Bill's Big Diamond Blog

Historic Vote

Finally, the historic vote came as healthcare reform passed in the House last night. Rep. Jim McGovern lauded Speaker Pelosi for "threading the needle" in pulling through a 220-215 margin for a truly significant change in American healthcare. Letting the abortion battle play out first seems to have been the necessary prelude to sorting out priorities in the Democratic Caucus and getting the votes needed in the "Yes" column.

As depressing as all our financial news is, this is a ray of sunshine in American political life. It's the first step towards truly important progress in an era when we seem too often to be merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. On to the Senate!

CBO Estimate Favors Public Option in Budget, Deficit Reduction

New CBO estimate sees public option as reducing deficit and coming in under Blue Dog proposal in budget impact. See CNN article.

Healthcare Debate— A New Option for the Public Option

As you no doubt know already, the public option as an essential element of healthcare reform has been under sustained attack.  Not only did the town hall Astroturf commandos decry the public option as part of a “government takeover” of healthcare, but soon afterward, the insider oddsmakers in Washington declared the public option dead-on-arrival, even as a substantial majority of the House of Representatives supported it, along with most Americans polled on the subject.

 While the public option would provide competition the private health insurance market currently lacks, it’s become clear that passage of it will be a monumental task in the Senate.  One way to do it would be by the same method President George W. Bush got both of his huge tax cuts for the super rich: by using “reconciliation,” a parliamentary procedure that bypasses the promised filibuster by the Republican minority.  While the reconciliation process has been used by both Democrats and Republicans, the current Senate majority and the President are reluctant to push through a monumental healthcare bill without any Republican support.

Other options to pass healthcare with either no public option or a severely hobbled version of it are viewed as a cop-out on the promise to truly reform the system.  With all the momentum gathered to pass a healthcare bill this year, it would leave tremendous disenchantment among supporters to end up with a bill that didn’t actually make the health insurance market more competitive and affordable for most Americans.  It would be particularly hard to explain to those who now lack affordable insurance and the easier access to care it provides.

There are those who argue that any substantial reform that includes the nationwide elimination of “pre-existing conditions” and moves towards full participation will eventually lead to a better system… over time.  They posit that what isn’t passed now will be easier to obtain once healthcare is viewed as a right by most Americans and the reform process continues over the coming years.  This position doesn’t address all those whose health is endangered today by a lack of healthcare or by poverty produced by a bankrupting experience with illness.

Now, there appears to be another option to pass a reform bill with a public option, but without the highest level of conflict— a public option with a state-by-state opt-out provision.  Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has posted some reasons to consider a public option with an opt-out for states that choose not to offer the choice to their citizens.  I’ll be honest, I haven’t explored comments on the proposal outside of Silver’s on the subject, but at first glance, it sounds like the best compromise short of a “clean” public option bill.  It has the beauty of leaving the workings of the public option alone (not hobbling it as other compromises would do) yet making it more politically palatable to Senators who fear voting for its inclusion universally.

As Silver notes, making the public option the ‘default choice’ would be a powerful way to encourage most states to remain opted-in.  The presence of the public option in most areas would encourage even conservative states to offer this alternative that would be available to residents of nearby states.  And the power of the public option where is would actually be in effect would be undiluted.  No hobbled plan to make the insurance companies happy.  The main attraction of the public option—the negotiating power to offer care at low rates— would remain.  

Perhaps this is the “magic bullet” necessary to pass a true reform bill.  Maybe not.  But meanwhile, outspoken progressive support for the public option remains the only bulwark between the insurance lobby and a Senate cave-in to their demands.

(Bill cross-posts at Buck Naked Politics.)

Florida Sunshine in the Healthcare Debate

Two of my colleagues at the other place I post, Buck Naked Politics, are based in Florida, the home of the dimpled chad.  For a decade, we’ve all been cringing when we hear they have an election down there.  Will they elect another member of the Bush family, or someone like Kathleen Harris, unable to discern the difference between serving the Bushes and performing her responsibility to voters?  Perhaps they’d send us another a moral-majority type like Mark Foley, leading one (creepy) life for himself and espousing another very conservative set of rules for the rest of us?  Who would Floridians send to Washington next?

