Robert Strange McNamara died today. The New York Times devotes thousands of words to justifying why McNamara should have been more a “dove” like today’s Times is on most issues. The Washington Post is only a bit more reserved in its thousands of words.
McNamara’s passing, however, in another take, does not end the Summer dreams that turned into national nightmares. Those nightmares are still being played out this Summer by President Obama and his advisors who recklessly pursue their lesson from Vietnam, to kiss up to our mortal enemies and to abandon our friends and those who rely upon the US as a bulwark of principled freedom.
In the Summer of 1964, we had incumbent President Johnson purposely downplaying the challenge in Vietnam of North Vietnam’s aggressions against the South, to further his election by gulling the electorate, while Barry Goldwater – painted as bringing on Armageddon in the Daisy political ad ranked as one of the vilest ever – spoke more plainly:
Make no bones of this. Don't try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam. And yet the President, who is Commander-in-Chief of our forces, refuses to say - refuses to say, mind you, whether or not the objective over there is victory. And his Secretary of Defense continues to mislead and misinform the American people, and enough of it has gone by….
Later in the campaign, “Goldwater said that the United States should do whatever it took to support U.S. troops in the war and that if the administration was not prepared to 'take the war to North Vietnam,' it should withdraw.”
Instead, we had McNamara’s incrementalism, meaning dribbling intermittent pressures onto North Vietnam, in contravention to military advice to cripple its logistics at their source in Haiphong and Hanoi, allowing Hanoi to adjust. The straight-shooting military logic of General Curtis LeMay, who led American airpower through WWII and built it after to preeminence, to bomb North Vietnam’s strategic targets til the “rubble bounces” was rejected.
President Nixon drew the lesson, as he spoke to some delegates at the Summer 1968 Republican Convention:
How do you bring a war to a conclusion? I'll tell you how Korea was ended. We got in there and had this messy war on our hands. Eisenhower let the word get out—let the word go out diplomatically to the Chinese and the North Koreans that we would not tolerate this continued round of attrition. And within a matter of months, they negotiated.
As Wikipedia sums up, “LeMay's theories were eventually proven correct.”
In 1972, Nixon ordered the blocking of Haiphong and aerial pounding of Haiphong and Hanoi, which ended Hanoi’s dithering over the “peace with honor” that ultimately wasn’t. Our post-Watergate heavily Democrat Congress refused to supply promised arms or air to South Vietnam, then overwhelmed by a massively supplied from Russia and China conventional invasion from North Vietnam.
After decades of silence, McNamara held to his turning against the costs of victory in Vietnam in his 1995 book In Retrospect. A review in the Washington Post:
It was McNamara's war in the sense that his Harvard Business School problem-solving methodology soon dominated American policy-making, to the general applause. The results, however, were confounding…. Mr. McNamara, in dismissing the possibility that America's Vietnam miseries encouraged Soviet adventurism, ignores Afghanistan, Central America, southern Africa and much else…. (As long as we're talking of who said what when: this newspaper was part of that resistance.) Nor does Mr. McNamara probe the cost of the war and finally of defeat to the South Vietnamese. They bled, died and finally fled in great numbers from a Communist regime whose totalitarian harshness made South Vietnam's corruption look like an afternoon at the beach.
There was such a thing as communism on the march. It was not a "misunderstanding." It was a threat to what deserved to be called the free world. The American people were indeed denied timely and full awareness of the illusions and evasions of the Kennedy and Johnson teams Mr. McNamara worked with. But Americans, understanding the basics, had for decades committed themselves to meet the challenge and to pay a price for it. For a reason--because it faced an armed takeover by an outside Communist regime--South Vietnam inevitably became a place where the confrontation was played out.
The United States conducted its Vietnam policy unwisely, not well. The result was terrible casualties, terrible human suffering. The McNamara book is and unrelieved narrative of how and why these things happened and its rewards pondering on this score alone. The book provides a cautionary tale that could be useful for people who are prepared to go beyond self-justifying into learning. Mr. McNamara fully earned his remorse. Retrospect reveals a rich map of roads not taken. But the losses were not futile. They were incurred in a larger, ultimately successful cause worth pursuing, if not in that place and in that fashion. Acknowledging that much is owed those who served.
(Also see this review in Commentary.)
It’s also owed to those who serve today, and those in countries being abandoned to the ministrations of ruthless despots. No, I’m not advocating the US bomb til the “rubble bounces.” (Although, Israel may have to, in self-preservation.) But, with Obama’s kowtowing to Iran and Venezuela's determined enemies of the US and their own and neighboring peoples’ rightful aspirations, Obama’s Summer of love, 1968 redux, is turning into another disaster. McNamara didn’t die today, so long as his misunderstanding of reality persists in the White House. Strange was McNamara’s appropriate middle name. Strange, or estranged from history’s realities, is Obama’s.
