by John M. Curtis
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Copyright July 6, 2009
All Rights Reserved.

            Dying peacefully in his Washington home, 93-year-old former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, met the same destiny as 58,000 young Americans serving their country in the Vietnam War.  McNamara, who in recent years expressed grave reservations about his Vietnam strategy and policy, offered regrets for a costly blunder in Southeast Asia, eventually ending April 29, 1975 eight months after President Richard M. Nixon resigned office Aug, 8, 1974.  McNamara presided as defense secretary during the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.  He came to the Pentagon as former president of Ford Motor Co., where he, and a like-minded band of Harvard Business School grads, applied sophisticated analytic models to make key decisions, including the 1958 Edsel, one of Ford’s costliest blunders. 

            McNamara, who was 43 when he became Defense Secretary, was known as one of the “Whiz Kids,” coming to Ford after World War II, finishing as a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force.  McNamara worked in the Air Force as an efficiency expert, performing complex data analyses.  Joining the Kennedy administration in 1961, he was considered among the “best-and-the-brighteest,” a phrase coined by Kennedy speechwriter and biographer Theodore Sorenson, characterizing the Cabinet as brilliant intellectuals.  Like former Vice President Dick Cheney who headed oil-servicing giant Haliburton Corp., McNamara raised high expectations as Ford’s wunderkind president.  While denying he had anything to do with the now extinct Edsel, he promoted highly successful Falcon, a type of symbol of Ford’s attempt to personify middle class American drivers.

            Kennedy never lived to see his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Defense Secretary make one of the most costly foreign policy mistakes in U.S. history:  Escalating the Vietnam War.  McNamara echoed the same anti-Communist voices that saw international politics as a global chessboard, where the Soviet Union conspired to rule the world.  Vietnam, to McNamara, was just another, as former journalist and brief ambassador to the Soviet Union George F. Kennan put it, constantly shifting point in the Soviet’s attempt to rule the world.  McNamara, like so many of his generation, knew little of colonial history in Southeast Asia or elsewhere, subscribing to the International Communist Conspiracy.  McNamara convinced JFK and LBJ that the U.S. had to hold the line against Soviet communism in Southeast Asia or face a slow but certain end of Democratic states.

            LBJ was bereft of foreign policy savvy, relying heavily on McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, much the same way Bush depended on Cheney, despite Bush’s lack of prowess in domestic or foreign affairs.  LBJ had a proven domestic track record in the Senate and House of Representatives, offering Kennedy a so-called Southern strategy.  “There is a place for analytical rigor in Pentagon policy, and he knew how to answer all the small questions,” said Ivan Eland, director of the Center on Peace & Liberty, a defense studies institute.  White the Vietnam War raged on between 1967-69, before Nixon’s election, McNamara provided the Pentagon every statistic-backed excuse to escalate to 1,000 deaths per month at the time McNamara handed the baton to Melvin R. Laird, Nixon’s defense secretary.  McNamara proved in charts-and-graphs the U.S. was winning the war.

            McNamara belatedly confessed his regret in 2003 about Vietnam, telling documentary filmmaker Errol Morris that the war was a mistake.  McNamara was the first to condemn Vietnam War protestors as unpatriotic for daring to question U.S. strategy and policy.  McNamara stuck to his guns as a died-in-wool anti-communist, pushing Kennan’s theory and the “Truman Doctrine,” that communism must be opposed or face worldwide domination.  “But,” Eland said, “he couldn’t’ answer the big questions,” especially about Vietnam, spouting off statistics having no relevance to the struggle of Ho Chi Minh and his freedom fighters in French Indochina.  No, McNamara paid little attention to history, parroting the anti-communist rhetoric of his post-WW II generation.  McNamara used 58,000 American lives to validate his paranoid anti-communist conspiracy theory.

            Establishment historians regard McNamara as a patriotic public servant, worthy of his place in the pantheon of distinguished U.S. defense secretaries.  Those who look at the bigger picture or were directly affected by the Vietnam War can’t help but see McNamara as an arrogant elitist, who convinced himself with blinding certainty about the correctness of the Vietnam War.  “We were wrong,” a 79-year-old McNamara said in his 1995 memoir “In Retrospect:  The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” referring to the “principles” of the Vietnam War.  “We were terribly wrong.”   When Morris released his 2003 documentary the “Fog of War:  Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S.McNamara,” a new defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made the same reckless promises about Iraq.  Six years later, with 4,3,21 deaths and 31,156 injuries, there are only unanswered questions.

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He's editor OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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