 Well, thanks to Damozel and Deb, I’ve noticed that they’ve now served up a refreshing Florida surprise down there in Congressman Alan Grayson, a freshman Democrat from the Orlando area.  Perhaps the Sunshine State has spawned some real cultural changes over the last decade— and we may all be better off for it.  While most of the country is still sending timid negotiators or know-nothing naysayers to the floor of the Congress, Florida has delivered us a legislator who wants to focus attention on some basic realities about the battle for progressive change.

When confronted with a Republican chorus of “start over,” “no government in my healthcare,” and “let’s not rush into change,” Grayson decided after eight months in Washington to fight fire with fire.  He stood up in the well of the House and called Republicans on the content of their healthcare plans… or rather the total lack of any plan in their obstructionism.  He described the Republican plan in three parts:

 1- Don’t Get Sick

 2- If You DO Get Sick…

 3- …Die Quickly

Many media pundits quickly criticized Grayson for incivility and several Republicans took him literally, demanding hilariously to know when he had heard any of them actually asking particular people to die.  But, in truth, Grayson exposed the incredible double-standard that’s been at play in the healthcare debate, in which the Right simply calls the President names— and then twists reform into descriptions of ‘death panels’ and a looming Big Brother, while Democrats (with a few notable exceptions) turn around and defensively parry these outrageous statements with gentle rejoinders, charts, and graphs.  The effect of this dynamic is to make healthcare reform look unpopular and ultimately doomed, despite continued grassroots support for a public option and for real change.

One thing I’ve learned living in New York: when the people you’re fighting with stop fighting fair, you better take off the gloves too, or you’re gonna be lying in the gutter soon, wishing you had.  Grayson has spent the last week responding to calls about his attention-grabbing parody by citing just how dangerous it is to do nothing about our broken healthcare system.  It’s actually fatal to 4,400 people every year.  That’s right, people die in this country all the time because they have no insurance.  If we’re planning on waiting till every Republican is happy with a compromise plan, many more Americans will die for lack of health insurance—and that’s simply unacceptable, Grayson says.

Until now, the healthcare debate has featured passion on the Right and mostly compromise, vacillation, and gentle persuasion by reform proponents.  Congressman Grayson has just pointed out that in order to make change, it might be necessary to some people go away mad, so the rest of us can move forward and make a better America.  It’s way past time for us be disengaged while the reactionaries and talk radio celebrities grab headlines with pitchforks, placards, and shouldered shotguns.  If we want change, we better realize, as Grayson has, that it’s not gonna come easy, or gently, but only with resolve and a willingness to fight ignorance with truth— and backbone.

UPDATE— In the same vein as the post above, Paul Krugman writes today (Monday) in the NYTimes about the new position of the Republican Party:  attack anything that might look like success for the other side, no matter what ideological inconsistency might be necessary.  Scorched Earth.  The new black.   

(Bill also cross-posts at Buck Naked Politics.)  

Honduran Coup Losing Backers

For those who missed it, here’s a link to the latest news from Honduras, where in the name of their Constitution, the coup-installed President has suspended civil liberties and sent international negotiators home.  This, while troops are surrounding the Brazilian embassy, where the legally elected President is holed up, unable to speak through opposition media, which has been taken off the air.

 It seems even the business backers of the coup are having some second thoughts now…

LA Times:

Roberto Micheletti, installed after a coup, says ousted President Manuel Zelaya's return necessitated a restrictive decree. Earlier, the government shut down two opposition broadcasters...

Investigative Filmmakers Barred From China

Filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill were barred from visiting the Bejing Independent Film Festival this week.  The Chinese government denied the pair visas to travel to the festival, where they hoped to speak with audiences of their HBO documentary, “China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province.”  Their film follows the struggles of parents whose children were killed during the earthquake in the central Chinese province last May.  These children were among thousands who perished when approximately 7,000 substandard classrooms collapsed during the quake.

 The scandal that erupted over the deaths of the children has sparked a controversy that continues to rage.  The term "tofu-dregs schoolhouses" has now become a derisive Chinese name for the shoddy and corruption-ridden construction process behind the structures that suffered mass casualties of schoolchildren during the disaster.  See today’s NY Times article and the film’s site for more information.

