I used to see him in the Army and Navy Club in Washington, the one on Farragut Square. He lunched there until he was well into his eighties. I was always surprised at the emotion that the sight of him brought to me. Overwhelming sadness, grief, a desire to avert my eyes from someone who was complicit in so much heartless cruel foolishness, these feelings always welled up.
I understand that he felt remorse, remorse for the Japanese cities that he helped Lemay destroy with the firestorms the B-29s were so good at creating. The Japanese were despicable in much of their conduct in that war, but no population deserves what they got.
And then there was our war. You know who you are. This mathmatical prodigy had it all figured out. He and his systems analysis and operations research "children" worked it all out on blackboards and primitive mainframe computers. If there were enough "inputs," then by a date certain, the "output" would be North Vietnamese surrender. I have been told many times that the date certain produced as prediction by these methods arrived sometime in 1967 or 1968. I forget which. I was told that before I left for Vietnam the first time. The problem in his reasoning was that those little NVA buggers in green fatigues and fiber helmets were not calculating the costs and the benefits. They gave it all, all they had, as many of us did.
And for what? For what? I hope God forgives Macnamara. pl
Pat,
Thank you for the heartfelt firsthand perspective. As a candidate wiz-kid from the post-Vietnam era (if I can be so immodest), I am only glad that I both lacked the natural math skills and then had the instinct to walk away because it was, to be frank, intellectually seductive…
In fact, I just sold my copy of Mary Kaldor’s The Baroque Arsenal that along with James Fallow’s National Defense and personal experiences were salutary influences on me in the late 70’s and early 80’s…
All I can wonder now is whether the armies of sociologists and anthropologists are not subverting a constructive (re)consideration of COIN in the same way that the pure technocrats and military-industrialists have consistently tried to remove the human-factors from the tactical and strategic analysis of warfighting.
PS: I really started this comment with the simple observation that I had just learned that McNamara’s middle name was “Strange”…
… and it’s too ironic to comment further.
Col.
I feel much the same as you do.
I can never forgive him for what he did.
Personal note: Really beautiful writing, Colonel.
I remember watching parts of the “Fog of War” documentary a few years ago and wondering if it wasn’t partially a mea culpa, as though a light finally came on in his later life.
Agree w/ you, may the Good Lord have mercy on him.
A good man seduced by mathematics?
I don’t.
Sigh. I remember.
Any time you hear something like this, you are most certainly listening to a charlatan.
And it doesn’t make a bloody bit of difference whether they are using antique IBM 360s or the biggest baddest massively parallel supercomputer available today or some quantum computer 50 years down the road.
There is a large class of problems whose outcome cannot be predicted by anything you can build. Even if you have precise governing equations in hand. And that inability, itself, can be mathematically demonstrated.
That’s just the very uppermost highly visible tip of the vast sunken iceberg that this sort of confidence game founders on.
Nice post.
I’m too young to have the personal feelings forged in Vietnam expressed here, but I second the comment on “Fog of War”. I hope you’ve seen it.
I saw Macnamara on the Orange Line one day in the early 2000s, late in his eighties, NYT under his arm, quite self-contained and obviously on his way to a few hours in a personal office.
It was deep, sleepy summer in DC, mid-day, when the metro was filled with more tourists than locals. I remember being amazed at the scene, a car full of families on their self-improving, civic duty weeks in dc, on their way to the monuments and buildings for a taste of physical evidence of American history, and totally unaware of the old man with the hat, the coat, and the newspaper who personally represented more of the American Century, for better and for worse, in their midst.
McNamara was a character worthy of Shakespeare. He caused enormous pain, and it caused him enormous remorse, which he openly acknowledged. His public confession made virtually unique among the countless Washington power mongers, who never have the decency admit to their crimes. Or perhaps their psyches are so warped that they are oblivious to their crimes. Among these, Rumsfeld and Cheney head the pack. Even worse is John Kerry, who learned the lessons of Vietnam and then promptly forgot them when it became politically convenient to do so.
As a nation we could do worse than eulogize McNamara in the context of lessons learned–that great power invites great abuse and can lead to great, often untold suffering. Above all, the lessons of McNamara’s life should be required reading for all Washington politicians and high government officials, particularly those involved in setting defense and foreign policy.
