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.)