(Cross-posted at Buck Naked Politics)

Facing the Post-Recession Future

Paul Krugman’s NYT column today on the federal deficit should be required reading.  We are still mired in a slow, high-unemployment recovery from the meltdown of 2008, but the world’s governments have helped prevent another Great Depression by spending on enormous rescue efforts.  However inequitable, those efforts are basically all that stood between the public and the precipice of total economic chaos as the financial system in the United States unraveled last year.

Yes, we should have spent our money more wisely— on taking more equity in the financial giants that caused the chaos.  We would eventually have gotten most of that back.  We should undoubtedly have spent far less on shortsighted tax rebates that didn’t help anyone significantly— and didn’t pump jobs back into the economy.  And finally, we might have been blessed with a quicker end to the Paulson Administration and succeeded it without a Rubin Redux team that keeps many of the financial system’s problem children still intact and in the money.

 But despite all its problems, it is still a recovery we are entering, not the free fall we were experiencing during the winter of 2008-9.  The Obama Administration and to some extent, the Paulson Administration (at least the Bernanke part of it) deserves some credit for that.  We’ve been saved from the worst.  Instead of celebrating the government’s bold intervention, however, we keep hearing a whining chorus on the Right that warns us that the federal deficit from that intervention is the bigger problem.  Yes, bigger than total economic chaos!

 Those who are worried about current deficits should read Mr. Krugman’s assessment of the levels of debt we now carry at the federal level.  They are not historically dangerous, but require a long-term vision.  They should lead rational people to address those areas of our economy that need streamlining— like the growth of percentage of our GDP we spend on healthcare and its administration.  Reforming this system, over time, will contribute to a long-term change for the better in our economy.  We need to take a deep breath and begin to rebuild, not panic with the birthers, death panel hallucinators, and the reactionaries who helped bring us the catastrophe of 2008.

 Yet we as a nation still have little stomach to face down these reactionaries and turn the page on them.  There is still great danger that we will return to the comfortable belief that markets will always find the most efficient solutions, even in the face of the most horrific evidence that markets can become completely irrational.  As a nation, this is a moment that requires maturity and a willingness to grow.  

Can we?

(Bill cross-posts at Buck Naked Politics)

Public Option Flowchart

Nicholas Beaudrot at Donkeylicious has put together a flow chart, based on a visualization by Chris Hayes, that helps keep the basics of the public option in perspective for the 200+ million Americans whom it will not affect in the slightest.  Many of these people will be the same people who are shouting about it at Town Halls across the country.

 Here is Beaudrot’s chart:  

The Town Hall Crowd

I see no real need for explanation here.  Watch:

Lives of Military Families

Over the years, I’ve written frequently about the war in Iraq and, less frequently, about the war in Afghanistan.  The role of our soldiers in these places is often on my mind.  As we sit, nearly eight years since the attacks on the US, it’s been awhile since the blog noted their situation.  Our military personnel are often sent back to war zones they’ve deployed to once or more already.  What’s also occurring is that back home, we all hear less and less about them, even as our soldiers’ lives become more and more synonymous with these endless wars.

 The families of the soldiers are similarly neglected in our popular culture.  Perhaps due in part to the nature of the all volunteer military, the majority of Americans don’t feel the impact of soldiers’ continued deployments. This is not true of their families, who are now often beleaguered and many stretched thin financially as they endure long periods when their loved ones are at risk in far away places.

 I’d like to recommend two sources of information about families and the soldiers they support, as well as a piece of work that is still in-progress. The first is a blog, well written by two journalists who happen also to be the halves of a military couple.  Their blog, Here and Far, comes from a uniquely interesting perspective on the experience of soldiers and their loved ones.  The “far” part of the couple, Matt Mabe, is a West Point-educated soldier who went on to journalism school after two tours of duty in the Army, started his career as a reporter, and was recently called back to Afghanistan.  His partner, Molly Birnbaum, also a journalist, writes back from “near” here in New York City or wherever her work takes her.

