Our Aging Faust
McNamara, Robert S.
Our Aging Faust In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam by Robert S. McNamara (with Brian Van DeMark) Times Books. NY. 414 pp. $27.50. Goethe called his works "one long confession."...
...The demonstrators by the millions marched, carried placards that read: u.s...
...To remain as Defense Secretary he had to ignore the incongruities between the trite expression of goals and the bestiality required to achieve them...
...It works...
...world position...
...One of his former associates said: "Poor Bob, he's carried this burden for so many years...
...Now, the Cold War over, victims and their relatives discover that had McNamara possessed the honesty, integrity, and courage to stop it, the war might not have continued past 1966...
...That is not what an imperial adviser does...
...Such cliches in defense of so much killing...
...Not just to free himself from three decades of accumulated guilt does McNamara use public space to simultaneously flail and defend himself...
...Few suspected that McNamara secretly agreed with their assessment...
...There was much that Marg and I and the children should have talked about, yet at moments like this I often turn inward instead—it is a grave weakness...
...Now that he's finally let his emotions spill out of their shell and onto the public's lap, he may feel better...
...McNamara's Bank meant progress, not damming nature to provide cheap power for multinational enterprises, making loans that made fragile Third World independence even more precarious...
...This emotional revelation offers insight into McNamara's moral learning disability, that ethical gap that allowed him to order missions of death without questioning his own integrity...
...McNamara, at times brutally self-critical, remains in his political thinking an unacknowledged imperialist...
...McNamara avoids the word "empire" to describe the U.S...
...McNamara's view of life as a series of successes and failures reduces history to short-term problem solving...
...But for the repentant but still strangely arrogant McNamara, it is Faust's words that should ring loud...
...Even Eisenhower admitted in his memoirs that had a vote been taken, Ho would have received 80 percent...
...The war could have and should have been halted, McNamara concedes, but he and other Johnson senior advisers failed to do so "through ignorance, inattention, flawed thinking, political expediency, and lack of courage...
...His memoir thus misses the very moral focus he desires because he cannot separate morality from notions of success and failure...
...That's life in Empire City, where nothing succeeds like failure...
...security was in fact ill-served by promoting such an endeavor...
...Eliot's "Four Quartets...
...He pressed on, "ravaging a beautiful country and sending young Americans to their death year after year, because they [the war planners] had no other plan...
...But unlike the robot accountant who cannot draw moral lines between what the figures dictate and human factors, McNamara understands that there is a choice...
...And I believed I shared some of these thoughts...
...Instead, McNamara expiates his guilt with a mea culpa...
...The aims are noble, but the strategy had little chance to succeed...
...The Great Administrator, who examined as if they were business reports the daily mounting body counts, the spread of antiwar protests, and the request for more U.S...
...But the depth of his evil still eludes him...
...McNamara strives for grace when he cites T.S...
...Bundy was a pillar of stability, one of the solid crowd of patriots and intellects that reinforced McNamara when he authorized "Westy" (General William Westmoreland) to send more troops and when he lied to the public by declaring he saw "light at the end of the tunnel...
...And last the rending pain of reenactment Of all that you have done and been...
...The next sentence should refer to a Pentagon request to use nuclear weapons, or reports on the increasing drug use by GIs...
...The worm am I, that in the dust does creep...
...I'm glad he wrote his personal testimony to the deceit of the past...
...McNamara acknowledges his doldrums over the loss of a colleague, but remains detached from the massive loss of life in "McNamara's War...
...Instead, the depressing event involves an original member of the best and brightest: "MacGeorge Bundy left the Administration...
...McNamara senses that his soul was at stake, but the glimmers of humane feelings that he allowed himself to acknowledge confronted a stronger, deeper commitment, one that cast a shadow over his ability to see right and wrong...
...troops to embark for Vietnam, recalls that "1966 began with an event that deeply depressed me...
...Indeed, McNamara's own family raised serious questions...
...The anti-war activists chanted, "Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today...
...But one must proceed with caution about the lessons he teaches us...
...McNamara presents himself as a morally strong man, but his memoir indicates he couldn't confront the inherent dilemma of making imperial policies inside a formal democracy, of using imperial reasoning inside a republican form of government...
