Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Editorials with fangs
O f all the editorials I have written, I am proudest of "Mr. McNamara’s
War,’’ and I guess it comes closest to having been written in a white heat.
As I recall, I was going through my regular morning reading and came
across news stories and reviews of "In Retrospect,’’ a book by former Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara. In it, McNamara confessed that even as he and
President Johnson were prosecuting the war in Vietnam, he did not believe
that the war was either right or winnable. Out of loyalty to LBJ, he confessed,
he kept silent about his misgivings while the death toll mounted among
American servicemen and the people and soldiers of Vietnam. McNamara also
conceded that during the crucial years of 1963 and 1964, he and Johnson
had told the American people that the war was necessary for the security
of the United States without ever investigating if that was really the
case.
I read McNamara’s confession with a sense of disbelief. He was saying
that he had secretly agreed with anti-war protesters who saw the war as
strategically unnecessary, militarily unwinnable and immoral. I believed
during the war and I believe today that any claim for forgiveness by McNamara
and Johnson would have to rest on the claim that they believed they were
right. But now McNamara was saying that he had asked American servicemen
to die in a cause he believed to be hopeless and for a policy he believed
to be misguided. I was particularly offended by his expectation that he
should be congratulated for confessing that he had never believed in the
cause for which he had inflicted so much suffering on so many American
families.
I went immediately to my word processor and wrote a first draft in which
I tried to capture all the outrage that I felt. But I also knew that writing
from a well of passionate feeling has its dangers. As editorial page editors,
we speak for our newspapers, not just for ourselves. So after I finished
the first draft, I took a break and wrote a second, somewhat more deliberate
draft. When I got to the office I had my deputy, Phil Boffey, and the assistant
editorial page editor, Phil Taubman, take over the piece. I told them to
edit it as if I was not their boss. Taubman did the line editing and Boffey
signed off on the final version. While they worked on the piece, I went
through McNamara’s book to experience his account directly and to make
sure that I was being fair to his arguments and not reacting to distortions
that might have crept into news accounts or reviews.
I quibbled with Phil Taubman’s editing on only one point and got his
agreement to preserve some of the emotive language about American infantrymen
in the next-to-last paragraph. I’m proud of the final editorial because
I think it succeeds in speaking both for my own generation and for an editorial
page that was among the first to express reservations about McNamara’s
policies in Vietnam. I’m also pleased that I remembered that every editorial
page editor needs an editor. I think it’s a strong piece because it was
composed while my inspiration was at a peak. It is also a piece that got
better between first draft and publication because Phil Taubman and Phil
Boffey went over it before it went into the paper.
Raines is editorial page editor of The New York Times.
