CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
HOW should we remember Robert McNamara? As an engaged public servant who participated in some of the most important decisions of the 20th century? A hawk who served as the chief architect of the war in Vietnam? A technocrat who never fully understood the moral implications of his policies? A hero who steadfastly worked to prevent the escalation of conventional war into thermonuclear conflict? All of the above?
It’s impossible to mention his name without starting an argument. Mr. McNamara engendered strong opinions, particularly among those who came of age in the 1960s. People have wanted to know, “Did he ever say he was sorry?” They wanted an apology for his role in Vietnam. The publication of his memoir “In Retrospect” (in 1995) only seemed to make people angrier with him.
But he did say it. It might not have been enough for many people, but it was an unmistakable admission of error. Still, how do you say you’re sorry for history? It’s impossible to see him as unaware of the role he played in World War II or in Vietnam. What he did give us was his struggle to understand the meaning of what he had done. We got to see him wrestle with history. And thus he serves as an object lesson to many of us.
His refusal to come out against the Vietnam War, particularly as it continued after he left the Defense Department, has angered many. There’s ample evidence that he felt the war was wrong. Why did he remain silent until the 1990s, when “In Retrospect” was published? That is something that people will probably never forgive him for. But he had an implacable sense of rectitude about what was permissible and what was not. In his mind, he probably remained secretary of defense until the day he died.
One angry person once said to me: “Loyalty to the president? What about his loyalty to the American people?” Fair enough. But our government isn’t set up that way. He was not an elected official, he said repeatedly. He served at the pleasure of the president.
This brings us to the question of what, if any, were Mr. McNamara’s lasting contributions as secretary of defense? Mr. McNamara saw his central role as preventing nuclear war. During his tenure as secretary of defense, there were conflicts that could have escalated into nuclear war — the confrontation over Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis. All of this must be seen against the backdrop of the prevailing ideas of the time, the domino theory and the cold war.
Mr. McNamara became defense secretary in 1961. The Joint Chiefs were hawks. This is clear in reading the transcripts of the Cuban missile crisis; the generals speak to John F. Kennedy with derision, contempt and anger. When Mr. McNamara took office he discovered secret Pentagon plans for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.
He worried that the Joint Chiefs wanted nuclear war, and he was determined not to allow that to happen. From ’63 to about ’67, we had first-strike capacity and nuclear superiority against the Soviet Union. (In the words of George C. Scott in
“Dr. Strangelove,”
I’m not saying we wouldn’t have got our “hair mussed.” But we would have destroyed them.) After Kennedy’s death, he served that central role of keeping the Joint Chiefs in check. If true, he becomes not the villain of American history, but something quite different.
And what about the escalation of the Vietnam War? Recently, the taped conversations between President Lyndon Johnson and his advisers have been made public. Listening to the president and Mr. McNamara, it appears that the pressure for escalation did not come from Mr. McNamara, but from Johnson. Mr. McNamara was not an enthusiast for this war. But charged with the responsibility for carrying it out, he argued for it.
In a 1966 speech in Montreal (delivered while he was still secretary of defense), he returned to the theme of rationality:
“Who is man? Is he a rational animal? If he is, then the goals can ultimately be achieved. If he is not, then there is little point in making the effort. All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal but with a near infinite capacity for folly. His history seems largely a halting, but persistent, effort to raise his reason above his animality. He draws blueprints for utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand: his own part-comic, part-tragic, part-cussed, but part-glorious nature.”
It’s the endless juggling of personal morality, loyalty, political possibility and the caprice of history. If he failed, it is because he tried to bring his idea of rationality to problems that were bigger and more deeply irrational than he or anyone else could rationally understand. For me, the most telling moment in my film about Mr. McNamara,
“The Fog of War,”
is when he says, “Perhaps rationality isn’t enough.” His career was built on rational solutions, but in the end he realized it all might be for naught.
The man had no compunctions about the number of violent deaths he caused. He also said, “I loved the mountains” and some young war opponent told me, “…you can not be all that bad because you love mountains.”
I suppose we can conclude he was the Dick Cheney of his time. He thought, to secure America’s greatness we had to kill as many third-world people as we can. Why? Because McNamara and his ilk’s ignorance, and abject poverty of their moral grounds.
We must not forgive or forget as we are already doing so to our recent current crop of unbalanced leaders who gave us Iraq and Afghanistan. They must all be held accountable for their war crimes and although Mr. McNamara escaped punishment, indeed was rewarded with important positions, he is now being judged by those who have not forgotten the truth of what happened in Vietnam. Much information has been released since then to prove how contemptable his place in history has become.
Thank you Mr. Morris, that was refreshing. It is especially nice to see in comparison to the venomous article by Mr. Herbert (where he seems to blame the entire Vietnam War and resulting problems solely on Secretary McNamara), and the comments that compare Mr. McNamara to Rumsfeld (Rumsfeld should be flattered to be compared to such a smart man), that blame Mr. Macnamara solely for everything he was ever involved in, and that sorely overlook the positive lessons from the man’s life.
