Robert S. McNamara, chief architect of the Vietnam War, is dead at 93.
At Hullaballo, dday has an interesting post up called “The Lessons of Robert McNamara,” discussing the 11 causes and lessons from Vietnam that McNamara laid forth in his later years.
We have so frequently bungled into conflicts, presuming our role in them when the other participants see it differently, making shortcuts while rationalizing ourselves as heroic, changing the rules if found to violate them, and controlling the message of moral rectitude rather than the actions. I find these cautions from McNamara to be crucially important, but even in my most optimistic moments I don’t believe America is even wired to live up to them.
Not only did we ignore them in 2003, we somehow managed to make most of the same mistakes in Iraq. It may seem a long time ago, but in the summer of 2003 people who thought we were making a colossal blunder were being called traitors. I suppose the trolls are still calling us traitors, but these days jingoism isn’t much of a selling point politically.
And while things may be less bad in Iraq, that crucial fact is that we are still there, and are likely to remain there indefinitely, despite what any politicians promise.
57,000+ dead Americans.
400,000+ wounded Americans.
Millions of families traumatized.
America torn apart politically and socially.
Hundreds of thousands, if not a million or more Vietmamese killed.
And all because Ho Chi Min and the Vietnamese didn’t want to be oppressed by the French. They did what any self respecting American would have done — fought to the death for their freedom and right to govern themselves.
Who gives a rat’s ass if McNamara is dead?
The world is a better place now that he’s gone. Just like the world will be a better place when ‘W’ and the rest of the Reagan Republicans are gone.
McNamara was an enigmatic and ambiguous character, and his 13th-hour criticism of the Vietnam War had a flavor of smoke criticizing the kettle for being black to it. I mean, here was a guy who peddled a war going around warning people to beware of guys peddling wars. However, he at least knew a shitpile when he saw one, which is more than anyone can say for shrub.
Poet Philip Larkin wrote that sex began in 1963. Actually, it was 1961, January. That’s when the kids and Whiz Kids with hair and testosterone came to town, and when old dull bald Eisenhower and his wife with Bettie-Pageboy bangs went back to the farm. That’s when sex began.
Robert McNamara, with flipcharts and probing, pointed questions and thrusting, pointed pointers was the brave new world’s most improbable and potent sex symbol. Camelot, 1961, was a party at which women, the best and the brightest, wanted to be seated next to Robert McNamara.
Then the war came.
The whole world was watching as strange Robert McNamara changed his spots or sloughed his cold skin or melted down (or whatever reptiles do) and became a reptile. Then he faded away.
Fog of War brings him back as a reptilian and equivocal Mr. Know It All. It creates for him Eleven Lessons, although God was satisfied with only ten and although McNamara himself had only a Ten Point Plan for saving the world from itself and from Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
Robert McNamara’s Eleven Lessons teach us nothing beyond the lesson painfully learned long ago that America was imperiled by entrusting power to a kid like Robert McNamara. They also raise old ghosts:
* McNamara playfully admits that his president, John Kennedy, won the presidency with a lie, the slander that General Eisenhower allowed a missile gap in the USSR’s favor. Harvard’s Kennedy was briefed throughout the 1960 campaign by friends from the CIA, which was saturated with Harvard elitists. The CIA was also saturated with the certainty that a Soviet-slanted missile gap was a lie. The CIA had that certainty because the CIA’s Richard Bissel, a Harvard elitist, had designed the spy plane that proved beyond doubt that Eisenhower had maintained American missile superiority, a superiority we kept until the progressive era of detente.
* McNamara recycles the Thirteen-Days mythology of 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis. General Curtis LeMay — not Khrushchev (who emplaced missiles and warheads in Cuba) or Castro (who wanted to launch them against America even after the crisis was “resolved”) — is the mythology’s designated villain. The mythology’s heroes are the Democrats who wrote the mythology. (Leftist Eric Alterman offers a necessary corrective and a truthful synopsis of the 1962 crisis in his recent book, When Presidents Lie.)
* McNamara seems to affirm Oliver Stone’s thesis that JFK, had he lived, would have drawn down his nascent Vietnam War and ended it. The problem with the thesis is that there were two assassinations in November 1963, several weeks before the draw-down was to begin. JFK was murdered on November 22 (Clue: By the Communist. With the Mannlicher-Carcano. In the Depository.) That was after another assassination that married America to Vietnam for a very long time. That was the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, America’s ally in South Vietnam.
