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Remembering McNamara's Hope for Peace


Robert S. McNamara expressed just months ago that he was hopeful about initial steps being taken by President Obama on nuclear weapons, but fearful about the nation's growing involvement in Afghanistan -- so much like Vietnam.
(1984 Photo By John Mcdonnell -- The Washington Post)

By Walter Pincus
Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Robert S. McNamara's last message to his wife, Diana, was typical, no nonsense. "No funeral/memorial service" was the way it began.

But he continued, "I leave this earth believing that I have been blessed with a wife, children and friends who have brought me love and happiness beyond compare." To this not-very-religious man, "Heaven . . . will be to remain in their hearts and memories as warm and close as we were in life."

My wife and I were among those lucky enough to be among those friends. Over 20 years, we had many dinners together, often followed by Kennedy Center symphonic concerts for music we all loved. A little over three months ago, at one of his last public outings, we had lunch together at the Cosmos Club with our wives. He was lucid but frail. Hopeful about initial steps taken by President Obama on nuclear weapons, but fearful about the nation's growing involvement in Afghanistan -- a situation so much like Vietnam.

Nuclear weapons and Vietnam were the way he and I first met, but back in the 1960s, it was in a totally different context. During an 18-month sabbatical from journalism, I worked for Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Over those months, then-Defense Secretary McNamara was first an architect of the successful U.S. response to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and, the next year, a proponent of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. In the fall of 1963, McNamara and Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor recommended a reduction of U.S. troops acting as trainers in Vietnam because they thought the war was going well and that -- another belief that turned out to be wrong -- they could use the reduction to force the leaders of South Vietnam to reform their government.

Later, however, McNamara presided over not just the buildup of the U.S. nuclear arsenal but also the enormous enlargement and public justification of the Vietnam War, actions that were destructive abroad and here at home. Those decisions in the 1960s haunted him until the day he died.

Initially, with his move from the Pentagon to the World Bank, he appeared to want to make up for a destructive past with a creative future. But those 13 years of trying to do good for the less fortunate around the world did not shake the demons still within him. Neither did the books he wrote or co-wrote about the war. Introspection took hold in the 1990s, as he tried to understand others' sharp criticism of his books, in which he initially disclosed his privately voiced opposition to the war while still at the Pentagon.

But it was in his interviews with filmmaker Errol Morris, which became the Oscar-winning 2004 documentary "The Fog of War," and during the many conversations he had with students who had seen the film, that he began to find peace with himself.

In the film, McNamara said, "At my age, 85, I'm at an age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions. My rule has been try to learn, try to understand what happened. Develop the lessons and pass them on."

"Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning" was one lesson headlined in the Morris film that has direct application to today. "What makes us omniscient?" asked McNamara, referring to Vietnam but also looking at the world then around him. "Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning."

In November 1967, McNamara presented President Lyndon B. Johnson with a memo that said: "The course we're on is totally wrong. We've got to change it. Cut back at what we're doing in Vietnam. We've got to reduce the casualties."

McNamara, in the film, said he told Johnson, "I know that it may contain recommendations and statements that you do not agree with and do not support," and added: "I never heard from him."

Thereafter, among rumors in Washington that McNamara was facing a nervous breakdown, the announcement came that he was leaving to go to the World Bank.

In another move that has echoes in recent years, McNamara said of his time with Johnson: "That's the way it ended. Except for one thing: He awarded me the Medal of Freedom in a very beautiful ceremony at the White House. And he was very, very warm in his comments. And I became so emotional, I could not respond."

In his last major article, titled "Apocalypse Soon" and published in Foreign Policy magazine in 2005 [the post to which this post is a reply], McNamara expressed his concerns about the immorality and danger of placing reliance on nuclear weapons as foreign policy tools. He particularly focused on the United States and Russia having the weapons on alert. Those arms "are potent signs that the United States is not seriously working toward the elimination of its arsenal and raises troubling questions as to why any other state should restrain its nuclear ambitions," he wrote.

In that final message to his wife, he summed up his hope of the future: for "others continuing to pursue the objectives which I have sought (very imperfectly at times) to move the world toward peace among people and nations and to accelerate economic and social progress for the least advantaged among us."

