War & Remembrance
Bacevich, A.J.
A.J. Bacevich WAR & REMEMBRANCE On not forgiving Robert S. McNamara F or most people who labor in the imperial capital, chance meetings with notables are a side benefit of the job. Not for me....
...Rather we allow him to roam freely among us, the awareness of his presence and his occasionally fleeting appearances rekindling outrage...
...That night I called on an old friend, another veteran of Mr...
...In Hanoi, an American ambassador has been warmly received...
...In the relaxed, prosperous summer of 1997, bitter memories about a distant war have become unseemly...
...For that, at least, I might have thanked him...
...tiness of the cold war to some vast misunderstanding now happily put to rest...
...He was lunching alone at a table for two in the Old Ebbitt Grill, devouring a fulsomely garnished hamburger, washing it down with a mug of coffee...
...Thus to stumble onto Robert McNamara two blocks from the White House feasting on a sandwich seemed to call for some action...
...Thus, by his own admission, McNamara had concluded by late 1965-that is, within six months of American combat troops first landing in Vietnam-that the war was unwinnable...
...Just two years earlier, my friend's only son-himself a young soldier of unusual promise-had been killed in a training accident at Fort Hood...
...But what...
...My friend and his wife had rejected altogether any thought of putting their son's death behind them, of "getting on" with their lives-at least so it seemed to me...
...Bacevich is executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C...
...It was a painful visit...
...Around Georgetown or Kalorama, no doubt, he remains "Bob...
...At home, the government busies itself with initiatives to perfect Bill Clinton's America: apologizing for slavery, saving children from the curse of tobacco, and eliminating the scourge of defective government-mandated automobile air bags...
...One imagines that he still attends smart Washington dinner parties...
...In our dizzily multicultural society, detesting Robert McNamara may be one of the few surviving remnants of a common civic culture, uniting citizens regardless of race, class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation...
...As a result, amidst the various knaves and bunglers who penetrated the war, he alone among officials at the very top saw disaster coming...
...He is an old man now, just turned eighty-one, his skin mottled and almost translucent...
...Flustered, I simply walked out...
...For those dedicated to the proposition that with Vietnam there should be no closure-no coming to terms, no letting bygones be bygones, no forgetting the bright hopes and dreams so abominably snuffed out-McNamara remains an irreplaceable sustaining force...
...After all, the market is up, crime and unemployment are down, and our fourth graders are doing us proud in math and science...
...Age has blurred and softened his features...
...Angry denunciation...
...Yet unlike the scapegoat described in Leviticus, we have not cast him into the desert in order to expiate sin...
...Instead, they had chosen prolonged mourning...
...In this household, to use the currently fashionable term, there had been no "closure...
...An offer to trade war stories...
...The McNamara who presided over the Pentagon as secretary of defense was also smarter than the rest of us: precise, analytical, and self-assured...
...Nor was there ever likely to be...
...From time to time, he graces some conference convened to consider weighty matters...
...They would not even for an instant let go of his memory...
...I did not know...
...The son's death had shattered the family...
...As self-anointed minister of national reconciliation, he parlays with former adversaries in Russia, Cuba, and Vietnam, as if to consign all the nas A.J...
...There, in the tall grass and the jungle, many would fall and the rest would return home to endure the sullen contempt of their fellow citizens, all to no purpose...
...In Bill Clinton's America, it may be bad form and it is no doubt ahistorical to persist in holding McNamara accountable for all of the dishonesty, hubris, and waste that was the Vietnam War...
...It is his peculiar role to shoulder the burden of guilt for Vietnam...
...El Commonweal 19 September 12, 1997...
...McNamara's war...
...By 1968, with the war having brought the nation to the brink of nervous collapse, McNamara simply moved on...
...He became a Judas goat, leading the unwary toward the slaughterhouse, resolutely shipping the lumpen soldaten to Southeast Asia...
...For those of us who served in Vietnam, McNamara remains a never-to-be forgotten figure...
...The world is (more or less) at peace...
...lucrative trade deals will follow...
...Night maneuvers, an unseen ditch, a moment of confusion inside a dark and crowded turret, and an Abrams tank suddenly lay upside down in a shallow pool of water...
...Yet singling out McNamara for peculiar responsibility serves a crucially important function...
...Driving back toward Washington that night I thought about my friend's family and again about my unsettling encounter with Robert McNamara...
...He was, as David Halberstam would write, "the can-do man in the can-do society, in the can-do era...
...Once the Judas goat who misled the innocent, McNamara has since become America's scapegoat...
...For all that, he remains instantly recognizable: the hair thinner but still slicked back, the eyes unmistakable quick, alert, penetrating-framed by the trademark rimless spectacles...
...Armed with that conclusion, he withheld it...
...Others were no less to blame...
...An insult discreetly uttered while passing his table...
...He became president of the World Bank, devoted himself to nuclear disarmament and other worthy causes, and finally, after decades of silence, published a "mistakes were made" memoir...
...Thus my surprise just before noon on a recent Saturday to come upon one of the most notable, if notorious, Washingtonians of them all: Robert Strange McNamara...
...Steadfastly loyal to his president, he betrayed everyone else...
...To persist was to plunge into an ever more costly stalemate...
...Outside of elite circles, meanwhile, he ranks among the most reviled living Americans...
Vol. 124 • September 1997 • No. 15