Our Left effected the near-destruction of CIA-FBI coordination because our clandestine services may have been complicit in assassination attempts against avowed enemies of America. Even now there are whirlwinds of concern and firestorms of depair about plots against Cuba’s Castro and Chile’s Allende. About the murder of Diem, America’s feckless friend, there is silence aside from inadvertent occasions when someone like McNamara hints at what happened in early November 1962. Let me speak the unspoken and overwhelming question: Did John Kennedy or someone close to him order the assassination of an American ally, or permit it with a wink and a patrician nod? Inquiring minds want to know. Why don’t the leftists who write our history and our mythology?
Typical that big bad Jon recycles without attribution the spin that leftist media put on McNamara’s passing: pro forma mention of Bob’s bagging c. 60,000 Americans in a bad war, followed by a pro forma denunciation of GWB.
It’s the formulaic formula followed last night by NPR’s On the Liberal Media, which used a too-long discussion of the re-re-re-written ‘history’ of the Cuban Missile Crisis to discredit … GWB.
The first write of the Crisis by Schlessinger and Sorensen talked about JFK’s flawless mastery of the Ex-Comm’s wise men and his effortless mastery of Khrushchev: JFK stood tall and blinked the fat man down.
The final write of history has JFK standing tall against the wise men themselves, and having the brave wisdom to stand alone in accepting Khrushchev’s dirty deal, a missile swap that kicked NATO to the curb.
How dirty was the deal? The clowns of Camelot circled the wagons for 20 years and lied lied lied about a deal being made. When Adlai Stevenson at the UN had suggested a swap, early in the crisis, the testosterone Kennedys publicly ridiculed him as way too gay.
So how did NPR play this play? By saying how lucky we were in 1962 to have a smart man runnng things, and how unfortunate we were to be led after 9/11 by an idiot.
The problem, of course, is that the Cuban crisis was a direct consequence of JFK’s idiocy. With a smarter man in power, even Nixon, the crisis would not have happened.
McNamara may have been a “whiz kid”, but he was also one of the first examples of the problems with assuming that a “businessman” is better at operating government than a professional civil servant.
Kennedy wanted someone who could tame the Pentagon bureaucracy, and he figured McNamara, with his experience at General Motors, was just the guy. Perhaps McNamara could have made a decent under-secratary of defense in charge of procurement. But when it came to grand military & foreign strategy, he simply didn’t understand that it was his role to anticipate problems and provide his boss with palatable alternatives. Instead, he saw his role was to make wars (instead of cars), and he was going to make war in a bigger way than anybody had done before him.
The problem was, that entire nation was blinded by the idea that the entire world was gripped in a communism/capitalism dichotomy. The problem was, the world was an immensely more complicated place. Our knowledge of Vietnam was based primarily upon what the French and their colonial oversears (the Vietnamese-Catholic elite) told us. They told us that they represented the forces of freedom and capitalism, and their opponants, who were mostly buddist traders and peasants, were all communists. But what to us was an epic struggle between Communism and Capitalism was instead, in the eyes of the average Vietnamese, a civil war in which they were largly caught in the middle.
Most Vietnamese never bought our claims that capitalism equals freedom, because most Vietnamese were used to communal farming in small villages. They had been doing it for centuries, and were hard pressed to see it as being an evil infringement on their liberties. Likewise, they know from hard experience the “capitalists” as the local landlords and merchants who looked down their noses at them socially, and cheated them at any opportunity. Government agents were even worse, demanding bribes in return for the simplist of administrative tasks. The more the U.S. supported that government, the more we (in their eyes) stepped into the role of the French.
This failure of basic understanding of the nature of the conflict isn’t the only mistake we made, we made lots of other ones. But it was the overriding mistake from which we had no hope of recovery, as each attempt to only dug us deeper into the hole.
I’d like to blame MacNamara for that mistake. As a “whiz kid” with lots of access to information through which he could have educated himself, I would like to think that he could have done better. But given the fact that most Americans were wearing blinders at the time, it might be unfair to blame him thusly. After all, one of Lyndon Johnson’s last orders was to commission of study to figure out how we got into the mess in Vietnam. It took several years of research in classified archives to do so, the result being the famed “Pentagon Papers” which the Nixon administration tried so hard to keep from being published.
