Robert S. McNamara is dead at the age of 93. He was the whiz kid who saved Ford Motor Company and subsequently became the most influential Secretary of Defense of all time, serving both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. McNamara was the brilliant strategist who steered Kennedy and the hawkish Chiefs of Staff out of a nuclear confrontation in Cuba, and we should be forever grateful for that. But he is also the man whose rationality fell short, when he predicted how quickly the U.S. could bring N. Vietnam to its knees. They just wouldn’t give up.
McNamara spent all of his years after 1966 in despair and regret about his role as the chief architect of the Vietnam War. That’s the year he came to understand the nature of the conflict–after he read a book-length C.I.A. study called “The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist,” which concluded that the U.S. was fighting a futile war. Then he talked with George Allen, a C.I.A. analyst who had studied Vietnam for 17 years and asked his advice. Allen told him that he should stop the bombing and negotiate a cease-fire with Hanoi.
At that time, McNamara told his aides to start compiling a top-secret history of the war–a report which would later be known as the Pentagon Papers. And he sought to influence Lyndon Johnson, who had become President after Kennedy’s assassination in 1965, suggesting in a Sept. phone call to Johnson that the President establish a ceiling on the number of troops in Vietnam and plan to stop the bombing. Johnson only grunted in response.
On May 19, 1967, McNamara sent a lengthy and carefully considered paper to President Johnson urging him to negotiate with Hanoi rather than escalate the war. McNamara wrote, “Most Americans are convinced that somehow we should not have gotten this deeply in. All want the war ended and expect their president to end it. Successfully. Or else.” Johnson responded this time by relieving of his job and making him President of the World Bank.
At his going-away luncheon, McNamara actually broke down and wept as he spoke of the futile destruction of Vietnam. Many of those present were shocked by the depth of his sadness and guilt, and appalled that he would condemn the bombing.
McNamara went on to dedicate himself to the reduction of “absolute poverty” in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but these efforts were often undermined by the ignoring of ecological concerns and by corruption in third world countries.
It was only in 1995 that he finally publicly denounced the Vietnam War and the part he played in it, when he published a memoir entitled “In Retrospect: the Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.” And then in 2003 came Errol Morris’s moving documentary on McNamara, “The Fog of War.” I will never forget this haunted, tragic figure as he looked into the camera and said that the greatest lesson that he had learned from Vietnam was the need to know one’s enemy, and to empathize with him. “We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes,” he said.
For his efforts at apology, McNamara was subjected to severe criticism. People wanted to know why he didn’t speak out against the war when he could have influenced policy. Why did he wait? I ask myself that question, as well. Was it out of loyalty to the President? After all, this was an appointed office, and he served at the will of the President. Was it because he wanted a cushy job at the World Bank, instead of being ousted from the Washington power structure? Did he think (probably rightly so) that he would have been labeled a traitor? Did he perhaps wonder if he would be blamed for not “supporting our boys” when we lost the war, as he knew was inevitable? I don’t know. Only he would know. But I will say this: it would take extraordinary courage to speak out against the war, against the President, against his colleagues, against the Pentagon, against the majority of the American people, who at that time believed that we were justified in being in Vietnam. Should he have done it? Yes. Sixteen thousand American lives had been lost when he resigned as Secretary of Defense–42,000 more were to die before the war was over–and countless Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. Would that he could have found that extraordinary courage.
Had he done so, would the war have been ended sooner? No doubt, his words would have had a powerful impact on decision-makers, would have given tremendous leverage to the protest movement. And he would not have had to drag through his latter years, an object of pity, his too-large clothing hanging round his form, bent and broken, wondering how a good man, a compassionate man, one of the best and the brightest, could have gone so wrong.
