For a major public official to admit profound error is extraordinarily rare, perhaps unprecedented, in American history. Of course, losing a war was unprecedented for the United States, too. But even failed efforts rarely yield apology. In his memoirs, Jefferson Davis could not bring himself to acknowledge major error by the Confederacy. And Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Who could have exited Vietnam in 1969 on the same terms they obtained in 1973 (more than 19,000 American lives later), never expressed the slightest contrition over their choices. McNamara is different.
He was always the most complex of the Kennedy men David Halberstam immortalized as the “Best and the Brightest.” As one of the legendary Whiz Kids, he helped resuscitate the Ford Motor Company in the 1940s and 1950s; the quintessential Organization Man. And the link was soon drawn between his deep faith in numbers and the perverse “body count” of Viet Cong dead. The standard biographic cliche continued: After leaving government, the brainiac with the slicked-back hair and reputation as a cool bureaucratic in-fighter became an emotional do-gooder-helping feed millions through the green revolution as president of the World Bank, preaching nuclear disarmament, weeping easily, shattered by Vietnam.
McNamara himself says gamely that he has not changed. “People today are seeing a different side of me because it Isn’t appropriate for me to be talking this way then,” he said in an interview last week, addressing the issue publicly for the first time (page 52). “Why did I go to the World Bank? Some people say it was for atonement, expiation. That’s garbage. I went there because I was fascinated by the development problem and wanted to accelerate the rate of social and economic advances of the billions of poor people in the world.”
The expiation theory robs McNamara of his subtlety -the weave of ambition, idealism, manipulation, duty. His friends say it doesn’t account for certain facts of his years at Ford, when he rejected the conventional corporate culture and pushed safety, or his early efforts within the Pentagon to teach thousands of military recruits how to read. Same do-gooder he always was, they say. His critics-often agreeing that he never really changed–point to the mechanical, memo-heavy quality of much of the new book. Same bureaucrat he always was, they say.
BUT THE NOTION THAT HE NEVER UNDERWENT A TRANSformation collapses under the weight of the war years and the almost Shakespearean torment. Anyone predicting in 1961 that Bob McNamara would one day cry publicly while admitting colossal error would have been laughed out of Washington. And the release he now feels can’t but be genuine. His research associate, Brian VanDeMark, a history professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, says that in writing the book McNamara “has been liberated from that monkey on his back.” He adds: “You know that old saying–“he just doesn’t get it.’ Well, he did get it, and it makes him a little more relaxed.”
Halberstam doesn’t believe McNamara gets it at all. “The book is shallow and deeply disingenuous. For him to say, “We couldn’t get information’ borders on a felony, because he was the creator of the lying machine that gave him that information. The point was to make a flawed policy look better. It’s almost a time warp: He sees Mac Bundy as the best national-security adviser ever and Maxwell Taylor as a soldier statesman. Taylor actually hammered anyone who told the truth and said the war wasn’t going well.”
Without refighting the war, it’s clear Halberstam is right on one point: McNamara can’t come fully to terms with the mistakes of Vietnam without criticizing other policymakers more vigorously. (The barbs directed at the late Henry Cabot Lodge are an exception.) That was an unavoidable trap: if McNamara were to trash others, he would look defensive and cheap. But because he doesn’t really single out his colleagues, the book doesn’t provide a full accounting. While he adds the human dimension in describing the toll on his family, he fails to convey the tangled personal motivations of the players, including himself. He can’t, for instance, fully admit that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident was convenient for their aim of winning greater leeway from Congress.
McNamara is not finished wrestling with his Vietnam ghosts. Lonely after the death of his wife 14 years ago, he is constantly jetting off to conferences. The one he yearns for now would be with the Vietnamese, modeled after the meetings he participated in with former U.S., Soviet and Cuban policymakers to discuss the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Council on Foreign Relations is trying to arrange this historic exchange, though nothing has been finalized with Vietnam. Bob McNarnaras old adversaries would find him strangely energetic to relive the horrors they shared.