I also suggest readers check out a wonderful documentary film called “The Way We Get By.”  It focuses on three aging greeters of the troops, who welcome them back from overseas at the airport in Bangor, ME, where an enormous number of the flights bound from Iraq and Afghanistan first arrive in the States.  The film doesn’t begin in the lives of the troops’ families, focusing instead on these three Bangor residents who take it upon themselves to get up at all hours to greet our soldiers with a smile, some treats, and the potential to make a free cell phone call to their families at home.  I won’t spoil the film for you, but it does convey a good idea of what military families go through. 

 Finally, I’d like to make a plug for a friend’s film-in-progress, “Flat Daddy.”  This documentary will be expressly about military families.   It takes its name from the life-size two dimensional photographic images of the same name that have become popular avatars for the daddy (or mommy) who is serving abroad.  Using the visual theme of the images with which these families fill the void left by a loved one’s deployment, this film is studying the lasting impact of the wars on their lives.  There is a trailer on the film’s website.  Anyone wishing to follow the film’s progress or to make a contribution to its non-profit sponsor can do so as well.

(Bill Kavanagh cross-posts at Buck Naked Politics.)

Healthcare Reform Now

I’m a little tired of the stories about the righteous indignation of conservative America regarding healthcare reform and the “socialist takeover” of the country.  I can only conclude that these folks have been sleepwalking through the last year and have somehow been miraculously reanimated by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich as zombies for the health insurance industry.  The indignation thing ought to be the territory of the rest of us, who’ve been ripped off by conservative leaders and their corporate backers for years and left to fend for ourselves when we’re ill, uncovered, or changing jobs.

 A “socialist takeover” is the farthest thing from what’s going on.  The healthcare reform now under consideration is a mild form of universal care, which would neither fix all the problems of healthcare in America nor break the health insurance industry’s hold on our dollars.  We deserve better, but at minimum we need the public option pivotal to most current reform bills.  Apparently, that’s too much government for the insurance industry and the conservatives who cater to their needs, but the public option is about the only thing that will give many Americans without health coverage a chance to increase their access to care.

 A public option is also the only thing that will prevent the 14,000 people currently losing their health insurance every day in America from losing their access to good medical care.  Those of us who are woefully undercovered by high-deductable plans would also be helped by a public option, allowing us better benefits for our limited dollars.  The public option might also help spur more competition within the private insurance market, since companies now providing coverage would have to make their products attractive to consumers able to stack their benefits up against an plan that would not be looking to constantly increase profits.

 The other benefit of a public option would be its lack of incentive to disqualify customers for specious reasons.  One of the ways private insurers increase their profits is by denying coverage dollars to individuals for the most mercenary and small violations of the insurance contract or dragging decisions out to dissuade the individual from seeking an expensive procedure, putting themselves between the patient and her doctor.  A public insurer without incentive to deny benefits would be attractive to many and might be matched by health insurers wishing to remain competitive with it.  They might need to find new ways to show their policies actually are more worthwhile when the consumer really needs them!

 Another possible development in the wake of a public option’s advent might be to encourage the founding of more non-profit healthcare clinics.  Preventive public health care, now less available than it should be, would be much more cost-effective for poor families. This care is far less than expensive than untimely emergency room visits, which the poor often use for health crises left untreated for too long.  If coverage was not an issue for many Americans strapped for cash, we would be far more likely to seek out preventive medicine.  The increase in preventive care would also make hospital emergency room waiting times somewhat less onerous and allow for better emergency care.

 While the private market may be able to innovate and provide new ways of approaching coverage to make the average person healthier and less healthcare-poor, there is little incentive for insurers to do so now.  The healthcare system is broken for too many; we need more basic guarantees.  Americans want to stop making employment decisions and career plans based on health coverage.  We need to join the rest of the developed world in decoupling healthcare from specific jobs and employment— and make our best plans portable and continuous.

 In short, we need major progress.  Let’s let our legislators know that we aren’t part of the blind rage of the televised Right-Wing Town Hall mobs.  We elected a new President in part because he promised to reform healthcare, not in spite of that promise.  We voted for change last year.  Now it’s time to demand that we get some when it counts.

Heathcare Astroturf Uncovered on CNN- Watch

Rick Scott, the former chairman of Columbia Hospital Corporation, a for-profit chain of hospitals, is the founder of an organization called “Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.”  CPR (cute, huh?) is now funding protests like the ones we see at health care reform town hall meetings across the country—  at which Congresspeople are being shouted down, scuffles started, and people routinely intimidated by mobs of frightened birther/wingnuts.

