McNamara's Evil Lives On

Why not speak ill of the dead?

Robert McNamara, who died this week, was a complex man -- charming even, in a blustery way, and someone I found quite thoughtful when I interviewed him. In the third act of his life he was often an advocate for enlightened positions on world poverty and the dangers of the nuclear arms race. But whatever his better nature, it was the stark evil he perpetrated as secretary of defense that must indelibly frame our memory of him.

To not speak out fully because of respect for the deceased would be to mock the memory of the millions of innocent people McNamara caused to be maimed and killed in a war that he later freely admitted never made any sense. Much has been made of the fact that he recanted his support for the war, but that came 20 years after the holocaust he visited upon Vietnam was over.

Is holocaust too emotionally charged a word? How many millions of dead innocent civilians does it take to qualify labels like holocaust, genocide or terrorism? How many of the limbless victims of his fragmentation bombs and land mines whom I saw in Vietnam during and after the war? Or are America's leaders always to be exempted from such questions? Perhaps if McNamara had been held legally accountable for his actions, the architects of the Iraq debacle might have paused.

Instead, McNamara was honored with the Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson, to whom he had written a private memo nine months earlier offering this assessment of their Vietnam carnage: "The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one."

He knew it then, and, give him this, the dimensions of that horror never left him. When I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times in 1995, after the publication of his confessional memoir, his assessment of the madness he had unleashed was all too clear:

"Look, we dropped three to four times the tonnage on that tiny little area as were dropped by the Allies in all of the theaters in World War II over a period of five years. It was unbelievable. We killed -- there were killed -- 3,200,000 Vietnamese, excluding the South Vietnamese military. My God! The killing, the tonnage -- it was fantastic. The problem was that we were trying to do something that was militarily impossible -- we were trying to break the will; I don't think we can break the will by bombing short of genocide."

We -- no, he -- couldn't break their will because their fight was for national independence. They had defeated the French and would defeat the Americans who took over when French colonialists gave up the ghost. The war was a lie from the first. It never had anything to do with the freedom of the Vietnamese (we installed one tyrant after another in power), but instead had to do with our irrational Cold War obsession with "international communism." Irrational, as President Richard Nixon acknowledged when he embraced détente with the Soviet communists, toasted China's fierce communist Mao Tse-tung and then escalated the war against "communist" Vietnam and neutral Cambodia.

It was always a lie and our leaders knew it, but that did not give them pause. Both Johnson and Nixon make it quite clear on their White House tapes that the mindless killing, McNamara's infamous body count, was about domestic politics and never security.

The lies are clearly revealed in the Pentagon Papers study that McNamara commissioned, but they were made public only through the bravery of Daniel Ellsberg. Yet when Ellsberg, a former Marine who had worked for McNamara in the Pentagon, was in the docket facing the full wrath of Nixon's Justice Department, McNamara would lift not a finger in his defense. Worse, as Ellsberg reminded me this week, McNamara threatened that if subpoenaed to testify at the trial by Ellsberg's defense team, "I would hurt your client badly."

Not as badly as those he killed or severely wounded. Not as badly as the almost 59,000 American soldiers killed and the many more horribly hurt. One of them was the writer and activist Ron Kovic, who as a kid from Long Island was seduced by McNamara's lies into volunteering for two tours in Vietnam. Eventually, struggling with his mostly paralyzed body, he spoke out against the war in the hope that others would not have to suffer as he did (and still does). Meanwhile, McNamara maintained his golden silence, even as Richard Nixon managed to kill and maim millions more. What McNamara did was evil -- deeply so.

Comments

[stratman351]

I find it amazing that a man can admit to orchestrating the deaths of 3.2 million people and some wish to give him sympathy because he has regrets later on in life about it. McNamara may have softened with age and truly had some regrets about what he did as a younger man but he was always a cold and calculating machine. Scheer's 1995 quote says it all:

"Look, we dropped three to four times the tonnage on that tiny little area as were dropped by the Allies in all of the theaters in World War II over a period of five years. It was unbelievable. We killed -- there were killed -- 3,200,000 Vietnamese, excluding the South Vietnamese military. My God! The killing, the tonnage -- it was fantastic. ."

Fantastic? Hardly the word I would use. Facts, statistics-all impressive numbers in his head but to me it is genocide. McNamara was detached from the rest of humanity while he held a position of power. He never put a human face on his war of attrition until years later. Ask the vets that sacrificed life and limb for his admitted "unnecessary war" if he deserves their sympathy. Better yet, ask the Vietnamese who still suffer to this day from the effects of Agent Orange and unexploded munitions dropped on their country. Because we as a nation failed to hold people like McNamara accountable for war crimes no less, we must live through it all again generations later.

