It's hard to understand the role of Robert McNamara and feelings toward him, particularly during the Johnson Administration, but if you think "Dick Cheney during the Bush years" and multiply, you'll come closest. McNamara, who died today, was one of the great villains of my 20's and 30's. Secretary of Defense, a major architect of the Vietnam War and defender of the ideas behind it, he supported both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in their attempts to "save democracy" there. He entered the new Kennedy Administration in a blaze of glory just five weeks after being named, and then resigning as, president of the Ford Motor Company. A supremely successful and confident executive (who opposed production of the much-reviled Edsel), he seemed a creative and promising choice.
What he became was a symbol of all that seemed wrong with American foreign policy, especially in Vietnam,(including the "domino theory" claiming that if Vietnam "fell" other nations in the region would fall as well) and one of the subjects of the landmark book about this foreign policy team, David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. In addition to the vast, deep anger at the direction of the war and the philosophy that defined it, McNamara and all he represented reminded us daily of what we saw as both the arrogance of the US decision to enter and remain part of the war in Vietnam and our conviction that we were being manipulated, spied upon and lied to.
Paul Hendrickson's The Living and the Dead best described McNamara's impact by visiting the stories of five people affected by the war. Here's an excerpt from the first part of the book; it looks long, but you'll be glad you've read it:
In the Winter of 1955
His
wife wasn't drinking milk with her Scotch in the hope her stomach might
hurt a little less – not then. A man bearing a child hadn't set himself
on fire below his Pentagon window – not yet. A wigged-out woman hadn't
stolen up behind his seat in an outdoor cafe in the Kodak winter sun of
Aspen to begin shrieking there was blood on his hands. (He was applying
ketchup to his hamburger.) A Viet Cong agent – his name was Nguyen Van
Troi — hadn't been found stringing fuses beneath a Saigon bridge he
was due to pass over. Odd metaphors and strange turns of phrase weren't
seeping from him like moons of dark ink. His pressed white shirts
weren't hanging loose at his neck. He wasn't reading Homer late at
night in an effort to compose himself. His dyslexic and ulcerated son
hadn't been shown in a national newsmagazine with his ropes of long
hair and kindly face reading aloud a list of war dead at the San
Francisco airport. Reputed members of an organization called the
Symbionese Liberation Army didn't have stored in a Berkeley garage some
crudely drawn but surprisingly detailed descriptions of the interior
and exterior of his resort home in Snowmass, along with thumb-nail
sketches of members of his family. (WIFE: name unknown to me. She is
small, not outstanding in appearance & probably not aggressive. .
.") He hadn't stood in the Pentagon briefing room in front of his
graphs and bar-charts to say with perfect seriousness, "So it is
fifteen percent of ten percent of thirteen-thirtieths that have been in
dispute here. . ." He hadn't stood on the tarmac at Andrews, at the
rollaway steps of his blue-tailed C-135, before winging to a high-level
CINCPAC meeting in Honolulu, and told another tangle of lies into a
tangle of microphones, made more artfully disingenuous statements to
the press boys, this time about the kind of forces – which is to say,
combat forces – soon to be shipped to the secretly escalated war. ("No,
uh, principally logistical support — arms, munitions, training,
assistance.") He hadn't hunched forward in his field fatigues at a news
conference in Saigon and said, as though trying to hug himself, and
with only the slightest belying stammers, "The military operations have
progressed very satisfactorily during the past year. The rate of
progress has exceeded our expectations. The pressure on the Viet Cong,
measured in terms of the casualties they have suffered, the destruction
of their units, the measurable effect on their morale, have all been
greater than we anticipated" — when, in fact, the nations chrome-hard
secretary of defense had already given up believing, in private, a long
while ago, that the thing was winnable in any military sense. The
president of the United States hadn't called him up to yell, "How can I
hit them in the nuts, Bob? Tell me how I can hit them in the nuts!" —
the them being little men in black pajamas in a skinny curve of an
unfathomable country 10,000 miles distant. He hadn't yet gone to this
same president and told him he was afraid of breaking down. The
expressions "body count" and "kill ratio" and "pacification" and
"incursion" hadn't come into the language in the way snow — to use
Orwell's image — falls on an obscene landscape. The casualty figures
of U.S. dead and missing and wounded hadn't spumed, like crimson
geysers, past the once unthinkable 100,000 mark. Nor had this man risen
at a luncheon in Dean Rusk's private dining room at the state
department (it happened on February 27, 1968, forty-eight hours before
he left office) and, without warning, begun coming apart before Rusk
and dark Clifford and Bill Bundy and Walt Rostow and Joe Califano and
Harry McPherson, telling them between stifled sobs, between what
sounded like small asphyxiating noises, between the bitter rivers of
his cursing, that the goddamned Air Force, they're dropping tonnage on
Vietnam at a higher rate than we dropped on Germany in the last part of
World War II, we've practically leveled the place, and what's it done,
nothing, a goddamned nothing, and Christ here's Westmoreland asking for
another 205,000 troops, ifs madness, can't anybody see, this thing has
to be gotten hold of, it's out of control I tell you. . .
No.
None of this.
Not yet.
It all lay waiting in the decades up ahead.
Pretty amazing, huh? Those are just a few of the moments that informed McNamara's War years, and mine. And the engendered the rage, the hateful things yelled at marches, the weeping, the tear gas, the chaos and the fear. And McNamara knew it. He spent much of the rest of his life trying to atone for those years, first by leading the World Bank in its sunnier years and urging America and the world to help the starving and the lost. At least once, he broke down at a major appearance as he described the world misery the Bank sought to abate. Later, he collaborated on a book, Argument Without End, that struggled to understand and, some claim, apologize for, the war.
As many of the obits noted, especially that on TIME's website, ("Robert McNamara dies, no escape from Vietnam") for many, next to LBJ, McNamara was the war. And as Hendrickson's book noted, he haunted those directly affected by the war even more than the rest of us.
Somehow though, it's difficult to retain rage as ideas soften and history teaches us more about times we lived when we were young. I remember that when Nixon died a friend called to talk about it. I wasn't home, and she said to my son "What really makes me mad is that I think he outlived our anger." I'm still trying to figure out if that's how I – we – will feel about this death. McNamara certainly tried to both understand and to atone for Vietnam but the damage of that war, up until today, remains. As I've written before, since Vietnam, every national campaign including the last one, and, you can be sure, any one that Sarah Palin runs in the future, is informed by – colored by – sometimes defined by – what happened then. President Obama has certainly blunted the culture wars, generational change will absolutely change many issues, especially related to gender rights, but I wonder… When the right gets mad – gets desperate – they can easily reignite the culture wars that were the bi-product of the Vietnam era. And Robert McNamara is responsible for those, too.
I don't know. Really, I don't. But I'm ending with this Charlie Rose interview with McNamara from 1995. Take a look. There's more of the whole man here. The question is now much he deserves, after what the Defense Secretary in him did, to expect us to think about all the rest.