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070603771.html [comments at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070603771_Comments.html ]


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McNamara's Ghost


Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, passed away on Monday.
(Photo: "Fog Of War")

by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Tuesday 07 July 2009

Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he's speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He's killed people unnecessarily - his own troops or other troops - through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand. But, he hasn't destroyed nations. And the conventional wisdom is don't make the same mistake twice, learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the same mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five.
- Robert S. McNamara

One of the last knights of Camelot, of the New Frontier, is gone. Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, former president of Ford Motor Co. and the World Bank, husband, father and chief architect of America's catastrophic war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, passed away at home after years of declining health. He was 93.

"Mr. McNamara is best remembered and in some quarters still reviled for the seven years he spent at the Pentagon and the part he played in waging the Vietnam War," read McNamara's obituary [ http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2009/07/07/robert_mcnamara_vietnam_wars_anguished_architect_dies/ ] in the Boston Globe. "In 1995, he published his memoir, 'In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,' in which he wrote that he and other top officials were 'terribly wrong' to pursue the war. The controversy that erupted demonstrated the extent to which the nation's scars remained unhealed. Others can also be assigned responsibility for escalating the US role in the conflict during that time: Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. To many, though, it was 'McNamara's war,' as US Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon once put it."

The timing of his passing saw McNamara join a motley crew of notables and celebrities who have shuffled loose the mortal coil in the last two weeks. Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, Steve McNair; each of these luminaries got a share of media coverage - some more than others, of course - and McNamara was no different. Every major newspaper in America treated the death of McNamara as front-page news, and the only reason his passing was not part of the rotation on the cable networks on Tuesday was because they were very slowly burying Michael Jackson in Los Angeles.

Some other people also died in the last two weeks. Two International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on July 1. Three members of a family were killed by rocket fire on the same day. Two British soldiers and one American soldier were killed in Afghanistan on July 2. Another American soldier was captured. A Canadian soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan on July 3. Two American soldiers were killed on the Fourth of July. A US Marine and three UK troops were killed in Afghanistan on July 5. Seven US troops were killed in Afghanistan on July 6. In the last two days, five Iraqi policemen and two Iraqi soldiers were killed in Baghdad. Five more policemen were killed in Mosul. Thirty-eight Coalition troops were killed in June in Afghanistan, and 19 have been killed in the first week of July. In Afghanistan, 1,220 Coalition troops have died since 2001. Fifteen US troops were killed in June in Iraq, and 4,321 have died since 2003.

None of these people got the same kind of ink as McMahon, Fawcett, Jackson, Mays, McNair or McNamara, but they are just as dead. The passing of McNamara and the deaths of all those soldiers belong in the same column, because they are all part of the same long, sad, blood-soaked story.

Vietnam was an exercise in hubris, deception and profiteering that McNamara spent the latter half of his life trying to justify, live down and explain away. The soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan would recognize Robert McNamara, for they were consigned to the grave by McNamara's modern replacements. Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rove, Libby and the other Bush administration officials who ginned up two wars and made abject debacles of both are the modern inheritors of McNamara's curse. As are the soldiers and civilians who have been chewed up and annihilated. As are we all.

Robert McNamara taught us all we needed to know about the folly of war, about aftermath and about regret. Nobody listened, nobody learned, except for the dead.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1893956385/qid=1055796595/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/002-8359763-1225605?v=glance&s=books ]" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0745320104/qid=1055796595/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-8359763-1225605?v=glance&s=books ]." His newest book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0977825329/sr=1-2/qid=1155755822/ref=pd_bbs_2/102-5663939-2555327?ie=UTF8&s=books ]," is now available from PoliPointPress.

Copyright 2009 Truthout

http://www.truthout.org/070709R [with comments]


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“Wrong. Terribly Wrong.”



MDM
posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 1:21 pm

Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara is dead. He died in his sleep at 5:30 a.m. Monday. He was 93.

There is a monument dedicated to his military and geopolitical expertise in Washington, D.C. It is the Vietnam War Memorial. It lists the names of 58 thousand dead Americans who were sent to their deaths because McNamara - a former president of Ford Motor Company - was given the power to intervene (in whatever manner he chose) in a civil war in Southeast Asia that became yet another chapter in the insanity that was the Cold War.

