The Stain of Vietnam: Robert McNamara, Redemption Denied

Flexible response, many historians have recently argued, was not only a miserable Cold War deterrent strategy, but a policy that vastly inflated the national debt and led to the Vietnam War. McNamara disagrees. He has countered that the Cuban missile crisis is a textbook study of how flexible response can work, and that just because Vietnam turned sour does not mean the strategy was flawed. Perhaps he is right. It was not the Kennedy administration's flexible response that inevitably led to the Vietnam War, but the Johnson administration's fateful decision in July 1965 to deploy troops in Southeast Asia. One may argue, not very usefully, that had Johnson not had such a large conventional force at his disposal, he would not have done what he did. The more compelling argument is simply that Southeast Asia was the wrong place to deploy them.

McNamara was from the beginning a true believer in the necessity of American intervention in Southeast Asia. "I think it is a very important war," McNamara wrote in April 1964, "and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it." McNamara got his wish. Historians, likewise, will always identify him with the Vietnam War, and since America failed to win it, McNamara will always be judged a failed secretary of defense, the man most responsible for what historian Paul Kennedy calls "strategic overstretch." What is worse-and it is a point Shapley implies time and time again-McNamara, a profile in courage during the Kennedy years, became during the Johnson years a bookkeeper of a military policy he knew was doomed to failure.

How can future generations of Americans learn to respect McNamara when historians like Shapley point out that as early as November 3, 1965, the secretary of defense knew that the Vietnam War was "unwinnable militarily"? As Shapley puts it, "he chose to deceive the American people by hiding the bad news while raising troop levels to 400,000, then 500,000, when he could have resigned, told the- 'truth' and stopped the American involvement."

Getting information about the Vietnam War out of McNamara is like pulling teeth, although Shapley occasionally succeeds. "I didn't want to bomb Hanoi; I didn't want to withdraw," McNamara told her. "I didn't have the answers. All I knew was we were in a hell of a mess." Yet even though he recognized "the mess," his knee-jerk Cold War response was that resisting communist aggression in Vietnam might be difficult, but the effort was necessary. McNamara had the opportunity to do the right thing, and salvage his personal and historical reputation in the process, in late 1967, when L.B.J. forced him to resign. Robert Kennedy pleaded with McNamara to speak out against the war, but instead of coming clean, McNamara, in Shapley's words, "retreated into silence, confusion, and remorse, which would propel him into his next life and world, in denial instead of self-knowledge."

THE DO-GOODER

Leaving government did not mean the end of Robert McNamara's public life. He went on to become the president of the World Bank, dragging Vietnam around like a ball and chain, particularly after the publication of The Pentagon Papers and David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, both of which tarnished his days overseeing the Defense Department. McNamara tried to repackage himself as the ethical good guy selflessly helping Third World nations launch green revolutions in the battle against global poverty, but to a growing segment of the American public he was the villain of Vietnam. If L.B.J. was seen as a tormented president, face buried in his hands, McNamara was Dr. Strangelove-the cold-blooded, calculating computer of death, speaking matter-of-factly in terms of "kills," "body counts" and "search-and-destroy missions." The more people asked for answers about his role in Vietnam, the more McNamara became aloof and silent.

The difficult question Shapley confronts is why an honorable man like McNamara seems to want to obfuscate the public record about Vietnam with evasive rhetoric and the artful dodge. For all her probing, Shapley elicits few illuminating insights from her subject, only a few confessional quotes:"The greatest failure of all was Vietnam." If it were not for the horror and futility of the Vietnam War, one might wish Shapley would just give up and leave McNamara alone.

The more McNamara equivocates about Vietnam, the more it will haunt him. His writings on nuclear issues will ring hollow until he stands up and confronts the war he wanted and lost. Whenever McNamara is asked about Vietnam, his stock answer is, "Let the historians sort it out." If he continues to remain silent, historians like Shapley will sort it out for him. The result may be that over time Robert McNamara will be seen less and less as an enigma and more as an ambitious and disingenuous political operator. That would be a pity, for despite it all, Robert McNamara is one of his generation's finest public servants.