...McNamara, now seventy-eight, wealthy, enjoying the privileges and comforts of the elite, does not offer himself for trial for crimes against humanity—barbaric deeds for which he is as guilty as the Nazi leaders tried after World War II...
...Torn between conscience over lost American lives (tens of thousands of people he doesn't know) on the one hand and his sense of duty to serve American power (people he knows and respects) on the other, McNamara chose power over conscience...
...Ironically, in recognition of his performance as Defense Secretary for Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara was appointed head of the World Bank...
...When Norman Morrison burned himself to death to protest the war in front of McNamara's Pentagon window as the Buddhist monks did in Vietnam, McNamara says he "reacted to the horror of his action by bottling up my emotions and avoided talking about them with anyone, even my family...
...But McNamara's memoir will only increase that cynicism and contempt...
...After making his business assessment that the war is unprofitable, McNamara makes his moral judgment: that it is therefore wrong...
...Defense Secretary in the 1960s and memoir writer in the 1990s, McNamara still gropes for the elusive coherence that can offer a graceful endgame for his life...
...Yes, lack of courage...
...Nevertheless, he continues, "this did not diminish my involvement in the shaping of Vietnam policy...
...I have grown sick at heart," he writes, "witnessing the cynicism and even contempt with which so many people view our political institutions and leaders...
...There is a logic of intervention that required top officials to insulate themselves, to place a wall between the questions that should arise when bombing missions are ordered, for example, against cities...
...another half-million returned with physical or mental war wounds that endure...
...Saul Landau (Saul Landau is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and the Transitional Institute in Amsterdam...
...So millions of Vietnamese died...
...As World Bank president, he defined his role as bringing development and allaying the burdens of Third World poverty, not running a bank through which giant corporations got roads built to bring raw materials from mines and plantations to port...
...McNamara is a moral schlemiel...
...He still believes "the United States of America fought in Vietnam for eight years for what it believed to be good and honest reasons...
...His book does not review the relevant history, 1945 for example, when the French stole Vietnam's independence, or 1954, when the United States nullified the Geneva Treaty and negated the will of the Vietnamese majority...
...the shame Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others' harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue...
...The purpose of the memoir, McNamara says, is to "put before the American people why their government and its leaders behaved as they did and what we may learn from their experience...
...to protect our security, prevent the spread of totalitarian communism, and promote individual freedom and political democracy...
...stinging President Johnson and McNamara...
...How will parents of dead soldiers or civilians, Vietnamese or American, feel when they read that as early as 1966 McNamara had become "increasingly skeptical of our ability to achieve our political objectives in Vietnam through military means...
...But the fact remains: McNamara gave the orders to kill...
...Compare Goethe's literary hero with our contemporary, aging Faust, Bob McNamara, writing "the book I planned never to write...
...McNamara sinned and seeks atonement...
...Faust saves his soul by making a great self-sacrifice, thus nullifying his contract with the Devil...
...But will the President's advisers learn from his memoirs that only the unscrupulous counsel the Crown without possessing the courage to demand the King change his erroneous course...
...He felt he could not confront the Cabinet hawks and then demand that President Johnson admit error and withdraw...
...His self-image is of the hard-headed fact man in the service of decent people, a member of a fraternity of trustees and gentry, in high command, from whose loyalty society achieves stability and integrity...
...McNamara does not acknowledge the interventionist logic because he doesn't see himself as an imperialist...
...out of Vietnam...
...This desire for psychic purging may have motivated him to write Faust, the allegory of every man's fight between conscience and a quest for power...
...Despite his deep doubts about the war's winnability (based on his assessment of numbers, body counting, and other military measuring instruments), McNamara continued to support it publicly because of his loyalty to the President and because he interpreted his constitutional oath to include obedience to Presidential dictates...
...Only in self-denial does he find fulfillment...
...This former automobile company CEO is heart and soul a servant...
...And he stuck with that choice for twenty-five years, until he saw the end of the Cold War as making it permissible for him to reveal his doubts...
...Poor Bob, indeed...
...He does not say that our nation should have had no interest in defeating an insurrectionary force in Vietnam or that U.S...
...His behavior cost millions of lives, led to the agony of prolonged war...
...58,000 Americans fell...
...I knew Marg and our three children shared many of Morrison's feelings about the war, as did the wives and children of several of my cabinet colleagues...
Vol. 59 • June 1995 • No. 6
