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Robert McNamara’s Scoundrels’ Time

July 7, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under In Memoriam, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam 

Robert Strange McNamara died yesterday at his home in Washington.  He was 93.

The former Harvard professor , Army vet, Legion of Merit recipient, and Ford Motors wunderkind served as America’s eighth Secretary of Defense, from 1961-1968, under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.  Mr. McNamara was the keystone and epitome of “the best and the brightest” —as ironically and indelibly tagged by David Halberstam— who planned and executed the Vietnam War.

He resigned from the Pentagon in 1968.   Although the Vietnam War was already the most controversial and divisive issue in American life, and although he remained on the scene as President of the World Bank until 1981, his desire to withdraw from the spotlight was welcomed by his fellow Democrats and accepted by a compliant media.

In 1995 he published a Vietnam memoir —Retrospect— which failed to satisfy most critics.  Its apologies were too little and far too late for the war’s opponents; its explanation of the domino-dominated thinking at the time was too pallid for its supporters; and his attempt at personal revisionism —presenting himself as a doubter and even a dissenter from the policies he was promulgating— was deemed unworthy.

The news of his death occasioned some fond and pained reminiscences.  But the notices —universally accepting an unreconstructed anti-war orthodoxy (the headline of his obituary in The New York Times is “Architect of Futile War”)— ranged from detached to reserved to resentful.

It will be sad for Mr. McNamara —who did the state some service— and tragic for the nation if his passing doesn’t generate some thoughtful and productive discussion about Vietnam and its meaning for America.  The possibility that this might have happened with the Kerry candidacy in 2004 and the McCain candidacy in 2008 were unrealized.

The Vietnam War was the central American political, social, and intellectual watershed of the 20th Century.  The bitterness it bred has now become inbred; and until we work it through and work it out, America will have unfinished business with itself.

The Vietnam War was the central fact of Richard Nixon’s presidency.  By the time he was elected President in November 1968, the leaders of the two Democratic administrations and the intellectual and political and media elites that had conceived, executed, escalated, and supported it, were suddenly war weary and gun shy.

The generals were now saying that it was unwinnable; and the newly-activated anti-war movement that represented a large part of the Democratic Party’s political base, was saying that it was unconscionable.  So many, most ignobly, turned on a dime (or on twenty-one billion 1968 dollars) and used the war they had declared and waged and so recently supported as a partisan stick with which to beat the new Republican President.

RN knew that he would have received widespread political, academic, and media support if he had just ended the war in his first months in office by declaring victory and bringing the troops home.  And he well knew that, after only a few months, the hated “Johnson’s War: would become the doubly hated “Nixon’s War.”  The prospect of starting on an up beat and with a clean slate must have been tempting.

It was, and is, possible to disagree with the way RN decided to end the Vietnam War.  Indeed, the conventional wisdom is highly critical.  But the wisdom of his insistence on combining negotiations with the enemy, preparing South Vietnam for American withdrawal, and honoring commitments to allies —what he defined as “peace with honor”— is already being viewed more positively by a new generation of Vietnam scholars.

But it is impossible to have any respect for the people who took advantage of the conveniently agreed upon collective amnesia regarding their activities from 1960 through 1968 to erase their consciences, rewrite their biographies, and advance their personal and political careers.

Whether it was the result of decency or shame —or both— it was to Robert McNamara’s credit that he at least remained quiet during that period —1968-1975— that was, for so many, such a scoundrel time.



Comments

3 Responses to “Robert McNamara’s Scoundrels’ Time”

  1. MK on July 7th, 2009 5:19 am

    You can’t impose a “country first” template on the handling of the Vietnam War in retrospect. Supporters of both LBJ and RN played political angles with it. If you really want to look at Vietnam with an eye to healing wounds and divisions, you need to look much deeper than you have. That includes examining LBJ’s private doubts as well as Vice President Spiro Agnew’s speeches. And considering how and why some older people struggled to understand the young people who protested the war. And why some younger people seemed to accept so readily extreme rhetoric from anti-war protest leaders. (Did some of them feel doubts about some of the most inflammatory rhetoric but feel unable to voice it – just as some who were hawks in public felt doubts about what LBJ and RN said while in office?) And why so many on both sides demonized the other side. Or reached too readily for broad-brushed, cartoonish stereotypes.

    I’ve seen some people who were young anti-war protestors back then later say they should have had more sensitivity to the people of South Vietnam and what happened later with the boat people. Some people do reflect back on things and recalibrate some of their positions while remaining true to their original objectives. Is it too early for such conversations? We couldn’t get into it in 2004 and 2008 because the political process discourages reflection and recalibration. As a young college student during Nixon’s first term, I wore Tell it to Hanoi and Silent Majority buttons in Washington. As a 19-year old, I smiled at some of Agnew’s speeches in the spring of 1970, as I made my way to classes while still smelling tear gas thrown hours earlier at protesters on campus. But as I grew up, I came to view much of what Agnew said as polarizing and fundamentally unmanly. How many Nixonites are willing to discuss that, even now?

    If your reference to scoundrels is intended only for people who worked for and with the Johnson administration to carry out its aims, then you need to consider the constraints that political considerations impose. Governance isn’t a collaborative, let’s brainstorm and figure out the best options type of process. You’re not allowed to just do your best and try to live with the results of your decisions, the way grown-ups do in other jobs.

    LBJ felt besieged, not just by opponents from the other side, but also by criticism from his own side. In private he agonized in 1965, “I can’t get out and I can’t finish it with what I have got. And I don’t know what the hell to do.” Could he say that in public? Of course not. Would RN have capitalized on it if he had offered a glimpse at his doubts and anxieties? Of course. That’s the way the game is played.

    If LBJ as President felt such doubts, why is it surprising that others in his party did, as well? Some voiced them to him, some didn’t. When party control changed, some of those with doubts ramped up the criticism. Others took a more low-key approach. It’s always been that way. In the 1960s and 1970s, LBJ’s team and his party supporters had to decide how to handle what he had done. Bush himself, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their supporters face many of the same choices now in how to assess what they did and what their successors are doing, now that their party no longer controls the executive. Not an easy challenge, then or now.

  2. Fred Laan on July 7th, 2009 4:43 pm

    McNamara was a very intelligent captain of industry and his material reorganization of the US army commands admiration. But in spite of his brilliance McNamara blundered many times in Vietnam, which makes his silence understandable.
    Twenty years earlier McNamara’s 1995 statement that involvement in Vietnam was a mistake would have been acceptable, but in 1995 it was hard to have respect for such a late conversion.

    To say: “But it is impossible to have any respect” however is too harsh an ordeal. And suggesting that McNamara is a scoundrel because the Nixon adminstration was considered a bunch of scoundrels by many, attacks the wrong person.
    What people tend to forget is that the real scoundrels were not McNamara or RN, but the leaders of Communism who were willing to sacrifice millions of their own people and misleadingly used communism for their imperialism.

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