McNamara was at Ford. Everybody knows that. We know you mean well, rhp, but shit. When Steve starts in on the excellent Piper for Scott’s unusual tendency to be thoughtful, erudite and articulate, I immediately think of you: turgid, tendentious, and befuddled.
Have a nice day anyway.
@5 McNamara wasn’t from GM, but from Ford. Remember the cartoon in which the problem-plagued F111 fighter was portrayed as a “flying Edsel”?
Couldn’t have said it better about the drivel in 3 & 4 myself.
And the pooper is anything but excellent. Like you, bloated, pretentious and boring…
@3-4 Man, what are you smoking? What you barfed up reads like a bizarre admixture of G. Gordon Liddy, Lyndon Larouche and L. Ron Hubbard.
Oh, by the way…you have your pro forma head up your pro forma ass.
Is it merely ironic that the news of McNamara’s death comes while Obama and Medvedev are talking about nuclear disarmament?
Who’s this ‘we’ you’re talking about, white man? Or, as a very dear lady used to say, do you have a turd in your pocket?
The entire nation was blinded by the free-world/commie dichotomy or duality? Then explain 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960. Those were the years of Dien Bien Phu and after when the entire nation, led by truly wise men (i.e. Republicans) did not let JFK and his saber rattlers get us rattled into war.
When Eisenhower warned us in early 1961 about the military-industrial complex, his original intent was to warn us against the military-industrial-Congressional complex, specifically meaning those Democrats, such as pres-elect Kennedy, who lied about Republican leadership. And who killed Diem. And who lifted Vietnam from the footnotes to the front page.
(It’s said, without proof, that McNamara was Republican. It’s certainly true that Ambassador Lodge in 1962 was Republican. After 1000 days of JFK, Vietnam had become an equal-opportunity destroyer.)
Look at Vietnam now.. Like China, not exactly a libertarian paradise but nothing like a North Korea and not much of a threat to anyone to speak of..
I’ve only glanced at the Pentagon Papers but I can imagine the gist: WE KNEW IT THEN…
Will we ever learn??
You’re yet another reason to support the absolute separation of art and state.
You got a problem with my hair, @9? Think it’s kind of cool. Just like my totally cool review of old Sponge Bob himself. heh heh.
(signed, Butthead)
Eisenhower was already supplying cargo planes, weapons and other aid to the French, JFK just escalated things sort of the same way that Obama’s escalated Bush’s war in Afghanistan on into Pakistan.
Pentagon Papers: Vindication and validation of everything I barfed @4 and @5. The Pentagon Papers were/are a living memorial to Kennedy/McNamara foreign policy. The Papers (thanks, Dan Elsberg!) and their story.
The speculation about JFK’s complicity in the assassination of Diem is speculation, fueled by a mysterious gap in the historical records that far exceeds 18 1/2 minutes. It’s said that JFK groaned when he got news of Diem’s death in November 1963, and it’s suggested that our Catholic would never have countenanced the political murder of their Catholic. But it looks like JFK did just that.
(About what I’ve been smoking: only Lee’s sloppy seconds … seeds, stems, shit like that. And, to be fair and balanced, remember that E. Howard Hunt, during Watergate, tried helpfully to fill the gap re Diem’s death by forging and fabricating memos showing that JFK was indeed holding a smoking gun.)
Note my chronology, kirk. It starts with 1954, the year the French got their nuts cut. The point of starting the discussion with 1954 is to show that Eisenhower had six years to turn a Frenchless Vietnam into an American war. Beyond a few hundred advisors, the kind of military mission we emplaced even in countries like Liberia, Vietnam after 1954 and before 1961 was not a Vietnam war.
We rejected a Geneva-produced settlement that would have turned even Vietnam’s quasi-Catholic south into a fiefdom of Ho chi Minh, but we didn’t invade. Kennedy did that when Diem’s overthrow made Vietnam a de-facto American province.
Typo alert @ 15. Sorry about that and sorry about those.
Is it ironic that Bob dies while Obama talks arms control? Dunno. But I know it’s a tribute to Reagan, who ended the arms that JFK and McNamara began, that Obama can now talk about eliminating dwindling stocks of nukes.
Remember that Reagan was an abolitionist. He tried at the Iceland summit to get rid of every last one. A dangerously alluring but dangerous idea.
Yep, McNamara was at Ford, not GM. So sue me.
I just got an e-mail from GM telling me how my warranty may, or may not be, honored now that Saturn is being sold to the Penske group. I had GM on the brain, and not in a friendly sort of way.
