The McNamara I Knew

I first met Robert S. McNamara, the brilliant, driven and deeply divisive former secretary of defense, in the autumn of 1996. McNamara, who died this week at the age of ninety-three and will forever be remembered as one of the principal architects of the Vietnam War, sought me out because of an important relationship we shared.

"I know who you are," he intoned gravely, jabbing an index finger at me as we spoke on the fringes of a C-Span foreign policy conference. "And I know about the book you were working on." He paused, evaluating me carefully. "The project you were involved in is still vitally important," he said, before rattling off a series of bullet points to support his thesis. It was pure and quintessential McNamara: intense, direct, impassioned, and intimidating. It was the way he engaged the world. And it was the way he fought his demons -- most significantly his unresolved regret and self-recrimination for the disaster of Vietnam.

When we first met, McNamara knew that I had been collaborating on a study of the Vietnam war with his dear friend and colleague, McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Bundy had been struggling with a Vietnam memoir and retrospective analysis of presidential decision-making, an agonizing effort cut short by a sudden, fatal heart attack in September of that year. The book was Bundy's final testament to what the historian Michael Beschloss later called "his cardinal moment in history." And it was an enterprise inspired by McNamara himself, who published his own memoir, In Retrospect, just the year before.

In his book, McNamara repudiated the decision to Americanize the war in Vietnam, which he retrospectively concluded was "wrong, terribly wrong." Despite the incendiary reaction -- The New York Times excoriated McNamara for allowing U.S. troops "to die at the rate of hundreds per week in a war he knew to be futile" -- Bundy nonetheless was determined to emulate his friend's act of public self-criticism. In fact, Bundy credited his choice to write about Vietnam largely to McNamara's example. "His book, In Retrospect, is a remarkably straightforward account," Bundy wrote, "and I think its value for the long run will far outweigh its obvious cost in short-term anger from readers with their own strong feelings about Vietnam."

What the former national security adviser did not acknowledge but must have known, as I later wrote, was that like his friend McNamara, "Bundy would pay a price in public opprobrium for finally recanting his belief in a ruinous war he had in large part designed and had passionately promoted, but had not renounced for three decades." Yet the power of McNamara's example was so great that Bundy forged ahead, despite the anger he knew it would trigger and the deep reservations of some in his family, particularly his wife, Mary, who "thinks a book about Vietnam is a very bad idea," Bundy told me.

In the years that followed this first encounter I had the opportunity to discuss with McNamara the various strategic and political questions posed by the debacle of Vietnam. In 1997 I was invited to travel with a delegation led by McNamara that went to Hanoi for a remarkable week of unprecedented meetings between the surviving members of the Vietnamese politburo and leading generals and their contemporaries from the United States. That conference, conceived and managed by the fabulous Brown University scholars Jim Blight and Janet Lang, put McNamara at the side of Hanoi's top leadership, the very adversaries he had tried to destroy three decades earlier.

While critical historical issues were discussed and delineated in the course of the week, my sense was that for McNamara the greatest revelation was psychological in nature. For the very first time he saw the war through the eyes of his Vietnamese opponents, realizing far too late that the core American strategy of reprisal bombing, attrition, and coercive force designed to "break the will of the enemy" was utterly doomed to failure. The nationalistic fervor of the Hanoi leadership was still, three decades later, palpable and dramatic. Their resilience and unshakable resolve dictated that capitulation at the negotiating table -- the stated objective of U.S. strategy -- was illusory and likely impossible. Here, finally, in the comfortably air-conditioned but sealed conference rooms of the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, Robert McNamara finally met the enemy and understood the depth of their tenacity, which would never relent to American bombs and combat brigades, no matter how heavy their losses proved to be.

It was around another conference table a year later that I found myself challenging McNamara on the war and how it had been conducted -- not on the battlefield but in Washington. We were participants at another gathering of scholars and former officials assembled by Blight, Lang, and their colleagues to explore the lessons of Vietnam. McNamara, of course, projected a formidable shadow over that dialogue. At one point he lamented the failure of senior administration officials to anticipate the implausibility of an American victory against Hanoi and the Vietcong or to stimulate a vigorous internal debate on these questions -- an assertion that several of us knew to be inaccurate. We all knew that George Ball, the undersecretary of state, had written an eerily prescient sixty-four-page memo in the autumn of 1964, sketching just such a disastrous outcome, a memo that Ball debated with McNamara, Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk on November 7 of that year, just days after Lyndon Johnson had won a landslide presidential election. But who among us would challenge McNamara on the facts?

To my left was one of the premier journalists to ever write about Vietnam. To my right a British historian and strategist of enormous stature. Neither was inclined to speak up. Far younger, less wise, and fortified with more temerity than my senior colleagues, I raised my hand. McNamara called on me. "What about George Ball and his autumn '64 memo?" I asked. Ball's memo was precisely the kind of contrary thesis and analysis that McNamara said had not existed -- and we knew the precise day that McNamara had dismissed it out of hand, infuriating Ball, who described the encounter in detail in his memoirs. I do not recall the exact response that followed from the former secretary of defense. But I will never forget McNamara's ferocity. He began to pound the table again and again, his frustration rising as he disputed my argument with his customary bullet-point presentation: One! Two! Three! Four! I was not persuaded by McNamara. But I was certainly cowed. During the coffee break McNamara sought me out on the terrace overlooking the grounds. I was literally cornered. And he started all over. "George Ball!" he exclaimed. And then again with the bullet points: One! Two! Three! Four!

