The Stain of Vietnam: Robert McNamara, Redemption Denied

Can we honor and respect Robert McNamara? From the time the young California native left a teaching position at Harvard Business School to join the Army Air Corps during the Second World War, McNamara has been a tireless improver and rationalizer of military and industrial institutions, even of the world. But as Deborah Shapley makes abundantly clear in Promise and Power, her eminently readable and cleverly crafted biographical study of McNamara, what the nation needed during the Vietnam War era was not a whiz kid, not a supreme bean-counter, but a leader of vision, moral courage and scrupulous honesty. And here McNamara's flaws overwhelm a lifetime of achievements, for the portrait that emerges from Shapley's book is of a man who was the primary culprit in America's ill-fated military engagement, a historical assessment that is likely to stick no matter how many nuclear arms reduction speeches and articles he churns out. The McNamara story is one of tragedy, for a dedicated public servant and for America, fueled by our frustration that a man of such promise chose, out of a misguided sense of mission, not to tell the American people what he knew about the dim prospects for victory in the Vietnam War when it might have made a difference.

EARLY SUCCESSES

McNamara's government career began successfully; with a few notable exceptions, his record as President Kennedy's secretary of defense was exemplary. J.F.K. had campaigned on a platform charging that the Eisenhower administration's obsession with budget balancing had severely weakened America's conventional and nuclear military strength, and "flexible response" was the Kennedy administration's remedy to Republican policies. McNamara was seen by Kennedy as the ideal implementer of his program, a corporate manager with a well-established reputation for cost-cutting and efficiency to preside over the expansion of military outlays Kennedy's program called for.

McNamara's aggressive efforts to modernize the armed forces and make the Pentagon more efficient were desperately needed antidotes to eight years of laissez-faire management. Upon taking office in January 1961 McNamara immediately demonstrated nerve, mastery of detail and Kennedyesque vigor in trying to weed out waste in the armed services. What other Cold War defense secretary had both the common sense and the iron disposition to say, while in office, that "the military feels it has to have every bright shiny new gadget that comes along no matter how much it costs. I think we ought to buy what we need!" Meanwhile, from 1961 to 1964, he presided over the largest peacetime buildup in U.S. military history.

Following his natural bent for efficiency and cost-effectiveness, first displayed as a hotshot executive with Ford Motor Company in the 1950s, McNamara began his seven years at the Pentagon by refusing to spend funds appropriated for the development of the RS-70 bomber (the pet project of General Curtis LeMay). He went on to veto the construction of nuclear power plants for naval vessels; grappled with powerful congressional conservatives in an attempt to merge the National Guard and the Army Reserves; offered the Tactical Fighter Experiment contract to General Dynamics, even though the military selection boards favored Boeing; and seriously ruptured relations between Washington and London by cavalierly canceling the promised Skybolt mission. McNamara's ability to shrug off the collateral damage of his policies to domestic and international politics allowed him to be presented in a flattering light by the press. The more the public learned of his hard-driving intelligence during the Kennedy years, the more they liked him. From Shapley's account of McNamara's smooth performance during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis, one feels grateful that our nation had such a careful and pragmatic tactician at the Pentagon's helm. By August 1963, when the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed by Kennedy, Harold Macmillan and Nikita Khrushchev-an event Shapley wrongly discounts as of little consequence-McNamara was in top form, the most respected and powerful secretary of defense since the cabinet position was created in 1947. McNamara had his detractors then, but they were a cracked chorus of fiscal conservatives and disarmament liberals who saw through the image of penny-pincher and charged that the Kennedy administration's flexible response deterrence strategy, which increased conventional forces by more than 300,000 troops, was profligate.

Yet as Vietnam would demonstrate, McNamara was more of an accountant than a global strategist, more of a technical manager than a man of vision. It is a painful irony that the man who preached the gospel of cost-effectiveness for the nuts and bolts of military hardware failed to comprehend that the Vietnam intervention would become the least effective and most costly military venture in American history. Between 1965 and 1967, spending on the Vietnam War escalated from $1 billion to $20.6 billion. Robert McNamara, it turned out, was penny wise and pound foolish.

THE LEGACY OF VIETNAM