In addition to the 58 thousand Americans, at least 2.5 million Indochinese - most of whom were Vietnamese - also were killed. All of these people - thousands of soldiers, hundreds of thousands of civilians - had their lives ripped from them as a direct result of the actions McNamara took in his dedication to the belief in the absolute primacy of American Corporatism and the need to force that belief on as much of the world as we could, no matter the consequences; no matter the destruction or the number of dead and crippled or the mentally destroyed.

By his own definition he was a War Criminal. Any action that is necessary to define that term - war criminal - was an action taken by Robert McNamara. From the fire bombing of Vietnamese cities and the subsequent murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians to the establishment of murderous “free fire” zones in the countryside, McNamara’s killing spree was without limits, without restriction, completely outside the rules of war so carefully crafted by the world’s “civilized” societies.

The curious can read McNamara’s biography here [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McNamara ]. However, his true legacy is to be found in American men now in their 60s who still carry the with them the memories of the war crimes perpetrated against yet another innocent country the United States decided to invade and destroy. His legacy also can be found in the monuments scattered throughout Vietnam - memorials to the death and destruction caused for no sane reason by the United States. Or in the hideous genetic deformities still occurring in newborns - nearly 40 years after the war ended in the worst defeat for the U.S. in its history - that are a direct result of the United States saturating Vietnam in a poisonous flood of the deadly herbicide Agent Orange.

The list of crimes against humanity committed by the United States in Vietnam is a long one. It is a list too horrifying for us to acknowledge. To do so would bring an end to whatever belief still remains here in our sad, broken country that the United States operated honorably during the bloody and war-eaten 20th Century. And we Americans are not ready for that - especially not now, not at a time when the record shows we have become a nation whose highest elected officials ordered the torture of men charged with no crime and given no rights in order to extract phony “confessions.” A nation whose leaders see nothing wrong in saturating yet another country with yet another toxic substance - this time explosives made with depleted uranium - that is already producing thousands of horrific birth defects and hideous cancers. So . . . there will be no acknowledgement, no discussion, no truth, no reconciliation. Not now. Maybe never.

Our century-long history of lies employed in the expansion of empire, crimes against humanity, wars of opportunity, and the wanton killing of millions of innocent civilians is a history in which Robert McNamara fits easily and comfortably.

©2009 MIKE MALLOY Radio Productions, LLC

http://www.mikemalloy.com/2009/07/07/wrong-terribly-wrong/ [with comments]


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Reading an obit with great pleasure

By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Monday, July 6, 2009

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
—Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)

Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.

McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.

Back in 1990 I had a series of strange phone conversations with McMamara while doing research for my book We Were Soldiers Once And Young. McNamara prefaced every conversation with this: "I do not want to comment on the record for fear that I might distort history in the process." Then he would proceed to talk for an hour, doing precisely that with answers that were disingenuous in the extreme — when they were not bald-faced lies.

Upon hanging up I would call Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam and run McNamara's comments past them for deconstruction and the addition of the truth.

The only disagreement i ever had with Dave Halberstam was over the question of which of us hated him the most. In retrospect, it was Halberstam.

When McNamara published his first book — filled with those distortions of history — Halberstam, at his own expense, set out on a journey following McNamara on his book tour around America as a one-man truth squad.

McNamara abandoned the tour.

The most bizarre incident involving McNamara occurred when he was president of the World Bank and, off on his summer holiday, he caught the Martha's Vineyard ferry. It was a night crossing in bad weather. McNamara was in the salon, drink in hand, schmoozing with fellow passengers. On the deck outside a vineyard local, a hippie artist, glanced through the window and did a double-take. The artist was outraged to see McNamara, whom he viewed as a war criminal, so enjoying himself.

He immediately opened the door and told McNamara there was a radiophone call for him on the bridge. McNamara set down his drink and stepped outside. The artist immediately grabbed him, wrestled him to the railing and pushed him over the side. McNamara managed to get his fingers through the holes in the metal plate that ran from the top of the railing to the scuppers.

McNamara was screaming bloody murder; the artist was prying his fingers loose one at a time. Someone heard the racket and raced out and pulled the artist off.

By the time the ferry docked in the vineyard McNamara had decided against filing charges against the artist, and he was freed and walked away.

© Copyright 2009 The McClatchy Washington Bureau

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/71328.html [with comments]


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and do see the other reply to the post to which this is a reply, and following, as well as the post to which this is a reply