I was glad he lived long enough to realize what he had done, somehow to come to terms with it & die peaceably. I wish every fool, tyrant, petty dictator & most especially George W & Dick long lives, and for precisely that reason. Time is the greatest solvent of all.
Stormcrow:
Furthermore, did his whiz kids input the number of draftable northern bodies and a guesstimate on reverse polarity Chieu Hoi’s (from ranks of ARVN/Ruff-Puff), still to be thrown at the Allies?
Not to mention, how long they could keep doing so?
Did they also plug in a timeline when LBJ would tire of Gen. Westhisface’s rosy, lighted tunnel prognostications, and shut the door on further US troop commitments?
GINGO…I bet our audience here could come up with a host of other factoids that were not input, notwithstanding the Historical and cultural differences.
Hey, MJ: Who counted the bodies?
fasteddiez
“Chieu Hois from ranks of ARVN/Ruffpuff?” What are you talking about?
i was there.
don’t BS me. pl
I went back and re-read your “General Jones Delivers the Mail” entry because you wrote they didn’t want a Vietnam/Iraq mess.
I don’t think McNamara deserves all the blame for Vietnam. Did Nixon get us out any sooner? Johnson knew we wouldn’t win, whatever win means. Surely Nixon knew also.
An eloquent elegy, Colonel.
And I have to second David H’s interpretation of a man “seduced by mathematics”.
In that sense, McNamara was perhaps the first of many, including the current incarnation of Wall Street mathematics mavens.
Unlike Rumsfeld, McNamara at least realized and admitted his terrible mistake. In “The Fog of War”, I found McNamara equally thoughtful and tragic.
Too bad our era’s Best and Brightest didn’t learn from him. Instead, today’s dangerous Whiz Kids are not economists but anthropologists.
Let’s also not forget the buck stops with LBJ who pushed the war and Nixon for prolonging it.
AA
I do not accept the notion that all America’s wars are ignoble.
Your insinuation that the HTS program is ignoble is not one I would accept any more than I would accept the notion that my family’s long service in the US Army is ignoble. pl
My comments are not about what is ignoble but rather what is strategically sound. Don’t confuse the two issues.
None of America’s wars are ignoble. Vietnam and this current war in Iraq, however, were strategic mistakes.
Similarly, HTS is not ignoble but futile and strategically flawed.
My comments are not about honor but about strategy, which, after all, is something McNamara failed to grasp.
Of course, your service (and my family’s service) is noble. It’s still okay in this country to be critical of strategic decisions of our political leaders without challenging the nobility of our military’s service.
I’m not exactly sure how, but he eventually took on contrition quite willingly.
Would the Vietnamese say “Kam an Ung” or “He beaucoup dinky dao”? (My apologies if I didn’t get that right. No posing. I was a lightweight in country)
The shades of many who predeceased Secretary McNamara have undoubtedly been waiting a long while for this moment.
You hope God forgives McNamara?
Do you likewise hope he forgives everyone else, yourself included?
Did McNamara personally dream up and advocate for the Vietnam War? It’s so convenient, and so typically American, to find something/someone to hang all our collective guilt and failings upon.
So it seems that McNamara is the fall guy, the national whipping boy.
America collectively owns the Vietnam War.
Unlike McNamara Generial Giap is willing to criticize his country’s political leaders:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/world/asia/29iht-viet.html?_r=2&ref=global-home&pagewanted=all
91B
I own my piece of the war and am proud of it.
AA
Serving soldiers do not have the privilege of determining what is strategically sound. Your comment is irrelevent. The Secretary of Defense has responsibility towards all those for whom he exercises constitutional judgments. pl
As a metaphor I thought then and still do that the criteria of evaluation for the foe should have been Valley forge. If so we would have seen more clearly and acted more astutely. I am clear that the kids i buried from that war are still mourned by me.
Whenever I read about the passing of someone like McNamara I have a line from The Gulag Archipelago go through my mind. For what it’s worth then:
You have your Macnamara, and I have my Rumsfield, Wolfowitz, and Feith.
I don’t think the war and the enablers ever change, or the attitude by the civil “servants” that the soldiers are just so many playthings for their latest theories.
