Robert McNamara’s About Face
With the death at 93 of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, moral and ethical questions come to mind. Here is a man who promoted escalating a war about which he had grave doubts.
“In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam” appeared in 1995. McNamara disclosed that by 1967 he had deep misgivings about Vietnam – by then he had lost faith in America’s capacity to prevail over a guerrilla insurgency that had driven the French from the same jungled countryside.
Despite those doubts, he had continued to express public confidence that the application of enough American firepower would cause the Communists to make peace. In that period, the number of U.S. casualties – dead, missing and wounded – went from 7,466 to over 100,000.
McNamara finally admitted how wrong he and his administrations were about Vietnam.
“We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of our country. But we were wrong. We were terribly wrong,” McNamara, then 78, told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of the book’s release.
But that mea culpa didn’t bring bring back any lives and further angered many Americans who suffered and lost loved ones during that era.
McNamara wrote that he and others had not asked the five most basic questions: “Was it true that the fall of South Vietnam would trigger the fall of all Southeast Asia? Would that constitute a grave threat to the West’s security? What kind of war – conventional or guerrilla – might develop? Could we win it with U.S. troops fighting alongside the South Vietnamese? Should we not know the answers to all these questions before deciding whether to commit troops?
McNamara was a bit late in making that analysis.
When U.S. naval vessels were allegedly attacked off the North Vietnamese coast in 1964, McNamara lobbied Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which Johnson used as the equivalent of a congressional declaration of war.
McNamara visited Vietnam – the first of many trips – and returned predicting that American intervention would enable the South Vietnamese, despite internal feuds, to stand by themselves “by the end of 1965.”
That was an early forerunner of a seemingly endless string of official “light at the end of the tunnel” predictions of American success. Each was followed by more warfare, more American troops, more American casualties, more American bombing, more North Vietnamese infiltration – and more predictions of an early end to America’s commitment.
Sound familiar? In the words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Our memory is far too short.
July 6th, 2009 at 10:59 am
This is precisely why no president should be given carte blanche to commit US forces to large-scale military adventures without the full approval of the congress, and a national referendum voted upon by the American people.
Yeah but if there’s an emergency, blah blah blah.
If the emergency is real no one’s going to question the president’s authority, or stand in his way if for the sake of national survival he has to ignore a few laws. But, here, as elsewhere, such as regarding FBI and CIA and NSA, if you give people full legal authority to do anything that might ever be helpful, at a time and place of their choosing, they will use that authority every day, as a matter of routine, even though it tramples the constitution.
GuidoVanHorn Reply:
July 7th, 2009 at 3:57 am
I agree Rocky…now I must self-flagellate as punishment for agreeing with you.
Daddio Reply:
July 7th, 2009 at 8:12 am
You can’t have a national referendum voted on by the American people to go to war Rocky.
We have a representative republic and a national referendum wouldn’t work. You can’t govern a nation like that. Wars should be left up to the decisions of the President, Congress, while conferring with our military leaders. That is how it works in a free republic like we have here.
July 6th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
“We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations…”. Doesn’t this mean that the responsibility lies with the top dude, not with McNamara? Ah, these government expanding, liberal adminsitrations, led by presidents who care so much for the “little people”.
crh3e Reply:
July 6th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Like Goldwater would’ve stopped Vietnam if he won in 1964? He wanted to start a preemptive war with the Soviets. He was an early example of a neocon. The mess we got into in Vietnam was not an issue of partisanship, but one of the growing powers of the military industrial complex. Eisenhower was scared of the day when we’d have a commander-in-chief that couldn’t understand the vast nature of our military after it changed in the 1950s and he was right. Kennedy was that commander-in-chief.
Daddio Reply:
July 7th, 2009 at 8:17 am
The powers to be didn’t know how to run the war in Vietnam.
Pres. Johnson really screwed up in Vietnam. He tried to run the war operations from the Oval Office instead of letting the Generals run the operations from the theater from which they were fighting.
Johnson would decide where and when to bomb and where and when to take a mission.
And there were to many cease-fires called during that conflict. This allowed the enemy to regroup and re-arm. No way to run a war.
July 6th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Nam was a mess from beginning to the end. I really don’t think anyone realized how totally messed up it was until it was to late and then it took years of protests to end it.
July 6th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
The truth is that we were on the right side. (Also, we won every major military battle, as the North Vietnamese generals all acknowledged. We defeated ourselves through the political outcries here in the U.S., which is what they had counted on.) But, it’s all history now. I think Goldwater would have understood all of it better than Johnson ever did.
Daddio Reply:
July 7th, 2009 at 8:19 am
MaryAlice is right. We won every major battle in Vietnam. Ther have been a couple North Vietnamese Generals from that era that have said that they could never defeat the US military. They said that America lost that war on the streets of America. The anti-war leftist were successful in defeating America in Vietnam.
average james Reply:
July 7th, 2009 at 11:22 am
Hooray for the anti-unjustified war leftists in America !!
crh3e Reply:
July 7th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
“I think Goldwater would have understood all of it better than Johnson ever did.”
-I doubt that. Johnson was an idiot, no argument there, but Goldwater was the guy who said we should “lob one (nuke) in the men’s room at the Kremlin.” He would’ve been clueless like LBJ.
July 7th, 2009 at 1:09 am
Well Guido, you will have to lick your wounds and come out fighting. I know you can do it. I have the upmost confidence in you. :)
July 7th, 2009 at 8:23 am