Several paragraphs into the remarkable, front-page New York Times obituary of Robert McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War, the author Tim Weiner inserted the following description of the former defense secretary in his final years:
By then he wore the expression of a haunted man. He could be seen in the streets of Washington—stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind—walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.
That image itself is haunting. The man who sent so many young men to an early grave, not to mention the millions of civilian casualties, himself lived to the age of 93, reduced in his later years to shuffling along the streets of Washington like a specter. If you believe, as I do, in a Supreme Being and in divine providence, it’s difficult not to see a kind of cruel justice embedded somewhere in that image. Rather than living out his allotted threescore and ten, the man who, more than anyone else, was responsible for the quagmire of Vietnam was forced to live with his mistakes and with his regret for a very long time.
Somehow the words of a Vietnam-era protest song come to mind: “When will they ever learn?”
I don’t mean here to pile it on; my theology also tells me that we are, all of us, flawed beings in need of redemption. And it is certainly the case that McNamara was not the only person responsible for that misguided war. Presidential culpability extends, without interruption, from Dwight Eisenhower through Richard Nixon, with Lyndon Johnson bearing a massive share of the blame for escalating the war far beyond the realm of sanity. And let’s not forget the responsibility of ordinary Americans for failing to halt it, for electing Nixon in 1968 and reelecting him four years later, long after the folly of Vietnam had become apparent. (Henry Kissinger, by the way, if I calculate correctly, is 86.)
Still, McNamara stands out as a singular figure. “Every quantitative measurement we have shows we are winning this war,” the man who was then John F. Kennedy’s defense secretary announced confidently following his visit to South Vietnam in 1962. Two years later, when Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon referred to Vietnam as “McNamara’s War,” the secretary of defense shot back: “I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.” McNamara, to his credit, began to have doubts by 1966, telling Johnson a year later that it was time to cut our losses and leave. Johnson dismissed him.
After a stint as head of the World Bank, McNamara published his own misgivings about Vietnam, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, a confession that many believed was too little, too late. McNamara expanded his public contrition in the 2003 documentary The Fog of War, as George W. Bush was gearing up for the invasion of Iraq. “I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn’t have been there,” McNamara said. “If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better reexamine our reasoning.”
Those familiar with Washington know that the Vietnam War Memorial is not much more than a stone’s throw (or a hand grenade’s toss) from the White House. I wonder if, as Robert McNamara shambled through the streets of Washington in his final years, back and forth to his office, he ever took a detour to the Vietnam Memorial, under cover of darkness perhaps. And I wonder if he stopped, like millions of visitors over the years, to trace his fingers over the names of a soldier or two who died in the faraway jungles of Southeast Asia, names etched for eternity into the black granite. And if he did, I wonder what went through the mind of the haunted man with the “thousand-yard stare.”
When will they ever learn?
Tags: errol morris, iraq war, lyndon b. johnson, robert mcnamara, vietnam, vietnam war
Many, including military strategists, pundits, Republican politicians, ordinary voters, military leaders, and probably most Democrats, could have assumed that the unification of Vietnam under a communist government would be a loss in our competition with communist opponents. That was the fundamental illusion.
We turned a civil war in a place that did not concern us an arena for global conflict. Using notions from Professor Thomas Schelling ("The Strategy of Conflict"), Mr. McNamara thought that he had a way to resolve the conflict so that the Americans did not have to win the zero-sum game or lose it. He thought he could force the opposition into negotiating a resolution to the conflict. That would avoid a loss in a zero-sum game.
I think that the valid fear that both he and Mr. Rusk had was that, without involving ourselves in what was a local matter, President Johnson had the problem of facing criticism that the Democrats had “lost Vietnam” or, even worse, letting the conflict disintegrate into a so-called limited nuclear war.
We must remember the setting for what Mr. McNamara and Mr. Rusk did. Remember how popular Herman Kahn was, remember Republican politicians talking about using nuclear weapons in what ought to have been limited conflicts. Remember Dr. Henry Kissinger even wrote a book supporting the rationality of limited nuclear war. Remember crazy generals.