 His campaign is coordinated by CRC Public Relations, the same PR firm that masterminded the 2004 Swift Boat campaign against presidential candidate John Kerry.  What’s more interesting, Scott’s own personal history in the healthcare industry shows how the current system can be gamed by those who would bilk the public.  Scott was forced out of the Columbia Hospital Corporation in 1997 by its board after being identified with massive overbilling and kickbacks for which the company ended up paying the $1.7 billion in fines.

 Here’s an encounter Scott perhaps didn’t expect with CNN’s Rick Sanchez yesterday.  Unfortunately for Scott, Sanchez had actually done his homework and uncovered the unpleasant facts behind Scott’s accumulated millions in the healthcare business.  Watch:

Walter Cronkite

The death of Walter Cronkite at 92 leaves Americans contemplating the changes in our media since his heyday as our preeminent television news anchor.  It is hard to imagine that we once looked to a network news broadcast as a digest of the nation’s daily experience, that one voice was ever regarded as, “the way it is.”  We have so many ways to get our news now, but none are so central to the American experience as the CBS Evening News was in Cronkite’s day.

 The first distinct remembrances I have of Cronkite are from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where he commented on Mayor Richard Daley’s security tactics against reporters by calling them “thugs” on the air and where he threatened to “pack up our cameras and go home.”  I also remember his coverage of the Apollo landing on the Moon, which was informatively detailed and yet still inspirational.  And finally, when the Watergate scandal began to wane because the facts seemed too arcane for most Americans to follow, Cronkite demanded, and got, a 22-minute, two-segment report on the nightly news to illustrate the money trail that led from Cuban burglars invading the Democratic National Committee headquarters directly to the White House and the Presidency of Richard Nixon.

 One of the ways to understand the profound difference that good television journalism made in Cronkite’s era is to reflect on his coverage of the war in Vietnam.  Cronkite was initially a proponent of the American escalation there, and his coverage of the war reflected his orthodoxy for a while.  But as his reporters began to bring back stories that contradicted the military and White House perspective on the conflict, Cronkite decided to go see Vietnam for himself.  After the 1968 Tet Offensive, Cronkite journeyed to the war zone and saw the protracted civil war for what it was, a stalemate that couldn’t be won by intervening American forces.

 As a respected combat journalist, not only did Cronkite’s on-air assessment strike a chord with a broad swath of the American public, but his reportage was apparently pivotal to President Lyndon Johnson, who decided shortly thereafter not to seek re-election in 1968.  Johnson told his press secretary, Bill Moyers, that if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost Middle America.  Negotiations with the North Vietnamese began shortly thereafter.

 It’s hard to imagine Americans, high and low, responding to a media figure today the way the country listened to Cronkite during the 1960’s.  The firewall between news and entertainment had not yet fallen at the networks— and there was a sense of pride among the CBS news staff that they were carrying a public trust— to present the events of the day to the nation fairly.  Cronkite was the voice of that organization and it was trusted to put journalistic standards largely above selling soap.

 Another part of the work Cronkite and his colleagues did was to unpack more investigative stories in long-form documentary shows, aired in prime time.  Pieces like “The Selling of the Pentagon,” which detailed some of the scandalous ways that military contractors used political connections and former military officers to get incredibly lucrative contracts out of the Defense Department drew huge audiences of American viewers and caused changes to be made in government policies.  One can’t remember Cronkite without keeping in mind the organization he had behind him at CBS.

 It would be worth thinking long and hard as we remember Cronkite about how we bring stories today to the public that the powers-that-be would still rather relegate to the backwaters of our media.  It won’t be through an organization at the major networks.  That day is over, as is Walter’s.  But it’s a legacy that should and must live on.  As we miss Cronkite, we should also remember that his standards should be his legacy to his country.

(Bill Kavanagh cross-posts at Buck Naked Politics.)

