Robert McNamara

The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War

By Paul Hendrickson

Vintage, 2000

427pp, $19.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/22212

In his 1995 memoirs, Robert McNamara, US secretary of defence from 1962 to 1968 and the chief architect of the US war against Vietnam, apologised for the harm done to the United States by the "tragic mistake" of the war — not for the results of the war: millions of dead and maimed Vietnamese, the ruined economy and scarred environment.

Leave it to the US secretary of defence to miss the point about the war. And leave it to US establishment journalists to miss the point about the US secretary of defence, as Paul Hendrickson does in his book on McNamara, whom he invests with "abundant moral courage" for his "apology".

After beginning a lifelong love affair with statistics at Harvard Business School, McNamara soared to corporate success becoming president of the Ford Motor Company and attracting the attention of the talent scouts of another president, John F. Kennedy.

As one of the "best and brightest" liberals of JFK's government, McNamara became defence secretary, in charge of the defending the "free world" and a war in a far-off south-east Asian country which, through the stubborn resistance of the Vietnamese, was proving to be a key test for US imperialism.

The US, which had financed the French war against Vietnamese independence after World War II, had steadily escalated its direct military involvement — from "advisors", to bombing, to combat troops.

McNamara had driven this policy and was instrumental in the key 1965 decision to significantly increase the number of US combat troops and to begin bombing North Vietnam (the south had been bombed remorselessly for years).

McNamara, the bean counter and disciple of systems analysis, believed that US military firepower and dollars could win a war against less well-resourced peasants. That's what all his computer printouts showed.

But the Vietnamese resistance refused to follow his statistical forecasts, their military tactics managed to stretch US military resources whilst maintaining the support of the population.

McNamara's cost-accounting abacus now began returning pessimistic projections. Even with a favourable "kill ratio" of 2.5 "enemy" for one US or South Vietnamese soldier, "it would cost 175,000 lives to reduce enemy manpower by a modest 20%".

McNamara began to lose faith in the military prospects of winning the war from 1965, and the domestic political cost of a drawn-out war also loomed large in his nightmares. With a war costing $24 billion a year pushing the budget into deficit, the economic consequences of an inflationary surge or increased taxes to ward off inflation would both spell doom for the government.

McNamara voiced even darker fears to President Lyndon B. Johnson — a war going nowhere in the paddy fields and jungles, antagonising US soldiers and civilians alike and generating a mass anti-war movement would lead to "massive refusals to serve, or to fight, or to cooperate, or worse".

Troop desertion, drug-taking and avoidance of battle plagued the US military in Vietnam. Draft resistance, civil disobedience, massive protests and the growth of a radical and influential left was the "something worse" that political managers like McNamara feared.

Nevertheless, for two years McNamara continued to direct a war he no longer believed in, upping the military commitment and the lies he used to publicly defend the war. Increases in combat troops were simply increases in "logistical support and training and advisory personnel", he told a gullible press. There was no "military stalemate" and each new South Vietnamese government (installed by the US) would win the political popularity stakes and undercut support for the resistance, he reassured.

When occasional cracks appeared in McNamara's public facade, and hints of private doubts began to leak out, Johnson decided to remove a potential source of embarrassment and weakness, manoeuvring the "hawk-turned-dove" from defence supremo to president of the World Bank.

There McNamara was much more at home with a set of numbers that promised easier political control of poor countries without the messy uncertainties of unpopular wars.

Not until 1995 did McNamara make public his doubts about the Vietnam War, and then in a way that suggested all his decisions to escalate the war were "honest mistakes" — honest because undertaken for a good cause (fighting communism) but mistakes because the war was unwinnable and 58,000 US soldiers were dead for no result.

McNamara's public deceptions about a doomed war whilst continuing to manage and justify it, and his refusal to speak up for three decades after his resignation, are unconscionable.

But far more appalling is McNamara's silence about the main victims of the war. In the 390 pages of his memoirs, In Retrospect, there is not one word of feeling for the Vietnamese people and their far greater suffering, or for their right to independence.

Hendrickson, displeased by McNamara's deception but moved by his "tortures of doubt", also spares no sympathetic feelings for McNamara's Vietnamese victims — unless they happen to be a wealthy family of anti-communist politicians who were puppet South Vietnamese politicians, army officers, policemen or "counter-intelligence" agents.

Other lives from the "five lives of a lost war" of Hendrickson's book are a US veteran and a US army nurse, who both agree that the US should have gone in harder and done the job of killing communists properly.

Hendrickson agrees with McNamara that the war was right, if unwinnable. That the US had no right to be interfering in Vietnam at all is a view so far off the conventional political spectrum as to be invisible to establishment journalists.

The only dissenting lives sketched in the book are an anonymous Massachusetts artist who, under threat of the draft in 1972, tried to throw McNamara off a ferry and (the most redeeming part of the book) Norman Morrison, the 31-year-old Quaker from Baltimore who burnt himself to death in 1965 outside McNamara's office in the Pentagon, bearing personal witness to the director of a cold, calculating war of what it means to die by fire.

The huge protests against the war get only fleeting references and their effect on McNamara ("I was scared of them") are given as little, or as much, analysis as McNamara's dislike of Kubrick's film Dr Strangelove, which McNamara felt to be a personal attack on himself (McNamara's middle name is Strange).

The Vietnamese people's struggle against the military brutality of US imperialism took courage. Morrison's sacrificial protest took courage. What Hendrickson calls McNamara's "abundant moral courage" for his belated "apology" for the war is no more than the sorry self-apology of a killer bean counter.