[mjc]

The title of your blog is exactly what we should remember. Korea was perhaps the beginning of America's interest in interfering and pretending to be the knight on the white horse, saving the world. Vietnam was even more so. Our interference in Vietnam was a very orchestrated PR campaign. When my father, a physician in the USAF was stationed on Mitchell Field (LI) he was invited to come and meet the nurse of Dienbienphu, the last hold out of the French against Vietnamese, in 1954. My mother and I went with him to the Plaza Hotel (no less) to greet her. Even though there were stories beginning to surface in the New York Magazine about how we could not or would not allow the French sacrifice go to waste and how our government was already sending "advisors" to help the Vietnamese in the South stand up to the rebels. Then there was the phony attack on American interests in Tonkin Gulf. Soon the advisors became brigades of soldiers, soldiers who supported the government that our foreign policy called for, and the small rebellion became a fight against communism, then China and/or Russia; the monolith communist domino theory in full throttle.

[DonJeff]

Thank you Robert Scheer. As usual you are direct and get right to the point. I agree completely that our lack of willingness to hold those accountable for the travesty of the Vietnam 'Conflict', paved the way for our current debacles. The unwillingness of our current president and Congress to hold anyone accountable for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq will lead to future leaders engaging in other misadventures and destruction. Heck, we didn't even fire anyone after 9-11. It is more than obvious that concepts such as 'honor', 'accountability' and 'taking responsibility for your actions' are mere terms for We the Peons and have no meaning for the elite of our country, no matter what their position or political philosophy.

[Sean 6399]

Don't the American voters have some responsibility for continuing over and over to elect administrations that do these things? I suspect even politicians might get a clue if the voters overwhelmingly rejected the architects of war and empire.

[marignymitch]

Thanks, Mr Scheer.

The evil lives on and Americans couldn't care less. They are glued to their video games and reality shows and are out shopping for that next SUV. We've been in Vietnam II (Iraq; toll: hundreds of thousands) for years now and we aren't leaving. Meantime we're escalating Vietnam III (Againista­n/Pakagain­istan; toll: more hundreds of thousands). And our leaders are eager for more for as long as we can leverage our bankruptcy with Chinese money.

Hear widespread howls of protests? Demands for a halt in the insanity? Me neither.

[Gary50]

The American people were manipulated into supporting the wars in Vietnam and Iraq using the same playbook. In Vietnam the threat was "the domino effect." If we diidn't fight the communists would take over the world. Dissenters were labelled as unpatriotic America haters, traitors and communist dupes. In Iraq the bogus threat was WMD and the phony linking of Saddam with 9/11. Dissenters were again labelled as unpatriotic America haters, traitors. The winners in both war were the military industrial complex. The losers were the millions maimed and killed. The other losers were the American people who karmically speaking, have the deaths of so many millions on their bloody hands and the future generations who will have to pay the trillions of dollars which were stolen from them. The right wing claims we can't afford national health care. Hmm, I wonder why?

[KarelS]

One of the last guys to die in my outfit in Viet Nam before we rotated back to "The World" was Pvt. Gelonik. By the time he got it, I had been reassigned to be the supply sergeant (because I was the only guy in my infantry company who could type). Two days after being sent back to base camp to assume my new duties, a bunch of war-damaged stuff arrived for me to DX. Among the stuff was Pvt. Gelonik's helmet. It had three bullet holes in it, put there by a sniper as he was walking point.
Up to this time I had seen enough sh#t in Viet Nam to last me and ten other guys a lifetime. But seeing that helmet of a guy who was almost exactly 1/4 the age of McNamara when he died will stick with me forever.
And here's the kicker: Just the day before, Gelonik had gotten back from R&R in Hong Kong where he bought a tape recorder. He made a tape of his voice to send back to his folks. He asked me to send it to them when I got the time. I listened to that tape before sending it off to his folks after he had died.
Just one of the many horrible stories that wouldn't have happened if McNamara would have used his influence to stop a war he had a major part in starting.

[lgillooly]

This is exactly why we need to hold Bush/Chene­y/Rumsfeld etc accountable for their lying us into a War with Iraq.....H­ow will we ever learn anything if these kinds of crimes go unpunished.

[Lynn McKinney]

FINALLY! Thank you! Now, to progress as a nation..we need to hold accountable those who lied us into Iraq. We need the whole world to come together to finish the madness of Al Qaeda and then let other countries choose their own path. Iran shows us that the people are wonderfully powerful when they stand up to the craziness.

No more trying to make others do as we think they should. We need to look to ourselves and clean up our own homeland.

Again, thank you for telling the truth.

[SamEllison]

There's a couple more obits I'm waiting to read.