In today's NYTimes, Bob Herbert has one of the strongest denunciations on Robert Strange McNamara I have ever read. I remember thinking the same thing after I read McNamara's book about Vietnam.
I remember McNamara's attempt to imply that his mistakes in Vietnam were similar to FDR's failed attempt to pack the Supreme Court of the United States. In those days, I wrote on the margins of every nonfiction book I read, arguing or agreeing with the author. I found very little to agree with in McNamara's book. I remember specifically writing on the margin of the page in which he attempted this, "No one died in FRD's attempt to pack the court. Perhaps 3,000,000 million or more Americans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians and Thai died as a result of McNamara's cowardice, and LBJ's and Nixon's war crimes."
I spent 4 years on active duty in the US Navy's Pacific fleet and another 4 years in the inactive reserve from Jan 1955 to Jan 1963. And I spent the years of 1964 to 1972 embroiled in the twin crucibles of medical school and an extremely busy ObGyn residency. As a result, I payed little attention the Vietnam until I completed my residency and the first 6 months of my extremely busy ObGyn practice. That all changed by Jan 1973 when I began to pay a lot of attention.
One of my great regrets is that I took no part in the protests against the war. I had several family members and friends who were involved both in the war and the protests, but much like the Civil Rights fights in the south, Vietnam slipped by me almost unseen. I am not proud of either.
Herbert writes:
After the War Was Over BOB HERBERT Published: July 6, 2009
Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s icy-veined, cold-visaged and rigidly intellectual point man for a war that sent thousands upon thousands of people (most of them young) to their utterly pointless deaths, has died at the ripe old age of 93.
Long after the horror of Vietnam was over, McNamara would concede, in remarks that were like salt in the still festering wounds of the loved ones of those who had died, that he had been "wrong, terribly wrong" about the war. I felt nothing but utter contempt for his concession.
I feel exactly the same, but Bob Herbert describes his contempt of McNamara much better than I ever could, because the kids who died in Vietnam were of his generation.
I remember getting my draft notice in the mid-1960s as Johnson’s military buildup for the war was in full swing. I’m not sure what I expected. Probably that the other recruits would be a tough bunch, that they would all look like John Wayne. I was staggered on the first day of basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., to be part of a motley gathering of mostly scared and skinny kids who looked like the guys I’d gone to high school with. Who looked, basically, pun intended, like me.
That’s who was shipped off to Vietnam in droves — youngsters 18, 19, 20 and 21. Many, of course, would die there, and many others would come back forever scarred.
My relatives who went to Vietnam, though none were killed, all came back emotionally scarred.
For what?
McNamara didn’t know. My sister’s boyfriend got shot. A very close friend of mine came back from Vietnam so messed up psychologically that he killed his wife and himself.
The hardest lesson for people in power to accept is that wars are unrelentingly hideous enterprises, that they butcher people without mercy and therefore should be undertaken only when absolutely necessary.
Kids who are sent off to war are forced to grow up too fast. They soon learn what real toughness is, and it has nothing to do with lousy bureaucrats and armchair warriors sacrificing the lives of the young for political considerations and hollow, flag-waving, risk-free expressions of patriotic fervor.
McNamara, it turns out, had realized early on that Vietnam was a lost cause, but he kept that crucial information close to his chest, like a gambler trying to bluff his way through a bad hand, as America continued to send tens of thousands to their doom. How in God’s name did he ever look at himself in a mirror?
McNamara himself went on to become very rich as the president of the world bank. He tried to heal the wounds of the war by using other peoples money to aid to poverty of the thris world by loaning money to dictators and criminals who stole billions from their people by placing much of these funds in Swiss Banks and leaving their countrymen holding the note. Hard to figure out anything McNamara really succeeded at in his life.
As The Times’s Tim Weiner pointed out in McNamara’s obituary, Congress authorized the war after President Johnson contended that American warships had been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. The attack never happened. As Mr. Weiner wrote, "The American ships had been firing at their own sonar shadows on a dark night."
But McNamara, relying on intelligence reports, told Johnson that evidence of the attack was ironclad. Does this remind anyone of the "slam dunk" evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction?
Neither Vietnam nor Iraq made our country safer. Did we learn anything from Vietnam? Not a hell of a lot.
And as Herbert writes,
Wars are now mostly background noise, distant events overshadowed by celebrity deaths and the antics of Sarah Palin, Mark Sanford and the like.
The obscenity of war is lost on most Americans, and that drains the death of Robert McNamara of any real significance.
Robert Strange McNamara, who lived a life of 93 years as a total failure.
Sounds like the life of George W. Bush.