The anthro guys aren’t claiming to be able to predict squat.
But they do seem to have a fresh POV on an field of study, to wit, the study of war, that wrecks “rational actors” models with monotonous regularity. Most actors in most wars, from top to bottom, on both sides, are most assuredly not rational.
If anthropologists can shed some light on this most profoundly ancient, sinister and self-destructive activity of humankind, then more power to them.
I’ve always wondered if he had some responsibility for creating the ticket-punching mentality by introducing modern management techniques to the military.
Marshall and Ridgway weren’t shy about cashiering incompetents. That kind of behavior seems to have disappeared by the sixties.
Westmoreland (who himself was kicked upstairs) and his cohorts would have been 2nd Lts during WW II or thereafter. I wonder if they were trained as middle managers by the Whiz Kids and their methods?
FYI, here’s Joe Galloway’s take. I’m not sure he’s reached the heights of New Testament forgiveness yet.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/71328.html
I give Macnamara credit for his subsequent analysis of his mistakes and wrongheadedness, not that it absolves what he did. He was after all an alchemist among alchemists, plenty of which (coinestas) are still experimenting without regard to the list of misconceptions, hubris, and delusions that drove him on to failure.
Serving soldiers do not have the privilege of determining what is strategically sound.
True.
But the rest of us have the obligation.
I find it terribly consternating for my opinions on strategy and effectiveness to be constantly rejected, out of hand, by soldiers who declare my ideas “un-american”.
I would like to see as many soldiers come home as possible. I would like to see the swords turned to ploughshares. The US spends far, far too much money on weapons, and now, as we are on the brink of economic armageddon, we find that guns and bombs are the only thing of quality that our factories are set to build.
There is nothing ignoble in pointing this out, and nothing un-american in declaring that many — perhaps most — of the wars the US has involved itself in, these last 100 years, have worked against its best interests.
I’ve posted this comment elsewhere, but it’s especially appropriate here. It’s a small anecdote about Mac and numbers, but it tells you all you need to know about the man’s morals.
In 1965-66 my father was a USAF briefing officer at MACV HQ in Saigon. He briefed numerous visiting bigwigs, including the likes of VP Hubert Humphrey, and of course Mac himself.
One scandal that rocked the Pentagon at this time was the bomb shortage. This was long before smart bomb technology; we needed innumerable “dumb bombs” to blanket targets in the hopes of getting a hit. And before Vietnam ramped up, countless dumb bombs were dumped on the salvage market for pennies to firms that would convert them to fertilizer and scrap metal, that is until the war got going and they sold their stocks back to the Pentagon for megabucks.
Anyway, Mac wanted say the bomb shortage wasn’t affecting combat effectiveness, so briefers like my father were instructed to say that the same number of sorties (individual aircraft making a combat flight) were being flown.
Here’s how they did it. An F-105 could carry multiple bombs on its external racks. Some photos show them carrying up to 20 750lb. bombs, though the normal load was usually less, because of external fuel tanks, etc.
What wasn’t normal was sending F-105s to North Vietnam with just two bombs apiece. Yet Mac had absolutely no compunction about ordering this, exposing multiple aircrew and aircraft to loss when a fraction of the number could have carried the same bomb loads up North. He did so solely so that he could claim “the same number of sorties” were being flown.
Many people say Mac was smarter than Rummy. The point is moot. They were both depraved, willing to sacrifice countless lives on meaningless, unnecessary wars.
china hand
you are distorting the sense of what I wrote. I did not say or imply that you do not have the duty to critically examine national policies or strategy. to the contrary, everything I have written or said insists that you do have this duty.
What I said is that soldiers while serving do not have that right unless doing so is part of their job. pl
I respect your blog, Colonel, because you do encourage critical thinking here.
But i have family in Huntsville, Al, and all through South Texas (San Antonio, Beaumont/Port Arthur, Fort Worth/Dallas), and have much experience with this mindset.
It has affected the very root of our public discourse, and — in my opinion — will do much more damage in the coming post-Obama period.
Been clicking a lot of youtube from 60’s era and downloading video about McNamara. He sounds like Rumsfeld’s uncle. Definitely from different era, when the dinosaurs run unchallenged. I would hate to have him advising me in “real war” where the enemy has approximately similar weapon and analytical capability.