Now, I was never alive for Mr. McNamara’s political career, or the Vietnam War, so that is probably why I feel no need to whip a dead man. However, I have studied extensively many of the crises that Secretary McNamara was involved in, and have read a decent amount about his career (and yes, I loved your film Mr. Morris). While he certainly was involved with some terrible things– from running logistics on the firebombing of Tokyo, to being a directing force in the futile war in Vietnam. However, unlike most politicians, he showed some amazing traits- namely that he was able to admit mistakes (a bit late for some, but better late than never), try to figure out the lessons, and actually pondered and cared about the implications of his decisions (I recall hearing that when Tokyo was bombed, he and some others realized if they lost the war they would be treated as heinous war criminals). Beyond that, his rational and strategic mind did great things in reorganizing and reigning in the Pentagon, and because of his key input in the Cuban Missile Crisis he is one of the reasons that we are all alive and able to debate his life today.
For all his faults, I found Mr. McNamara very admirable in many ways. He was an embodyment of the importance of rational thinking under stress, he showed that to be a good decision maker one must never ignore one’s conscience (or rather his failures and the pain that followed him in his life taught us that), he taught us that when you’re wrong, you need to own up to your mistakes and draw lessons from them.
Many despise him for his role in Vietnam, turning him into the incarnation of all the problems the war caused. Having someone to blame always makes it easier to cope. But to all those seeming to cheer over his death, please look at the lessons of his life, it has much that everyone can learn from.
RIP Mr. McNamara
PS- sorry if this is multiposting, my browser is messing up
Anthony July 8, 2009 · 4:22 am
Unlike the thousands upon thousands of draftees he and others condemned to early deaths or lifetimes scarred by their experiences in Vietnam, the Robert Mc Namara described here as loyal to and “serving at the pleasure of the president” was at all times a volunteer.and therefore fully capable saying, “I quit.”..Moreover, Is it not possible that prolongation of his power and prestige led him to dedicate his mind to the perpetuation of a stance that he, by his own later admission, came to realize, while still in office, as wrong?.
Sharad C. Misra July 8, 2009 · 4:28 am
Forget Vietnam. It is surprising that unforgiving Americans remember McNamara only an the architect of Vietnam War. He has played an admirably positive and constructive role as the President of the World Bank Group in the sixties which is unfortunately forgotten. The old generation of heads of developing countries would fondly remember him as a friend of the underdog, more than the Soviet Union with its communist professions. As the President of the World Bank Group he liberally helped the developing countries including India and Pakistan with IDA credit for projects in social sector including heath care and education which did not admit of yielding a return on capital unlike other infrastructure and industrial projects. He justified the approach to such projects and programs on the ground that a sound social sector provided the foundation for accelerated economic development. India was the biggest beneficiary of the IDA credits at the stage of its economic take off. His policies of funding projects through the soft-loan window of the Bank i.e. the IDA won him the acclaim of many developing nations, ignoring the stigma of his being the villain for waging the Vietnam War. His addresses to the Board of Governors were highly illuminating documents which need to be preserved in the Bank’s archives and gone through by the Development Economists .
Barry Blitstein July 8, 2009 · 4:30 am
The question of Mr. McNamara’s compassion has been raised repeatedly since his death. I am not qualified to evaluate his compassion, his commitment to reason, his good will. Nor am I a Christian, to be swayed by intent or repentance.
He consistently abetted or presided over significant atrocities. It may have been accidents of history, the bad luck of having the right talents for the wrong purposes. Intentional or not, he was one of the monsters the sleep of reason is notorious for breeding. Reason’s worst nightmare. Let the dead forgive him. They are wiser than I.
What an epitaph: “A career built on rational solutions.” The same could be said of Albert Speer.
A career built on seeking rational solutions in service of stark evil or misguided policy is a career built on a foundation of sand, and a self-serving one at that.
Maybe McNamara may have realized that, but he didn’t admit it until much too late. He may have made some compelling, humanistic comments in Montreal in 1966, but in Washington that same year he proudly testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about how the bomb tonnage dropped on Vietnam in 1965 exceed that dropped on Germany in all of WWII.
McNamara didn’t serve only at the pleasure of the president. He served at his own pleasure, as well. The Vietnam War Memorial may well have far fewer names on it had McNamara had the courage to act rationally on what was obvious by 1966, if not before the escalation of the war: that Vietnam was a terrible mistake, based on an irrational Cold War pespective that refused to see the conflict there as a combination of civil war and anti-colonial struggle rather than one essential to stop the advance of Communism.
In short, the domino theory was irrational, and all the rational solutions to justify it and prove it were shear madness.