As our intervention escalated, even as early as 1965, I think it became apparent that Schelling’s notions were not working. Maybe, Mr. McNamara realized that even at the time. I do not know. However, one has to consider that withdrawing our troops might well have set up an even worse situation by allowing less benign people that Mr. Rusk, Mr. McNamara, or President Johnson conduct our wars. Nuclear war of even the most limited means—something extremely hard to modulate or manage—would have been even worse than what we got.
The game plan (if I may use that awful euphemism) called for the players to do something profoundly immoral—turn a local civil war into a substitute for global conflict. It meant murdering American soldiers in an undefined conflict and murdering in what was essentially a genocidal war the people of Vietnam, both those supposedly on our side and those supposedly opposed to us.
Essentially, the free use of abstractions trumped good sense, moderation, and morality. However, Mr. McNamara and Mr. Rusk did not have easy options. What would you have done?
The illusions were not just the property of Mr. McNamara. Our entire political world lived within those illusions.
I feel the pain directly. I could have fought in that war and maybe ought to have served during that time. I feel deeply compromised. What I did was just go insane--for real for a few years.
Says we must confess we are pilgrims and strangers on the earth; that even after we see things afar off, are persuaded of them and confess them.
On July 4th this year, two days before my Mother's birthday and the passing day of Robert S. McNamara, I attended a Fasola Sacred Harp Singing at the Liberty Baptist Church in Henagar, Alabama.
Folks were there from Boston, London, even Luc Sante's Bard College on the Hudson.
There I spoke to my friend Bud Oliver, an acquaintance of Robert McNamara from Vietnam.
McNamara knew Oliver by name as Bud saved him close to 900,000 dollars on a project in Vietnam on the Plane of Reeds.
First time Oliver told me the story I thought he was saying plainer reeds.
To approach any further value of this anecdote, one would have to join in the singing of one of these occasions.
The last paragraph of Roger Kimball's review of Marilyn Robinson's The Death of Adam in the NY Times several years ago strikes me as apropo here, after reading my friend Balmer's thoughts here and the NY Times six page online story.
Gravity pulls us all back down to the earth where some rise again.
Wow, thank you.
I am watching again an interview of McNamara by Charlie Rose. I wonder if Mr. McNamara deserves quite as much credit as I supposed in my post above. I am not certain what he thought. I have read all of his books and I do not know that I read them well.
I do not see how we could have ever won that war. Fear of nuclear war was always the key background factor. A million of us Americans there would not have achieved anything.
The war haunted me for decades. I opposed it when I was an R.O.T.C. student at Georgia in early 1964. I made an "A" on an exam where I outlined why we ought not to continue our engagement in that course.
I opposed that war from May 1964 before we increased our engagement. I felt that opposition was patriotic. I think I was even ahead of the game than Mr. McNamara. It is just beyond reason that what we did there made sense, even in terms of the time.
What our leaders tried to do did not work. The Vietnamese had nothing—nothing that is except a thousand year history of rejecting domination by other peoples. That in the end is what counted. We completely misunderstood the Vietnamese.
This is all deeply personal. I think that I lost my sanity because of that war. I would have had problems anyway but the war made it worse. My brother says I live locked in the past--in the sixties. I do not believe that I am, but that war is like somethng that happned yesterday afternoon.
Rita Nakashima Brock writing in an e-mail from Faith Voice this morning makes several fine comments that pertain to this thread.
One has to do with the way our laws do not allow one to seek exemption from military service based on the immorality of a particular war. This was a problem for me during the Vietnam War because I am not a pacifist but did take great exception to the American war in Vietnam. That meant that I could not enter seminary as a candidate for the chaplaincy or consider enlisting and seeking training as a pilot. That meant also that letting myself be drafted was a moral problem. Nevertheless, saints by definition have dirty hands, don't we.
Second, Mr. McNamara made a profoundly immoral decision to engage us in Vietnam. Criticism of him at his death is very much in order.
I am curious why this was published after his death.
He left us with a bitter history. We comment on people when they die. We judge how they lived.
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