Is it me or he uses a lot of hair grease?
Also, he didn’t say jack about Iraq war when it obviously slides into “short adventure” into big budget protracted war.
McNamara’s long life is a silent tribute to the reality of the Viet Nam Vets studied example of teh rule of law, sense of Justice, Patriotism and ultimate respect for those who died by McNamara’s hand, both US and Vietnamese. Letting him live was simple justice and any number of Vets I personnally know could have killed him and probably thought of doing so to avenge buddies who died in RVN! McNamara was not a HIMMLER but there are certain similarities. He never understood his profound and deep ignorance of warfare or why men (and women) fight and the deep understanding of human fraility that sometimes comes out of warfare in the survivors. Oliver Wendal Homles (a civil war wounded vet and survivor) is reputed to have said “Beware Well-meaning Men Without Understanding.” No one fits this phrase like McNamara. I think David Halbestram’s book
The Best and the Brighest” best summarized the personalities and the period that led to the Viet Nam War and its collective and individual tragedies. But McNamara was also responsible for the operations research conclusions that led to bombing of civilian targets in Germany and Japan with that destruction also. JFK may have many successes and failures in his record, but the selection of McNamara and the attempt to “Manage” warfare (the least manageable of human activities in my opinion) and the Pentagon still costs the country dearly even now. That era was filled with those who belived fully in the “American Empire”(a term used by Chalmers Johnson and others)and even today too many decisions in Washington and the Pentagon and by Flag Ranks are based not on cold calculation of interests and competence but based on ego and hubris. McNamara stands atop the tower of ego and hubris that should be built to commemerate the viet Nam WARS except it should be built in a pit looking up at Maya Lin’s moving tribute to the US human direct costs of that event. I hope the death of this man is frequently mentioned in the halls of the White House and Pentagon in the context of whether a decision is driven by ego or hubris in the decider or something hopefully more rational. With the benefit of time we now know for sure that McNamara was not a rationale human being. That is his real memorial.
Colonel,
Every time that Macnamara’s name is mentioned, all my brain sees is ‘The Wall’. Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines….Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines…..Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines. May God Bless them one and all, Amen.
http://thewall-usa.com/
PL:
China Hand gets it.
I am talking about McNamara and civilian policy-makers. Reflexively, you want to take any criticism I make of civilian strategy as a criticism of our military. This smacks of the last administration’s tactic of labeling anyone who questioned the strategy of its civilian leaders as unpatriotic.
Who do you think comes up with or approves these bad strategic ideas like Vietnam, OIF, and now HTS? That’s right it’s the civilians. They are the ones that risk the lives of our military as well as waste the nation’s limited resources by undertaking these highly ambitious interventions and social-engineering projects abroad.
But don’t worry, with enough anthropologists we can solve any COIN and nation-building problem. In fact, history is on our side when it comes to COIN and nation-build. Everyone loves a foreign occupier.
Oops, maybe not.
AA
I have commented on other political blogs re: McNamara’s death, but I find it very hard to comment here. But will have a go.
Too much memory of the personally hellish grinding worry about my brother serving in Vietnam. And, as he says above, the results calculated as to be exactly what.
Less generous than Pat about where God might like Mack the Knife to finally land, he & his ilk.
Tyler
you clearly do not know anything about me if you think I do not despise all those you have named.
AA
I think you should not presume to tell me what I am thinking.
What is your specific beef with HTS?
How would you feel about the program in a context in which there are not a lot of US troops in the country? pl
great post Col. For what? As per one poet below:
Hugh Selwyn Mauberly [excerpt]
by Ezra Pound
V
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
I would sum up McNamara’s lihe this way: “There was madness in his method.” The problem is that while McNamara may be dead, his method isn’t. Witness one of his former whiz kids, Alain Enthoven, applying the same systems analysis madness to health care.
AA:
Reflexively, you want to take any criticism I make of civilian strategy as a criticism of our military
There are many words that I can think of that would describe our SST host.
Reflexive is definitely not one of them.
Please reconsider your assertions to that effect.
