Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Editorials with fangs
Comes now Robert McNamara with the announcement that he has in the fullness
of time grasped realities that seemed readily apparent to millions of Americans
throughout the Vietnam War. At the time, he appeared to be helping an obsessed
president prosecute a war of no real consequence to the security of the
United States. Millions of loyal citizens concluded that the war was a
militarily unnecessary and politically futile effort to prop up a corrupt
government that could neither reform nor defend itself.
Through all the bloody years, those were the facts as they appeared
on the surface. Therefore, only one argument could be advanced to clear
President Johnson and Mr. McNamara, his Secretary of Defense, of the charge
of wasting lives atrociously. That was the theory that they possessed superior
knowledge, not available to the public, that the collapse of South Vietnam
would lead to regional and perhaps world domination by the Communists;
and moreover, that their superior knowledge was so compelling it rendered
unreliable and untrue the apparent facts available to even the most expert
opponents of the war.
With a few throwaway lines in his new book, "In Retrospect," Mr. McNamara
admits that such knowledge never existed. Indeed, as they made the fateful
first steps toward heavier fighting in late 1963 and 1964, Mr. Johnson
and his cabinet "had not truly investigated what was essentially at stake
and important to us." As for testing their public position that only a
wider war would avail in the circumstances, "We never stopped to explore
fully whether there were other routes to our destination."
Such sentences break the heart while making clear that Mr. McNamara
must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen.
Mr. McNamara wants us to know that he, too, realized by 1967 that the
dissidents were right, that the war had to be stopped to avoid "a major
national disaster." Even so, he wants us to grant that his delicate sense
of protocol excused him from any obligation to join the national debate
over whether American troops should continue to die at the rate of hundreds
per week in a war he knew to be futile. Mr. McNamara believes that retired
cabinet members should not criticize the presidents they served no matter
how much the American people need to know the truth. In Mr. McNamara’s
view, the president can never become so steeped in a misguided war that
patriotic duty would compel a statement.
Perhaps the only value of "In Retrospect" is to remind us never to forget
that these were men who in the full hubristic glow of their power would
not listen to logical warning or ethical appeal. When senior figures talked
sense to Mr. Johnson and Mr. McNamara, they were ignored or dismissed from
government. When young people in the ranks brought that message, they were
court-martialed. When young people in the streets shouted, they were hounded
from the country.
It is important to remember how fate dispensed rewards and punishment
for Mr. McNamara’s thousands of days of error. Three million Vietnamese
died. Fifty-eight thousand Americans got to come home in body bags. Mr.
McNamara, while tormented by his role in the war, got a sinecure at the
World Bank and summers at the Vineyard.
So much has changed since those horrendous times. The nation has belatedly
recognized the heroism of the American troops who served in good faith
because they, in their innocence, could not fathom the mendacity of their
elders. But another set of heroes — the thousands of students who returned
the nation to sanity by chanting, "Hell, no, we won’t go" — is under renewed
attack from a band of politicians who sat out the war on student or family
deferments. In that sense we are still living in the wreckage created by
the cabinet on which Mr. McNamara served.
His regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books for our dead soldiers.
The ghosts of those unlived lives circle close around Mr. McNamara. Surely
he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers
of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by
platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time
apology and stale tears, three decades late.
Mr. McNamara says he weeps easily and has strong feelings when he visits
the Vietnam Memorial. But he says he will not speak of those feelings.
Yet someone must, for that black wall is wide with the names of people
who died in a war that he did not, at first, carefully research or, in
the end, believe to be necessary.
