in nearby Farmland. His father, Wilber Pursley, was a carpenter and farmer, and his mother, Ina (Puckett) Pursley, was a schoolteacher.
He entered West Point in 1945, joined the Air Force on graduation in 1949 and flew 50 combat missions in a B-26 Invader during the Korean War.
In 1953, he married Phyllis Roberts, and the couple had five children. His wife died in 2021. In addition to his granddaughter Ms. Bowman, he is survived by four children, Mark Pursley, Elizabeth Rock, Kristin Bowman and Carol McGuire; 17 other grandchildren; and 33 great-grandchildren. A daughter, Anne Pitts, died in 2016.
The military sent General Pursley to Harvard Business School, where he earned an M.B.A. He was then hired by the Air Force Academy to teach economics. He went to the Pentagon in 1963, in its Systems Analysis department, the home of the so-called whiz kids, whom Mr. McNamara had recruited to use modern management practices to tame the sprawl of military spending and to guide war strategy.
After retiring from the military, General Pursley was on the board of USAA, the insurance company, and an executive at Logistics Management Institute, a defense consulting firm based in Northern Virginia.
Vietnamization, the policy that General Pursley helped articulate, was widely considered a failure. The South Vietnamese military was incapable of fighting a war on its own. At the same time that Mr. Kissinger was negotiating a U.S. withdrawal “with honor” with the North, he and Nixon widened and escalated the war.
The last U.S. troops pulled out in 1973 after more than 55,000 American fatalities, and Saigon fell to the communist North in 1975.
In the 1980s, Mr. Kissinger invited General Pursley to breakfast in New York, the general recalled in the Pentagon history. “At the conclusion of that breakfast,” he recounted, “Henry said to me: ‘You and Mel Laird were right about Southeast Asia. We were wrong.’”
It was a “private” admission, the general added. “I’m sure he would strongly deny it if it came to light.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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