A Postscript on McNamara's Death

It has taken me nearly a week to reflect on how figures like Robert McNamara contributed to the erosion of the American people's trust in so many of their institutions. It was his arrogance and self-confidence that so diminished whatever he had to say about Vietnam from the time the war began. McNamara was so infuriating in the early days of the conflict that I would attend his news conferences in Saigon by driving to the airport in an Edsel, one of the cars belonging to the CBS News bureau.

During his presidency of the Ford Motor Company and until he left it to become John F. Kennedy's Defense Secretary in 1961, the Edsel was the biggest and most controversial lemon ever designed and rolled off the Ford assembly line. I would park it immediately across from the exit of Ton Son Nhut airport so that McNamara could not miss it when he departed from one of his interminable news conferences in Vietnam. After tolerating his endless barrage of statistics and analyses he used to justify progress in the war, my message was quite clear.

It was McNamara's stubborn conviction that enemy body count and bomb tonnage dropped on North Vietnam were barometers of American success in a conflict that gradually would divide the country and diminish his reputation until the day he died.

Vietnam was Kennedy's war until he was assassinated in 1963, but a year later it became Johnson's legacy. McNamara stayed on as the war's architect and in preparing for the 1964 presidential election, LBJ invited him to become his vice presidential running mate. It was an offer he refused; one that Hubert Humphrey accepted.

By 1967, he began to realize that no matter how much money and manpower the United States committed to the war, the resolute North Vietnamese army and their Communist guerillas were not going to end the conflict until they won it. It was a bitter realization for a Cold War warrior like McNamara to swallow. He was a stalwart believer in the faulty "domino theory" propelled by columnist Joseph Alsop, who years before had predicted that an American defeat in Vietnam would expose the remainder of Southeast Asia to Communist domination. Like Secretary of State Dean Rusk, McNamara mistakenly saw the need to curtail China as the justification for the war in Vietnam.

No one knows precisely what turned McNamara because he was disingenuous in justifying his own reasons. Neither in his 2005 memoir, In Retrospect or his later documentary interviews with Errol Morris in The Fog of War does he do so.

But the turmoil of the war disrupted the lives of many Americans in public life. His son had joined the ranks of thousands of American college students who were part of the anti-war movement. At one point, Robert Craig McNamara appalled his parents by suspending a Viet Cong flag in his bedroom. After young McNamara went off to college and despite their mutual affection for one another, the father and son did not talk to each other for several years.

After McNamara left the Johnson Administration and became president of the World Bank, he performed noble service in his advocacy of assisting Third World countries to rise from the ranks of undeveloped nations of the globe. Nonetheless, it affected too many of us whose memories of Vietnam are too deeply embedded to forget that had McNamara spoken out early enough, he would have spared the lives of many Americans. More than 16,000 Americans died while he served Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. But while journalists and historians have blamed McNamara for orchestrating Vietnam, there was enough guilt to be shared later. Another 42,000 were killed before the shooting stopped, during what more accurately could have been called Nixon's war. That should have troubled the parents, siblings and wives as much as those whose grief began the day the conflict started.

Many so-called experts were to blame for the tragedy of Vietnam. But as Ward Just, my old friend and colleague, once told a fellow reporter, McNamara "was not a bad man, just a flawed one."

Comments

[aofh]

Many castigate McNamara for what he did in Vietnam, but McNamara was one of Kennedy's "best and brightest" taken from the business world. Mightn't we also reflect on McNamara-style thinking in the business world and the role it has played in developing the current crisis?

[larry278]

Bad or flawed, McNamara's years as Secretary of Defense was a disaster for the USA & proved to be fatal for S Viet Nam.

[Dragash]

"It has taken me nearly a week to reflect on how figures like Robert McNamara contributed to the erosion of the American people's trust in so many of their institutions", says Fromson.

Gosh, Murray. It has taken you TWO WEEKS (or so) to figure out that the guy was a MONSTER AND A MASS MURDERER? .

Whoa! Nobel for Physics, pronto!!!

[getoffthecross]

Juxtapose this with Rumsfeld, and I believe the conclusion alters: He was (sic) both a flawed and bad man.

[gurukalehuru]

A "flawed" man makes mistakes, as we all do. Nobody's perfect. But the Viet Nam war, like the Iraq War, was no mistake. Powerful people wanted these wars, and made them happen. That is not flawed. That is evil.

[apduncan1]

The Viet-Nam adventure was a war against socialism taking a foothold in France; France could not handle reconstruction after WW2 fighting the Viet-Cong in SE Asia.

That's what it was ... a capitalist country aiding another capitalist country.

The Iraq adventure is over oil, though.

[jhamm1]

I agree.

Though most likely unachievable, the military objectives in Vietnam were hardly as deplorable as those concocted in order to justify the Iraqi invasion.

Considering the sheer number of Vietnamese on both sides of the border who wished their country to become united, a subsequent U.S. pullout without victory seems something of a foregone conclusion.

However, our involvement did not by any stretch of the imagination predetermine a tactical approach that resulted in such horrendous civilian casualties and the near devastation of country itself, for which McNamara earns the lion's share of the blame.

[gorideabike]

I have heard about saving France from socialism and consider it more of a cover story. Officers don't make general without some combat theatre experience. The military industrial complex Eisenhower warrned of clearly stood to profit from ongoing war. Airplanes, bombs, missiles, and cacamamie research and development contracts were everywhere. Congressional leaders could get reelection points and direct military pork to their districts: not to mention reelection funds form war profiteering corporations. The presidents got wartime powers to enhance their agendas. Lots and lots of powerful and already rich people were totally willing to sacrifice Americans and Viet Namese lives for what was just like Iraq, an elective war. It was m o n e y - the end.
And Ike, BTW, could have left well enough alone after the French lost their colony of French Indochina in 1954. He sent in advisors to prop up a bogus government and lit the fuse...
Thanks for an interesting discussion by all.

[jhamm1]

While I still see traces in this article of a common syndrome that frequently counters the death of a maligned individual with characteristic repetence of "You know, maybe we were a bit too hard on the guy.", it's nice to see a columnist who truly understands how the term "Architect of Vietnam" truly applies in McNamara's case, symbolizing not a driving force that is responsible for having orchestrated the war in the first place, but as a perpetual know-nothing masquerading as a know-it-all to such extremities as to fuel attempts to micromanage every aspect in which the war was fought, from directing troop operations to selecting predominantly useless and prone-to-c­ollateral-­damage targets for impending airstrikes.

Far too many bloggers on the Huffington Post seem to misunderstand the reasons for McNamara's villification, as, not one who spearheaded the incentive for involvement in the first place, but as concocting a tactical approach that proved both strategically counterproductive in addition to ensuring horrendous civilian casualties, given his status as a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs.

As such, McNamara serves as a trademark example of Sun Tzu's warning of one of the three primary methods in which the conduct of a nation's Army can "be placed in great difficulty" by the ruling hierarchy, culminating in civilian leaders who "do not understand military affairs but insist on conducting them" accordingly.

[timm0]

Get a copy of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". I think the author's last name is Perkins. He describes how the world bank is used by war profiteers and corporatists. Don't be so fast to hand out kudos for the "work" Mcnamara had done at the world bank. Chances are much better that he merely continued to prosecute for the profits of the corporate gods he loved so dearly.