The Wrong Kind of Loyalty -- McNamara's Apology for Vietnam

As much as any other individual, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara personified the American commitment in Vietnam. He was "the can-do man in the can?do society in the can-do era," David Halberstam wrote in The Best and the Brightest, and during the Kennedy and early Johnson years, he managed America's expanding involvement almost as if he were a desk officer. Whether slogging through Vietnam in army fatigues, spewing out statistics to demonstrate progress, or presiding at a press conference, map on the wall, pointer in hand, he epitomized what came to be called "McNamara's war." Whatever the difficulties of the moment, he exuded a certainty that promised ultimate success.

In fact, as has long been clear, his public confidence far outlasted the emergence of personal skepticism, and McNamara's tearful departure from the Pentagon at the height of the Tet Offensive in early 1968, as much as Lyndon B. Johnson's March 31, 1968, speech, marked the inglorious end of an era once bright with promise.

As the war aroused growing controversy in the United States, McNamara became a major target for critics from both left and right. Ignorant of his muted, tightly constrained internal dissent, doves viewed him as the ultimate technocrat, whose blind faith in technology and statistics plunged the nation into a destructive quagmire. Hawks, on the other hand, denounced with growing venom his interference with the military and his refusal to give it the freedom and tools to win an eminently winnable war.

For McNamara, Vietnam became a source of great personal torment. He left office quietly in 1968, declining out of a sense of loyalty to his president to air publicly his grave doubts. From that day forward, he refused to speak of Vietnam, even when he resurfaced in the 1980s during the debate over nuclear responsibility. He broke his vow of silence only briefly, at the time of the Westmoreland?cbs trial and on the eve of the Persian Gulf War.

His completion of the book he "never planned to write" is as mysterious and characteristic of the man as his curious internal dissent against the war and his subsequent silence. He insists that he did not write to defend himself, and the results seem to speak for themselves on this score. His purpose, he claims, was rather to explain to the nation the reasons why its government and leaders acted as they did and to draw appropriate lessons. The fundamental question he raises is, why did the best and the brightest go wrong in Vietnam? Why did they make errors "not of values or intentions but of judgment and capabilities?"

DECLASSIFIED DOUBTS

In compiling this memoir, McNamara followed the example of his successor as Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford, in Counsel to the President. Rather than rely on memory, he consulted the documentary record, examining the vast quantity of recently declassified materials and some sources not yet available to historians, such as Johnson's tape?recorded phone conversations. He also brought in historian Brian VanDeMark to help him access that record and ensure that "insofar as humanly possible" he remained faithful to it. This method gives the memoir an air of authority that others lack but robs it of some personal reflection. Clifford compensated by offering sometimes shrewd retrospective judgments about people and events. True to character, McNamara only occasionally provides the insights that give the documents fuller meaning. He reveals little on the interaction of personalities in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the decision?making process, or the conflict with the military and Joint Chiefs of Staff that raged throughout his tenure and reached a crisis point in late 1967.

McNamara does shed new light on the origins of the bombing halt of late 1965 and his inception of the Pentagon Papers project, and he provides important new examples of the way Johnson in the last years of his presidency squelched internal dissent. He also provides some illuminating personal insights, especially on his growing disillusionment with the war. He admits, for example, the profound impact on him of the self?immolation of the young Quaker, Norman Morrison, outside his Pentagon office in November 1965, and he deplores the way he bottled up his reaction. He also admits that the impact of visits to Harvard and Amherst in 1966 led to his realization that "opposition to the administration's Vietnam policy increased with the institution's prestige and the educational attainments of its students." Johnson long suspected that his defense minister's dovishness derived from the sinister influence of Robert Kennedy, but McNamara recalls a dramatic encounter in which Jackie Kennedy literally beat his chest and demanded that he "do something to stop the slaughter." Though a private person, he speaks with remarkable candor about the effects of the war on himself and his family.

What is truly remarkable about this book, however, is the pervasive apologetic tone. For public officials to write memoirs to defend their actions is conventional, and McNamara does this on occasion, mostly on smaller issues. He continues to insist that the alleged second Gulf of Tonkin attack of August 4, 1964, "appears probable but not certain" yet presents no new evidence. He defends the much?maligned body count as a measure of progress in the war yet rejects charges that he was a mindless number cruncher. He also claims the much?criticized McNamara line, his project for an electronic barrier, helped reduce North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam.