Editorials:
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
McNamara's book Robert S. McNamara's repentant In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (Times Books), has exposed a national wound that has not healed, and could not, until he or someone...
...On one side, some supporters of America's longest war have reacted in fury to the McNamara bombshell: veterans' and POW groups, South Vietnamese expatriates, bereaved families...
...If there is one lesson this reaction to In Retrospect teaches, it is that the divisions of the Vietnam War will never fully die, for even when the nation finally takes responsibility for its mistakes to the degree McNamara has, the echoes of the war will touch our politics and our national consciousness...
...Watergate...
...Don't underestimate the power of nationalism...
...It is a personal tracing of the fault lines that lie between matters of state, loyalty to one's leaders, and the requirements of personal integrity...
...He thinks that cynicism is destructive, and he is right...
...On all sides, people are still fighting to "win" the war...
...Since its inception in 1946, SOA-meant to be a means of professionalizing and democratizing the military in those countries-has too often been an academy associated with torture and repression...
...Of 246 Colombian officers accused of human-rights violations, 105 are SOA alumni...
...But even then, it is a reply to a deeper, more silent, moving voice...
...When that recognition has risen to the power of speech, then and only then is reconciliation possible...
...Interviews, editorials, letters to the editor, TV debates have come even before people have read the book itself...
...Here, McNamara's book has much to offer...
...It was nominated for this year's Academy Award in the "Documentary Short Subject" category.bject" category...
...The New York Times-which disciplined some of its own correspondents for reporting the truth about Vietnam too early-was harshly and unsparingly critical of McNamara for his decades of silence...
...A skeptical vigilance is the price we must pay for democracy...
...McNamara wisely warns in an interview with Newsweek's Jonathan Alter (April 17): "Don't misjudge the nature of conflict...
...We have here an epic struggle of a bright and focused intelligence at war not only with the limits of knowledge but with the intricacies of the heart and the demands of the moral world...
...This year, budget cutters ought to do the job...
...It is a gift to his country: A nation still at war with itself, still in need of clarifying its vision, promise, and role...
...When and how can we act more effectively...
...McNamara's book Robert S. McNamara's repentant In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (Times Books), has exposed a national wound that has not healed, and could not, until he or someone of his rank and level of accountability spoke...
...Lee Atwater's use of the race wedge...
...On the other side, some opponents of the war have gloated over McNamara's confession...
...It requires the shattering of a self-imposed silence, a turning back, a necessary confession...
...McNamara's memoir is flawed...
...It was predicated on faulty assumptions about a country we barely knew and about the possibilities of unlimited American power...
...It was justified by larger, geopolitical policy assumptions-ones we still hail as having led to the end of the cold war...
...More recently, a Guatemalan graduate, Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, a reported CIA operative, is accused of torture and assassination...
...When can I speak the unuttered words that are choking me...
...To reread the official memoranda and documentation (see, for example, Vietnam: A History in Documents, 1981) issued by then-Secretary of Defense McNamara is to see McNamara's fabled quantitative intellect at work during the war years...
...Our policy was "wrong, terribly wrong," he writes...
...Nevertheless, he has managed to raise again, almost single-handedly, the questions that still haunt us: What was it that was so rotten about that undeclared war...
...For the choices that face us today are mostly about how a superpower democracy reacts to the threat of instability or the temptation to impress its will on the longings of others for self-determination...
...That is its importance for the post cold-war world...
...countless ethical investigations of congressmen, senators, cabinet members, and even presidents and Supreme Court nominees...
...These contradictory perspectives show why the man and the nation were pulled apart...
...Or that Kennedy, had he lived, would have altered the course of the war...
...has repeatedly sponsored amendments to end SOA subsidies...
...ET CETERA SCHOOL AID Instead of cutting appropriations for school lunches or college loans, Congress ought to cut one complete school: the U.S...
...Witness the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia...
...His book may not be a perfect act of contrition, but it is a courageous act...
...They are proposed even less often to nations or states by their leaders...
...taxpayers...
...but they help us understand McNamara's remorse, his overwhelming "sense of grief and failure...
...The crisply written communiques McNamara sent Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson on the prospects and progress of the conflict-recommending higher troop assignments than even Johnson was willing to order at the time-send a shudder when read in the light of McNamara's reconsiderations...
...Like "McNamara's War" (in which more than 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans died), McNamara's book has touched something deep and raw in the American psyche...
...For an award-winning video on the SOA, see Maryknoll World Productions' "School of Assassins" ($14.95,1-800-227-8523), an eighteen-minute film narrated by Susan Sarandon...
...How did we slip into the morass, at first supporting and then undercutting dictators of our own making in the South, and all the time disdaining the people of what Johnson called "that damn little piss-ant country...
...But to read them in light of In Retrospect is to witness a Janus-like spectacle...
...Don't overestimate what outside military forces can accomplish-they can't reconstruct a 'failed' state...
...In 1995, Robert S. McNamara has finally spoken the unuttered words of his heart...
...But President Bill Clinton got it right in his assessment of the McNamara memoir: "I do not believe that the book should be used as yet another opportunity to divide the United States....We should learn from what happened, resolve not to repeat our mistakes, honor the service of Americans, and go forward together...
...Why does it divide us still...
...And if Manuel Noriega (Panama), Leopoldo Galtieri (Argentina), and Roberto D'Aubuisson (El Salvador) have more in common than being graduates of SOA, it is their subsequent records of abusive power...
...Congressman Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass...
...McNamara, ever the public man, writes that he is confessing past failures now because they have contributed to a deep cynicism among Americans about their government...
...In 1967, Vietnamese monk and poet Nhat Hanh wrote, When can I break my long silence...
...Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia...
...These are questions rarely addressed "in open view" by public officials, and only in the quietest hours of the night by most of us...
...But it is not entirely misplaced...
...the contra war...
...Last year, Paraguay's police archives yielded a "confidential" SOA torture manual that, among other things, taught interrogators how to keep electric-shock victims alive...
...Repentance-whether of an individual or a people-is essentially and initially a unilateral act...
...Each year, SOA trains 2,000 Latin American and Caribbean soldiers at a cost of over $3 million to U.S...
...And don't act unilaterally unless the security of our country is directly threatened...
...Does he still believe, for example, that his and the nation's errors were "Not of values and intentions but [only] of judgment and capabilities...
...What did it do to us...
...Should we strive to be an honest facilitator or a self-appointed judge of the nations...
...Many conflicts of the future will be about nationalism...
...Repentance follows only after an individual-or a nation-recognizes that a deep self-contradiction lies within its being...
...But Vietnam was largely a nationalist war...
...So are 4 of the 5 senior officers who organized a notorious Honduran death squad, Battalion 3-16...
...In El Salvador alone, where fifteen years ago D'Aubuisson had Archbishop Oscar Romero assassinated, 48 of 69 officers cited for human rights violations by the 1993 UN Truth Commission were SOA graduates, including 10 of the 12 responsible for the El Mozote massacre and 19 of the 26 involved in the '89 murder of six Jesuits and two co-workers...
Vol. 122 • May 1995 • No. 9
