In Retrospect
McNamara, Robert S. & Mark, Brian Ban De
"Can anyone remember a public official with the courage to confess error and explain where he and his country went wrong?" —Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. from the dust jacket of In Retrospect N ow that...
...Not to forget John Stennis, Strom Thurmond, and the rest of the war-mongering Senate Armed Services Committee, all of whom wanted to bomb Hanoi back to the Stone Age, despite McNamara's 1967 testimony that "to pursue [bombing] would not only be futile, [it] would involve risks to our personnel and to our Nation that I am unable to recommend...
...Now, thirty rain seasons late, McNamara is back, taking Speer into uncharted realms of chutzpah—the word Schlesinger should have used...
...As a result, he writes, there were no officials, either at Foggy Bottom or Defense, with the slightest degree of "geopolitical expertise" on Southeast Asia...
...Speer would approve...
...The consummate Harvard Business School product: Whatever it takes...
...Having reviewed the record in detail, and with the advantage of hindsight, I think it highly probably that, had President Kennedy lived, he would have pulled us out of Vietnam...
...The result: applause all around, editorial accolades from the Post and Times, a huge jump in his Gallup numbers...
...Odds are that by the time this magazine goes to print we will all have overdosed on what Max Frankel touchingly refers to as McNamara's "aching conscience...
...So there you have it, in a nuclear nutshell...
...but, according to McNamara, all "the top East Asian and China experts in the State Department—John Paton Davies, Jr., John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent—had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria in the 1950s...
...But today I feel differently...
...He also believed that the end—Goldwater's defeat—justified the means...
...The Speer rule squared: first, mea culpa and get the PR benefits thereof...
...Still brown-nose after all these years...
...John F. Kennedy saw the world as history," writes the author of In Retrospect...
...Odious comparison, but what does this say of Lyndon Johnson...
...But, wouldn't you know, along came loyal Bob McNamara, baring his Sulka-covered breast to tell the world that he, not Kennedy, was the real culprit—he and Allen Dulles and the CIA, who, after all, had dropped the invasion into the new president's lap without so much as a warning label...
...In 1961 John F. Kennedy, after presiding over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, owned up that he was responsible—that is, confessed the obvious...
...Suffice it to say that in disgorging this cri du culot, McNamara manages to apportion blame for the tragedy of Vietnam with the same passion for credibility he gave body counts during his seven years in the Pentagon: • It was all Ike's fault...
...Because "Barry Goldwater took a hard line on Vietnam throughout the 1964 campaign," writes loyal Bob, Lyndon Johnson, ordinarily "a model of moderation and restraint," was driven to escalate the war...
...only to credit Speer for his shrewd discovery of the first rule of postmodern morality: Confession is good for the image...
...It was all Joe McCarthy's fault...
...from the dust jacket of In Retrospect N ow that you mention it, one comes immediately to mind—Albert Speer...
...He was truly a great leader, with uncommon charisma and ability to inspire...
...Even Albert didn't do tears, though he might have if encouraged by Diane Sawyer—the Ricki Lake of primetime—and told by his agent that one brush of a tear could be worth two extra printings...
...Back, and telling us what was really on his febrile mind in those glory years when he was dazzling his bosses as a number-cruncher and treating critics with that gelid disdain that the best and brightest reserve for land-grant college graduates...
...A cynic might say that the Kennedy White House Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...And what would Kennedy have done about Vietnam had he lived...
...After which, the good Secretary got on a plane and flew to his Aspen ski lodge—which, he discovered to his horror, was being picketed by antiwar demonstrators...
...The right-wing devil made him do it...
...orchestrated McNamara's grandstand performance with just that in mind...
...Second,] I saw no gain to our nation from speculation by me—or others—about how the dead president might have acted...
...I have been asked that question countless times over the last thirty years...
...then, let it be known that there were exculpatory circumstances...
...To be sure, that rule has been embellished since the Nazi Minister of Armaments applied it at Nuremberg, then turned it into royalties with his Memoirs...
...Contrition is good for the wallet...
...McNamara, incidentally, approved of war protesters—so he claims—though he was spared hands-on contact with any, save in one instance: "Jackie was indeed a glamorous woman," he writes of the IN RETROSPECT: THE TRAGEDY AND LESSONS OF VIETNAM Robert S. McNamara with Brian Van De Mark Times Books/ 414 pages / $27.50 reviewed by VICTOR GOLD The American Spectator June 1995 67 widow Kennedy...
...Not a one...
...And there come those world-historic moments when sycophants with courage must choose between masters...
...if Kennedy had lived, we would have had a leader with "the ability to stand back from an issue and see its broader implications...
...But what about the white hats, those who, had they lived, might—no, most certainly would—have done something to stop the slaughter...
...In any event, she became so tense she could hardly speak [and] suddenly exploded...
...So you see, when you got right down to it, Kennedy wasn't responsible at all...
...But she was also extremely sensitive...
...I could have sworn Dean Rusk once headed the Far East desk at State...
...Only that he, like Kennedy, is dead, but Kennedys are still around—senators, congressmen, rainmakers...
...Bad enough that Ike gave LBJ such advice on Vietnam, but he also left the White House, according to McNamara, with hints of "a certain inner satisfaction from laying a potentially intractable problem in Kennedy's lap...
...First,] the president did not tell me what he planned to do in the future...
...B ut wait: I fear I'm beating a dead, or in any case a swaybacked, horse...
...But that would discount loyal Bob's self-aggrandizing capacity to brown-nose his superiors, as he did Henry Ford II before becoming Secretary of Defense, and as he did Kennedy, then Johnson...
...He took the long view...
...Tears yet, on every talk show in America...
...She had grown very depressed by, and very critical of, the war...
...Not to equate the metaphysical bastardy of Hitler's chief technocrat and sycophant with that of Lyndon Johnson's...
...Eisenhower scholars Stephen Ambrose and Fred Greenstein to the contrary, beneath the façade of the Ike who refused to intervene in Indochina there lurked, writes McNamara, a bellicose madman urging Johnson to drop the Big One if that's what it took to win the war...
...It was all Goldwater's fault...
...It was the fault of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...turned and began, literally, to beat on my chest, demanding that I 'do something to stop the slaughter!'") E isenhower, Goldwater, McCarthy, the JCS—so much for the black hats, those McNamara now sees as having plunged the United States into the Southeast Asian equivalent of our own Civil War (with Ho Chi Minh, presumably, in the role of Lincoln...
...Thus far, I have refused to answer for two reasons...
...When it came to Vietnam, writes McNamara, members of the Kennedy-Johnson administration "found ourselves setting policy for a region that was terra incognita...
...Loyal Bob...
...In an imperfect world, he raised our eyes to the stars...
...President Johnson firmly believed that a Goldwater victory would endanger the United States and threaten world stability...
...So much for Ike's lousy advice, Joe McCarthy's purge of experts, that old devil Goldwater, the Strangeloves of the JCS...
Vol. 28 • June 1995 • No. 6