Col. Lang:
You wrote: “… soldiers while serving do not have that right [to critically examine national policies or strategy]”
What does this mean in practice? Is it an illegal activity? Surely people are entitled to their opinions.
One can elect to vote for this or other candidate based precisely on a critical examination of that candidate’s policies and strategies. In or out of the uniform.
If I recall correctly, there have been claims that the Union soldiers voting for Abraham Lincoln was critical to him winning in 1864.
Am I missing something here?
Babak
It is generally thought in the US military that serving service members should not publicly question the policy of the elected civilian government. To do so is to violate the principle of civilian control of the armed forces. what one thinks is, of course, one’s own business. pl
I only became aware McNamara other than as a face on the news when I watched Fog of War. With no personal or even intellectual stake in Vietnam, I’ve none of the legitimate anger expressed here. I’ve now seen it a couple of times.
It does seem clear to me, from the Fog of War, and from several other radio interviews recently rebroadcast, that McNamara was contrite. Seppeku mea culpa contrite, maybe not.
His message was that grievous mistakes were made, by humans, in a systemic way. He hoped to prophylacticly limn them for the future benefit of his country and citizens, whatever his culpability. He did seem irked at being bearded on moral questions, but because his individual culpability, however monstrous, was not central to what he believed the substance of that attempt to dispel the fog, however self-serving.
Remember Shrub struggling to recall a single mistake?
Given the impact technology and an individual like a Madoff, Kim Il Sung, Cheney or McNamara can have, I can’t despise him for sharing his reflections on his experience.
I heard him count the millions, he knew the numbers on both sides, appalled. However many political 2-bomb runs were ordered up 40 years ago, for what it is worth, he did not couch his apology in the current “IF I have offended any one. . .” mode.
So he’s at least one step up from those cretins in my moral taxonomy, however petty their crimes. And forgiveness, well, its blessing falls on the giver, can’t matter a whit to McNamara either way.
So I pray it falls on all of you suffering from McNamara’s actions.
When I was a young, many of the active duty officers I was aware of did not even vote, that was too political, too dangerous to their core values.
The part that has always bothered me with McNamara, is that i) he knew for a long time that his Vietnam policy was a failure, and did nothing and ii) there is nowhere, until his later years, the slightest indication, that he even perceived a moral issue, and then only in retrospect.
The Colonel is of course correct that active military members, while free to hold any view that they choose, are not free to act on those views. That is perhaps a blessing in that they are, and should be, “pre- forgiven” for participation in war, and their moral responsibility is seen in the context of honorable warfare, i.e. after the decision to go to war is made. Civilian leadership, on the other hand, is only responsible for the “go, no go” decision. Imagine what that decision entails for a moral human being?
To have made that decision without a great deal of thought, doubt and introspection seems the greatest betrayal of all. LBJ for all his failures, at least had the decency to be destroyed by the tragedies fostered by his decisions, but McNamara and most recently the Bush 43 administration, seem to have exempted themselves from that moral responsibility.
We now hear that Rummy reports that the collapse of Constitutional protections seemed to happen “all at once” and that there was not even a cabinet meeting to state openly whether members of the administration were for or against the Iraq war- apparently no real moral decisions were made, they were all too busy playing Army to fulfill their Constitutional roles.
I am curious why my prior comment about Mac’s manipulation of sortie numbers during the bombing of the North (vs. the number of bombs the sortieing aircraft carried) didn’t get past moderation. It was based on my Dad’s first hand experience as a MACV briefer in Saigon. Was there something wrong with it?
Redhand, beneath the comments on all typepad blogs there are little double arrows that get you to the next comment page or back to the one before. Your comment has been posted by the Colonel on the second page:
Posted by: Redhand | 07 July 2009 at 07:31 AM
People who don’t notice this often seem to feel censored. There is another item that is helpful for the reader. To the left there are columns. Beneath the latest posts by Patrick Lang himself you find a column showing you the latest comments. They are links and get you directly to the article.
Your comment was interesting. But it is always good to check first and get paranoid after making sure what one feels is true.
Here’s a small anecdote about Mac and numbers. It tells you all you need to know about the man’s morals.
In 1965-66 my father was a USAF briefing officer at MACV HQ in Saigon. He briefed numerous visiting bigwigs, including the likes of VP Hubert Humphrey, and of course Mac himself.
