BRAINS BEHIND THE MUSCLE

Backing up Secretary McNamara in the Defense Department are some of the sharpest minds in Washington. The top three:

Roswell L. Gilpatric, 54. Deputy Secretary of Defense, is one of the few Pentagon leaders hand-picked by President Kennedy, who felt that McNamara, inexperienced in Washington ways, would need someone with previous Pentagon wound stripes to help him through the interservice booby traps. The two men--the driving Midwestern production man and the polished Eastern intellectual--have hit it off so well that McNamara now characteristically begins an opinion with the phrase, "Ros and I." Ros Gilpatric made Phi Beta Kappa at Yale (1928), got his law degree there (1931 ) and in time became a leading corporation lawyer, as a partner of Wall Street's Cravath, Swaine & Moore. During World War II, he ironed out production-contract problems. In 1951 he plunged into the Pentagon as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, soon was promoted to Under Secretary, and began warning about Russian jet progress and the need for service unity. After leaving the Pentagon in 1953, Gilpatric kept close tabs on the military, served as a member of the Rockefeller Panel that called for an increase in U.S. defenses. While on the panel. Gilpatric became so impressed by Nelson Rockefeller that in the 1958 New York gubernatorial campaign he led the Democrats for Rockefeller. Last year Gilpatric was a prime contributor to the Symington report urging service integration. A sailor and tennis player. Gilpatric likes to get away weekends with his wife to a farm on Maryland's eastern shore. But there is a landing strip handy and the Pentagon and all its problems are just 20 minutes away.

Paul H. Nitze, 54. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, has the tough job of fulfilling one of Kennedy's major aims: coordinating State and Defense policies so that U.S. diplomacy and military power go hand in hand. Nitze (rhymes with it's-a.) can tackle a ski trail at Aspen, discuss theology with a Jesuit, and is handsome enough to divert attention from Kennedy himself at public gatherings. After graduating cum laude from Harvard. Nitze joined Wall Street's Dillon, Read & Co., Inc., where he began working on his first million and met James Forrestal, later to become the first Defense Secretary. In 1932 Nitze married Phyllis Pratt, granddaughter of a founder of Standard Oil. After wartime service as an economist, Nitze began a brilliant career in State. In 1948 he was prime mover of the group that took the general ideas of Secretary George Marshall and whipped them into the practical program that became the Marshall Plan. In 1950, as director of State's Policy Planning Staff in the Dean Acheson regime, he was calling for a buildup of U.S. military strength months before war came in Korea. During the Eisenhower Administration. Nitze stayed on in Washington as president of the Foreign Service Educational Foundation and as an outspoken critic of the Eisenhower-Dulles doctrine of massive retaliation, fed ideas on limited warfare to leading Democrats and headed Kennedy's pre-election committee on defense.

Charles J. Hitch, 50, comptroller, is being studied warily by most of the salty admirals and brass-hatted generals in the Pentagon. A mild-mannered, scholarly economist, Charlie Hitch has the self-confidence to insist that the comptroller should actively help shape military decisions. Hitch's thesis: only by using the economist's complex tools of analysis to judge the cost and efficiency of each alternative course can military commanders choose the best solution. Son of the head of Kemper Military School in Boonville, Mo.. Hitch graduated from the University of Arizona in 1931. spent a year at Harvard and then, like many another New Frontiersman, became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. During World War II, Hitch worked with the OSS in England. In 1948 he became head economist of California's Air Force-sponsored Rand Corporation, which ponders the darkest problems of defense. There Hitch crammed his theories into a book published last year called The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age (Harvard University Press. $9.50), a brain-numbing tome filled with such concepts of his trade as isoquants and exchange curves.*

When he was looking for a comptroller, McNamara was quickly impressed by the high praise high officials gave Charlie Hitch, and hired him with the comment: "Your dossier is the fullest." As proof of his faith in the economist, McNamara gave Hitch the job of heading up a task force on strategic warfare.

* One Hitchian term: "minimax," i.e., how to minimize the maximum the enemy can do.

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