Also remember the Ike sandwich. Ike came in with Truman’s bad war in Korea, and ended it. Ike went out while Kennedy and Kennedy and McNamara came in and while they lied about missile gaps and bomber gaps. Then the Kennedys started a war they couldn’t finish.
That’s the peril of turning over leadership of the free world to a kid and the kid’s kid brother.
The Pentagon Papers make it pretty clear that just about every decision which could have been made correctly was made incorrectly, going back to 1945 and Truman’s decision to refuse to recognize Vietnamese independence in favor of renewed French colonialism. This pushed Ho Chi Minh into an alliance with the communists (China and the Soviet Union).
Mistakes after that compounded one after another: supplying French forces in their fight against the Viet Minh, refusal to accept the Geneva accords, backing one petty despot after another in a vain attempt to counter Ho’s acknowledged popularity, creation of the home villages (which displaced millions of Vietnamese from ancestoral homelands into the hands of petty landlords in order to make more “defensable” villages), trying to create the equivilent of a Vietnamese national guard (which only ended up arming the Viet Cong at a time when they had little more than handmade shotguns and simple booby traps), etc.
By 1965 the situation had been so royally screwed up it’s a wonder that we were able to hang on as long as we did, a conclusion which most of the Johnson administration had reached by 1968.
But Nixon promised us a “secret plan” to end the war. A little over four years later our involvement in the war did end under the Paris Peace Accords, but only on essentially the same terms which the N. Vietnamese offered in 1968. And Kissinger recently admitted that both he and Nixon knew the S. Vietnamese government would collapse within just a few years anyway – they just hoped it would be under another administration. It happened earlier than expected, but it also happened under the Ford administration, due to circumstances which Nixon hadn’t anticipated at the time.
How’s that for clarity?
Or this: “just about” every decision that could have been made correctly was made incorrectly …
Glad you’re equivocal about all this, because there are few final answers, at least in the world we live in.
Oh well … too many typos, too little time. Gotta go say prayers for the salvation of YLB’s dark soul.
21 – Did you not support the same crazy neo-con policies under the last idiot? You know, the one who shuffled off last Jan 20?
I don’t care if a D or R is next to it – crazy is crazy. Misguided is misguided. A mistake is a mistake. When in a hole stop digging.
Pray for your own soul wingnut. You need all the salvation you can get. Your boostering of the pathetic, National Review-addled Pooper is evidence enough of that. I’m good on my own thanks very much.
re 3: “McNamara playfully admits that his president, John Kennedy, won the presidency with a lie, the slander that General Eisenhower allowed a missile gap in the USSR’s favor.”
If memory serves, he was running against Nixon, not Eisenhower.
Nixon must have been flabberghasted that a politician would lie. After all, in his successful run in ’68, Nixon made the forthright and truthfull claim that he had a ‘secret’ plan to end the war. Apparently, it was so secret, he could nor find clerance for his own knowledge of it.
23 Nixon was, to a degree, regarded in 1960 as an extension of his predecessor as the most recent Republican standard bearer was tarred with the “McSame” moniker. Not entirely accurate in either case.
@6 “Piper for Scott’s unusual tendency to be thoughtful, erudite and articulate”
Is it Comedy Hour already?
@19 “Ike came in with Truman’s bad war in Korea, and ended it.”
Yeah, with a truce that left the commies in possession of all of Korea north of the 38th parallel, and with a tense standoff along said parallel that continues to this day. I thought you wingers were against this sort of thing — declaring victory and going home with your tail between your legs, I mean.
Funny how a revolving-name wingnut comes in here and spews all about JFK and McNamara but has nothing to say about Nixon’s complicity in prolonging America’s useless and unprofitable war in Vietnam for several more years, or how all of that era’s Republicans were chanting for more war, more war. Also interesting how this troll overlooks the fact that the majority of America’s casualties in Nam occurred under Nixon and Kissinger, not JFK/LBJ/McNamara.
Le Pelletizer de Douchebag…
Here’s the thread title again…”Robert S. McNamara, chief architect of the Vietnam War, is dead at 93.”
Not everyone will diarrhea a thread or leave the thread full of useless pellets like you do.
YOU Are talking about DIARRHEA????
Stop. Stop before I hurt myself laughing at the very thought….
