The death of former defense secretary Robert McNamara undoubtedly will be an occasion for rehearsing the main themes of his later years: contrition for his sins in managing America’s war in Vietnam as well as his minor role as a young man in the air campaigns against Germany and Japan.
McNamara may have entered the national stage in 1961 as a Ford Motor Company statistics whiz-kid but by the time he resigned in 1968, he was blasted for being the chief architect of a failed military strategy. The quintessential exemplar among the “Best and the Brightest” (as the title of David Halberstam’s book describes them) that invaded Washington during the Kennedy administration, along with fellow JFK holdover Dean Rusk at State, McNamara was reviled as the decade came to an end. He earned some absolution by spending 11 years at the World Bank fighting international poverty. In 1995 he repudiated the war only to have his plea for absolution rejected by New York Times editor Howell Raines in an editorial that was quoted in his obituary today in the same newspaper. He continued that campaign in Errol Morris’ documentary “The Fog of War” which allowed him to tell his story of failure and penitence.
But the problem with all of McNamara’s boo-hooing about his role in conducting the war in Vietnam and second thoughts even about the Allies’ strategic bombing in World War II was that he was apologizing for the wrong things.
It can certainly be argued that America’s decision to militarily intervene in Vietnam was a mistake because that country’s strategic importance did not merit the commitment of such massive forces. But the notion that the U.S. effort to defeat the Communist attempt to subvert and then conquer South Vietnam was immoral ignores not only the context of the conflict but the consequences of the eventual American defeat that was set up by McNamara’s squandering of years of public support on ill-considered tactics. It was once thing to denounce the war in 1968, quite another after the exodus of the boat people and decades of bloody Stalinist repression there after the North’s military conquest of the South once America had abandoned the country to its sorry fate.
It would have been far better for McNamara to spend more time apologizing for his inept micromanaging of the war effort that squandered American and Vietnamese lives on a massive scale. It was ironic that in his later years he curried favor among the liberal intellectuals by calling Curtis LeMay a “war criminal” for the massive bombing of Japanese cities in 1945. While in control of the effort in Vietnam, he attempted the opposite strategy, employing American air power in minute pinprick attacks on selected targets in North Vietnam rather than using an overwhelming conventional attack. His tactic of gradual escalation only convinced the North Vietnamese that the Americans were not serious about winning the war and inflicted no serious damage. The lives lost in this campaign were simply thrown away. The North was not brought to the negotiating table until McNamara’s flawed ideas were discarded. A more comprehensive air assault on the North at the end of 1972 brought our prisoners home and forced the North to accept an independent South Vietnam although they threw out that agreement as soon as they thought the time was right.
As for his retrospective criticism of strategic bombing in World War II, though LeMay’s tactics were brutal they were the best way to a bring a quick end to a terrible war. It would have been immoral to allowing the Nazi and Imperial Japanese war machines extra life because of our reluctance to hit the cities that supported their war efforts.
McNamara would have also done better to think again about the consequences of his 11 years at the head of the World Bank and its massive building projects in the Third World. Though it would be wrong to dismiss everything that institution has accomplished as meaningless, the truth is, most of the investments it made around the globe during his time as its head served more to reinforce the control of corrupt local elites than to aid the poor. Though supporters of such strategies continue to prey upon the guilt of the West, the impact of foreign aid on these societies has been decidedly negative with many if not most of the countries McNamara sought to help being far worse off today than they were before he started.
The verdict of history on Robert McNamara must be that for all of his brilliance his record was one of uninterrupted failure once he left Detroit for Washington. It’s a shame that his death will prompt a rerun of McNamara’s own wrong-headed evaluations of his career.