Tapping Our Economic Potential

Sometimes it’s hard to say you were wrong.  That seems to be the case for President Barack Obama when it comes to fixing the economic meltdown.  Understandably, his Administration misjudged the size of the financial catastrophe during the depths of the freefall.  Then, he presumed that making a compromise deal with the conservatives in his own party and with the Right Wing in the Republican Party on a stimulus bill would unify them, be enough to put Americans back to work—and more importantly, to pull the American economy back from the brink of extinction this winter.  It seems he was only one-third right.

Yes, we are no longer in free fall.  That’s a blessing.  But the tax-cut-ridden stimulus and relatively small measures taken to address the foreclosure tsunami at the beginning of the Obama Administration’s tenure have not restored our marketplace to anything resembling health and don’t look to be on the brink of doing so soon.  We could be in for continued months—or years— of crippling unemployment in an economy that continues to run in low gear, since the huge destruction of wealth that occurred during the real estate and banking meltdown will not be soon replaced.

So what to do?  The Obama Administration, and now the President himself in a Washington Post Op-Ed piece on Sunday, seem to think we should simply wait and try to enact his long-term proposals as envisioned prior to the meltdown.  We reform health care, enact education reforms to train the workers of the future, and we green the energy grid in the hopes that it will provide new employment and make for a healthier investment climate. 

Well, I’m for these planks in the Obama platform, but there’s a disconnect in the Administration’s thinking.  It seems that the President believes we can make the economy healthy again without first putting Americans back to work.  The President doesn’t address the wasted energy and drag on our recovery represented by allowing tens of millions of us to remain unemployed and underemployed.  Meanwhile, multinational business continues to look for the cheapest and most desperate labor forces on the planet to cut its costs.  This means that the U.S. could continue in a stagnant way, with jobs declining over the long-term, while capital moves to other regions where infrastructure is building up and where labor is still cheap.

One possible solution would be to put Americans to work while at the same time rebuilding our infrastructure for the long term.  It’s an idea that has been around for some time and has many backers among economists and in the business community.  For years, banker Felix Rohatyn and former Senator Warren Rudman have backed the creation of an Infrastructure Bank and the Obama Administration recently backed its creation in its 2009 budget proposal.  

But the kind of capital that a totally new infrastructure concept needs and which would make an enormous difference to the economy at this moment has not yet been put forward by the Administration (It has been supported by Senators Dodd and Hagel).  If the Administration were to back a program to rebuild America’s infrastructure with the capital and the vigor that the Eisenhower Administration put behind the Federal highway system or that the Kennedy Administration put behind the space program, we could transform the country quickly.  America’s aging and increasingly dangerous system of bridges, mass transportation, roadways, water projects, flood control systems, and waste treatment plants would be upgraded to meet the needs of the twenty-first century, employing millions in the process.  

What’s more interesting, an Infrastructure Bank would be authorized to multiply government funding by loaning money, or helping states and municipalities sell the bonds that raise money for appropriate projects.  This is a critical part of the concept, that the bank would be capable of leveraging federal funds, without resorting to enormously complex derivatives, to help government raise capital and spread the investments out over time.  It would help maximize the impact of federal funds.

An Infrastructure Bank would also help the Administration to meet the important challenge any huge spending project must contend with— oversight.  Presently, the hodgepodge of spending projects between cities, states, interstate entities, and the federal government on infrastructure projects lead inevitably to porkbarrel spending and to competing projects getting funding when only one project should go forward.  Having an Infrastructure Bank that would have to approve projects and would have a mandate to cut waste and duplication would help endure that federal money was well spent.  No Bridges to Nowhere!

While an Infrastructure Bank was starting up, the Obama Administration would be well advised to begin immediately preparing legislation to send funding to the states to help them overcome budget deficits and continue their infrastructure projects, while meeting their obligations to taxpayers in the midst of this Great Recession.  It will take some time to get the Infrastructure Bank set up and for it to begin taking the lead on projects around the country, but that’s no reason to let the economy founder until it is complete.  We can put America again at the forefront of the world economy, but we can only do it if we are willing to keep making an investment in our future and in the welfare of our people, not just in our mightiest financial institutions.

Perhaps the Administration doesn’t need to say it was wrong in order to make things right.  But it does need to adjust and to do so quickly.  Supporting new infrastructure efforts while aiding the states will show the Administration’s seriousness and account for our need to address the future— and the present.