One scandal that rocked the Pentagon at this time was the bomb shortage. This was long before smart bomb technology; we needed innumerable “dumb bombs” to blanket targets in the hopes of getting a hit. And before Vietnam ramped up, countless dumb bombs were dumped on the salvage market for pennies to firms that would convert them to fertilizer and scrap metal, that is until the war got going and they sold their stocks back to the Pentagon for megabucks.
Anyway, Mac wanted say the bomb shortage wasn’t affecting combat effectiveness, so briefers like my father were instructed to say that the same number of sorties (individual aircraft making a combat flight) were being flown.
Here’s how they did it. An F-105 could carry multiple bombs on its external racks. Some photos show them carrying up to 20 750lb. bombs, though the normal load was usually less. What wasn’t normal was sending F-105s to North Vietnam with just two bombs apiece. Yet Mac had absolutely no compunction about ordering this, exposing multiple aircrew and aircraft to loss when a fraction of the number could have carried the same bomb loads up North. He did so solely so that he could claim “the same number of sorties” were being flown.
Many people say Mac was smarter than Rummy. The point is moot. They were both willing to sacrifice countless lives in meaningless, unnecessary wars.
McNamara lied to drag us into war. Lied. Made shit up. To advance his reputation and career. To win an election for LBJ.
The fact that he admitted his wrong late in life does not make him a tragic figure. Tragedy, in the true sense, involves fully understanding in a deeply spiritual way how a person has been betrayed by his weaknesses. It involves conscious awareness of the effects of one’s choices. Tragedy is not just an admission of guilt.
I have a friend whose wife told him, ”If you fool around on me, I dont want to know it.“ I told my friend, ”Well, that’s some deal.“ He said, ”But you need to know why. She knows me. She said ‘You dont get all the pleasure and I get all the pain. I want you to live with the fact that you can’t confess it to me. I want you to rot your guts out’.”
I sort of feel that way about McNamara’s confession. He got all the pleasure out of it.
Redhand, should have expressed thanks for that post the first time.
Smarter than Rumsfeld? More scrupulous, thus less efficient: he fudged his data; Rumsfeld and the makers of reality fabricated theirs.
How can one claim that the Iraq War is noble in any way? It is not. The “noble’ reasons promoted by the American media and both adminisitrations have nothing to do with the real reasons, whatever they were, for the invasion. The hundreds of thousands of dead and the destruction of the country’s society are not worth it, no matter what lies we tell ourselves. There is no noble reason for the death and destruction we have instilled there.
As for America’s other wars, there are many that were definitely ignoble. The repression of the Phillipines, our various adventures in Latin America (not full wars, but our soldiers were involved), much of the gneocidal Indian warfare, Panama, Grenanda. These are not noble wars in any way. That does not mean all soliders serving in such wars are ignoble, but the kind of blind patriotism you are promoting is in itself somewhat Un-American. Or at least, should be. Fear your government-and that includes the military
All
It should be noted that Brian M appears to be other than American. “He jests at scars who ne’er has felt a wound.” pl
Dear Brian M,
I have been reading SST regularly from its inception. Your charge that the author is promoting blind patriotism is bull shit to the highest degree. People that promote blind patiotism as you call it, are usually scoundrels.
Perhaps a strong dose of Teilhard de Chardin is in order for you.
Sir, I am your most humble servant,
Steve
Angry Aggie: Unlike Rumsfeld, McNamara at least realized and admitted his terrible mistake. In “The Fog of War”, I found McNamara equally thoughtful and tragic.
I just watched the documentary for the first time. It’s no doubt absolutely brilliant. But, maybe you can point out to me, what passages specifically made you perceive McNamara as thoughtful and tragic.
May I offer you my favorite passage? Fogs of War. Admittedly not a very good copy. But I’d suggest you go to 1:30:00 to about 1:37:00 and carefully pay attention to both what McNamara says and the images Errol Morris juxtaposes. And please try to blank out the admittedly tragic and quite brilliant music. If you can?
Angry Aggie: Too bad our era’s Best and Brightest didn’t learn from him. Instead, today’s dangerous Whiz Kids are not economists but anthropologists.