@26 The stalemate in Korea was perhaps the first in many motion-masquerading-as-action maneuvers that perpetuated the Cold War, and which have to this day maintained a bunch of unstable unfinished business in the Middle East. Among other things, this allowed the continued wartime funding of the aerospace industry to prime the economic pump from the 50’s onward. In other words, a state of quasi-war was maintained on both sides of the Iron Curtain because it was good for business.
In the 80’s, mismanagement by the Soviet leadership, Pope John Paul II and a lot of brave souls in Poland and elsewhere caused the Soviet empire to crumble, while Reagan took the credit. At that point, faced with the question of how to justify the massive subsidies to corporations that had been keeping the fat cats in caviar and the rest of us in Happy Meals, the Middle East/crazy terrorist brew has been kept stirred and bubbling instead.
Golly Liquid Farting Art, nice revisionist history lesson there@30. Of course you forgot Reagan and Bush the Elder sent real support. Even Time Magazine reported that Liquid Fart but somehow you forgot this. Got racetracks yet?
You can visit the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. You can read the National Security Council files there. You can learn something real instead of getting yo learnin from foolish places like TPM, or Media Matters or Daily Kos. Got racetracks yet?
Butt, Puddy suggest you stay stupid and enjoy those racetracks in your boxers or tighty whiteys! Puddy sees shit coming out of both sides of your alimentary track and it’s not impressive either way.
Puddy revisionist “historian” says:
Really! Care to document your ramblings? Oh, yeah – you forget to cite your so-called sources and when you do – they contradict your vapid opinions.
I don’t have the time to kick your uneducated butt again today.
Instead of having the Michael Jackson funeral on every channel, we should all be having a national party, celebrating McNamara’s passing.
Dresden fire bombing planned by McNamara.
Tokyo and a hundred innocent towns in Japan fire bombed under McNamara planning.
Hiroshima bombed under his personal control.
Nagasaki bombed under his personal control.
Personally chose Westmoreland (more kills means we win even if we wiped out villages of 100 and recovered one broken shotgun) to command in Vietnam.
Die Kissinger, die, the devil needs you to baste McNamara as he toasts in napalm and white phosphorus.
Number 5 war criminal in 20th century for murdering unarmed innocents. Stalin, Hitler, Chiang Kaishek, Mao, McNamara, then Pol Pot. I am sure that he was deeply troubled in his declining years for not being number one. All but Hitler died happily in bed of old age. Human race? Cheney is a choirboy compared to this super evil semihuman thug.
* My prayers for YLB’s dark twisted soul were anavailing. Please forgive.
* Korea: Stalemate was one of two options. The other was nuclear war. Credit Eisenhower with the wisdom to know the difference. Acheson, the kind of public-service pro rhp extols, goofed us into the Korean Police Action (no war declared by Democrat Truman’s Democrat Congress) and then couldn’t get us out. Note the similarity of the bad Democrat war of 1950-1953 to the bad Democrat war, undeclared, in Vietnam.
* Did Ike end Korea forever? Did Nixon end Vietnam well? Wrong questions. They probably did the best they could with the Democrat messes they were given.
* Nixon’s Secret Plan: Certainly looks like he had a successful and secret plan to use Vietnam as a wedge to pry apart China and the USSR. Give him credit for having the wisdom to correctly see fissures and fractures where Democrats saw monolith.
* McNamara at GM: rhp or rhp’s Wiki has probably mixed up Ford’s McNamara with GM’s Engine Charlie Wilson, secretary of defense when Ike ended Truman’s Korean War.
* Etc.
Funny how fuzzface could claim without irony that Ted Kennedy was straight-arrow straight about Mary Jo Kopechne’s death in 1969, that wonderful year when Nixon was trying to end a Kennedy war.
Does Rabbit really believe as he implied that there was no Kennedy cover-up and no Kennedy payoffs? Perhaps Rabbit was so preoccupied with huffing napalm and fragging lieutenants that he was oblivious to stateside reality.
Or perhaps Rabbit, like many or most liberals, reflexively makes excuses for Kennedy crimes. (Read Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh to get a clue.)
Dickless wonder NutsTooTight asked this whopper:
Foolish tool, Puddy already told you it was Time Magazine, a libtardo magazine. Search for it moe-ron!
BTW still smarting over that TPM smackdown eh? Kicked your ASS all over on that one. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahahahahahaha How did Puddy know…? Cuz you are too predictable. You drink kook-aid first then read later.