(Bill Kavanagh cross-posts at Buck Naked Politics.)

Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara’s death this week at age 93 brings up a host of emotions that haunt most Americans of a certain age.  His role as the primary architect of American involvement in the Vietnam conflict during the 1960’s will be, despite all his other work, McNamara’s historical legacy.  Reflecting on that role also appears to have been the ethical shadow that preoccupied the latter half of McNamara’s life.

The decision to send half a million American boys to Vietnam in 1965 to fight a major Cold War conflict over a continuing civil war had consequences far beyond that country’s borders over the intervening decades.  The fierce resistance of the Vietnamese, a growing American domestic disillusionment with our involvement, and an increased press scrutiny of the escalation led to a decision by Lyndon Johnson not to stand for re-election in 1968, to the rise of an American political insurgency, to a questioning of an Imperial Presidency, and to the fall of many another American icon.   

The continued war effort after McNamara and Johnson, fought over years of drawn-out peace negotiations by President Nixon and his Vietnam guru, Henry Kissinger, brought forth myriad additional moral questions.   Their ‘larger’ goal— to put an American defeat at a ‘decent interval’ from a drawdown of U.S. troops—finally ended with 58,000 American and two million Vietnamese dead by time the war was over in 1975.  Many of those casualties were taken for peace terms that were already on the table in negotiations begun in 1968.

But despite the compounding crimes of the Nixon years, the Vietnam experience is forever stamped with the brilliant, but calculating mind of Robert McNamara, a young business leader with a background in military strategy and targeting during World War II.  McNamara was a rational numbers man—and everything about America in Vietnam was done by the numbers: casualty counts, troop strengths measured, tons of armaments dropped, dollars spent, lives diverted.  The problem was that the war wasn’t about numbers for the Vietnamese.  For them, it was about fighting for their country.

No amount of rational calculation would have helped McNamara arrive at the simple conclusion he finally saw by the time history had been written about the conflict: that no war can be understood solely as a mathematical and ideological enterprise.  The Americans had only been the last great power to realize that the Vietnamese would not stop fighting for their independence until they had won; Ho Chi Minh’s troops weren’t mainly a faction of a global ideological movement, but primarily a nationalist movement with an ideological and strategic connection to our global opponents.

McNamara’s War, as it became known, was unwinnable by a foreign power and to make matters worse, America’s chosen Vietnamese allies were the most corrupt and least connected to the people of all the forces at play there.  No amount of propping up the likes of Diem, Ky, and Thieu was going to change their distance from Vietnam’s peasants, who were doing most of the dying out in the rice paddies of the country.  But to McNamara, the war was seen as part of a global war against Communism, a beachhead in a greater battle for freedom.  His frame of reference was almost totally at odds with the reality of the situation on the ground in Southeast Asia.

There is evidence that even McNamara had private doubts about the whole adventure.  He claimed to have expressed them to President Johnson in a prelude to the escalation decision in 1965, asking the President to think twice about committing American troops to a jungle war a world away.  But in the end, McNamara fell prey to professional loyalty to the Presidency and the to the institutional belief that he could make a flawed policy work with overwhelming force.  In so doing, he became another of the many American leaders who put their Vietnam qualms aside to achieve a “larger goal.”

The two most important lessons to be learned from the McNamara experience in Vietnam are that war is to be waged only when it is forced upon us, not when it is optional, and that rational calculation is a sad second to a moral compass where matters of life, death, and country are concerned.  Anyone forgetting these lessons is likely bound to repeat the mistakes McNamara made in thinking that Vietnam could be won with numbers and that the Vietnamese would see their best interests in rational compliance with the wishes of a superior force.

Errol Morris, the documentarian whose important film on McNamara, “The Fog of War,” should be required viewing for foreign policy and government students, quoted a 1966 speech McNamara gave in Montreal in his obituary blog on the former Defense Secretary.  The way that McNamara chose to honor rationality and yet to implicitly acknowledge the massive failure men make when placing their larger aims ahead of the means used to achieve them is sadly evident in Morris’ chosen McNamara quotation:

“… 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.”

(Bill cross-posts at Buck Naked Politics.)