Could you tell me, a non-US nitwit, what exactly you think today’s Best and Brightest could learn from him? And who in your opinion they are? He feels a bit like an older brother of the neocons, would you agree?
Let’s also not forget the buck stops with LBJ who pushed the war and Nixon for prolonging it.
How do you interpret this?
Want to give you my impression after watching this documentary for the first time? The only pity this guy could ever feel is self-pity, and he is a moral coward. After watching this film I honestly wonder how the image of the turned McNamara, the repentant, McNamara could ever develop.
We must have watched two different documentaries.
One private final question. What makes you angry? And what exactly does Aggie connote, a redneck agrarian?
“For 14 hours yesterday, I was at work-teaching Christ to lift his cross by the numbers,
and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I
attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they
should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands mute before his
accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar
with the topography of Golgotha.”
Captain Wilfred Owen, The Manchesters
Killed in Action, 4 November, 1918
Poignant, that I believe McNamara understood this long before he left as he seemed a haunted man.
……….
Note: The quote from an earlier Memorial Day post by the Colonel.
McNamara didn’t do jack about Iraq war, when it clearly turned into prolonged war of choice.
He had some rambling op-ed in british newspaper during Bush heated media battle.
He is the exact, ass covering eyehole that he was, 40 yrs ago. Just doing his job for the man. Lesson learned and remorse my foot. Good documentary tho’ (not sure it’s going to last much longer once all the vietnam era papers are released.)
But at least he isn’t Colin Powell.
http://www.mideastweb.org/log/archives/00000136.htm
12/16/2003
In a recent interview with US News & World Report, Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara explained that he doesn’t feel it that it’s appropriate for him to comment on the conduct of the war in Iraq. But it’s not too hard to guess what he probably thinks, based on his own experiences and the conclusions he has drawn about them. In his unique 1995 book In Retrospect, McNamara listed eleven lessons from Vietnam that are very much worth reflecting on.
Pat Lang,
I concur with the opinion that we all own the Viet Nam War. The early 60s can be characterized fairly as an epoch of overwhelming hubris and that feeling, at least as I recall those days, permeated our society.
I think the two driving causes for the war were Johnson’s fear of being accused of “losing Vietnam”, as the Truman administration was of “losing China”, and the sense that we couldn’t fail if we put forth enough effort. The latter was a result of our being the only winner of the Second World War, the resulting prosperity, American dominance in technology and the arts, and all the rest of it.
I suppose the point I’m attempting to make is that McNamara, the Bundys, Rostow, Rusk and the rest of “The Best and the Brightest” were so associated with American dominance that, and given the political imperative sensed by LBJ, they were unable to do anything other than plough ahead. (Stay the course?) And, I must add, the Manichean view of the world, held by the large majority of Americans, also comes in for a large share of the blame.
As for Mcnamara’s numbers and statistics oriented approach to strategy, in a way it’s “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. One of Clausewitz’s earliest essays was a criticism of von Bulow’s theories on war and strategy in which he (von Bulow) postulated, in true enlightenment fashion, that it was impossible to lose a campaign if one’s forces were in the proper geometric relation to those of the opposing force.
WPFIII
Simonides epitaph to the Three Hundred:
“Go tell the Spartans, passerby, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”
How can anyone feel superior to such men and to those who survived with scars both physical and psychological? We should be grateful. It is the politicians and the nation that call the men to arms. It’s up to the citizens to understand the mechanics of propaganda and separate the lies from the truth and hold our leaders accountable for going to war. Undeclared war is a way for Congressmen to evade their constitutional responsibilities.
God certainly does forgive but it does not preclude punishment for ones actions. I was there when the USS Liberty was deliberately attacked. I was there that day that it was most likely McNamara that turned the help we needed around and sent them back. I tremble to even imagine what punishment will be handed to this man who took this to the grave with him. I feel nothing but sorrow and pain for what he will have to endure.
I am, and remain, a survivor
and the POIC of the body recovery and identificaton. I only wish he could see what he caused so that we wouldn’t embarass Israel. My life has been a twisted wreck because of being a part of recovering my own shipmates bodies. The ensueing coverup has only caused this nation even more pain and it will remain so until the truth is told.