In his final years, despite a visceral resistance to the notion of collaborating on a documentary about his life, McNamara nonetheless accepted the counsel of his colleagues Blight and Lang and took a leap of faith to work with the filmmaker Errol Morris on the groundbreaking documentary The Fog of War. It's hard to imagine any member of the Bush administration agreeing to sit for a similar set of probing questions about the Iraq war and answering them so forthrightly.

As the nation and the world reflects on McNamara's passing and his legacy, there will be legitimate fury about his conduct of the war. But I hope there will also be a recognition of his unique example. Never before has an American political figure so passionately evaluated his own failings or so determinedly sought to understand the lessons of a tragic war -- lessons that continues to illuminate not just the past but the future as well.

Comments

[Eoin45]

After watching The Fog of War I came away convinced that McNamara still did not grasp the magnitude of his of his folly or come to grips with his culpability.

[Squaker]

What a load of nonsense
He got caught red-handed (the pentagon papers) being guilty of war crimes
And he tried to defend himself in the press

He didn't actually renounce many of his actions as far as I could ever tell

[StephenKMack]

2of 2
That Mr. McNamara was suffering from a continuing personal,ethical crisis over Vietnam is the most plausible explanation for his demonstrable, combative defensiveness. That Mr. McNamara appeared at events, that were bound to elicit criticisms of his policies as secretary of defense is no demonstration of his latent integrity, but instructive of the corrosive,­destructiv­e character of American exceptionalism wedded to an equal personal hubris.

[StephenKMack]

1 of 2
Of what are we to make of Mr. Goldstein's convoluted apologia for Robert McNamara? As argued by Mr. Goldstein, Mr. McNamara seems utterly unrepentant,indeed, even eager to defend,rationalize, his position on Vietnam. A quote, at length, from The Color of Truth by Kai Bird, page 345 offers some insights:
“Ben Bradlee also knew about McNamara's private agony over the war. A few months earlier Bradlee had jumped from Newsweek to become deputy managing editor of the Washington Post, and on the last day of 1965 he went to a New Year's Eve party with his wife, Toni. “ We witnessed this extraordinary thing” he recalled, “McNamara sitting on a couch with Toni, and he was quite obviously upset. Tears were gushing down his cheeks. He was doing most of the talking. Toni was saying very little.” They were talking about the war, a war that Toni was against. The spectacle of the secretary of defense shedding tears was witnessed several times in Washington society over the next two years. Everyone knew Bob McNamara was dreadfully unhappy with the way the war was going. But for the television cameras he told a different story”

[ChristMD]

None of this changes the fact that my brother died in that stupid war. McNamara was a war criminal. May he burn eternally.

[northstar11]

"""""But I will never forget McNamara's ferocity. He began to pound the table again and again, his frustration rising as he disputed my argument with his customary bullet-point presentation: One! Two! Three! Four! I was not persuaded by McNamara. But I was certainly cowed. During the coffee break McNamara sought me out on the terrace overlooking the grounds. I was literally cornered. And he started all over. "George Ball!" he exclaimed. And then again with the bullet points: One! Two! Three! Four!""""

remarkably similar to rumsfeld

Secretary of Defense position should require psychological testing

[northstar11]

he has been described as brilliant and has spent his life in self-flagelation over his role in the viet nam war so others may learn

he was not brilliant-----it does not take a genius to fight a war---see george bush

he was no instructor------ rumsfeld cheney bush ----and the neocon war mongers learned nothing
most americans learned nothing

[NicoloM]

I cannot find one instance of McNamara's commitment to an open society. In a government of the people, secrets are the enemy of the people. Think now of what he didn't feel the public had the right to know until 1995.
He may have felt sorry for how his certainty produced such a disaster, but he wouldn't answer the question about why he didn't speak up once out of office. Of the two, the latter is a more significant sin.
His silence meant thousand more died, and many hundreds of thousands more live in denial about what happened.
That fact is why his attempts fall short. But as you said: "But who among us would challenge McNamara on the facts?"

[robbep]

This man is responsible for the death of thousands of people and all he can say is that he was wrong. People who send other peoples kids off to die in war shld be required to have a loved one of their own sent to war as well.

[CactusTom]

Unfortunately, as we have once again seen , we humans learn nothing from history. Mostly because leaders like Bush and Cheney, with McNamara's example living right under their nose, have no interest in past lessons. They know better. Arrogance and ignorance are the real killers of mankind.

[celticjag]

And just as Obama is pursuing his new and improved wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan!

[eea123]

The home of the real source of 9-11, you might add celtjag. Neglected for the past 7 years for "the war of choice" in Iraq.

[Eoin45]

Bull. Finishing what your guy failed at.

[GuyRC]

new and improved? if it is improved it can't be new can it? If you knew anything, and you don't, you would know that we were in afghanistan before Obama became president.

[robert234]

Like all of us, he is a person who entered the world, and like all of us he could choose to leave it a little better or a little worse. While there are a few others, it's hard to think of any who left it worse than he did. No matter how hard he tried he could never make amends for the millions of innocent men, women, and children killed my his policies.

[Henry]

"to Americanize the war in Vietnam, "

The war on terrorism has been "americanized" by our recent president. And if you are not with us, you are against us. If your terrorist foment springs from your idea of your homeland being illegally usurped by westerners and Jews then this to is Americanized. So... we've learned what when Iran is bombed by the state of Israel? Mideast problem or Chritian problem to bail out the Jews?
There was no communist monolith and Trotskiites had long been pushed off the cliff. And there must have been someone in Washington with enough education and awareness to realize this. Or was this the so-called "slam-dunk" of deception (the domino theory) to draft the masses of kids who would eventually die? Was this all a summation of stupidity or was there an agenda that had a goal which could not be communicated? McNamara did not come clean.

[Eoin45]

Or was this simply a rambling and largely incomprehensible post?