Strategic Review News Article
Robert McNamara, the Anti-War
Left, and the Triumph of Intellectual Dishonesty
Fall 1995
About a year ago I made a presentation to a group of
high-powered account executives at one of the world's largest
investment banks. My speech discussed Vietnam's current
demographics, its economic future, and the desirability of doing
business there. During the question-and-answer period I was
challenged by a gentlemen of about my age who had never been to
Vietnam and who in his youth had obviously been opposed to the war.
Why, he asked rather snidely, would I want to do business with the
communists when I had tried to kill them as a Marine? Where was my
consistency of thought? And indeed why did we even fight a war if
they were so keen to do business with us?
I answered by pointing out that I have always believed in
the strength of the culture and people of Vietnam, that the
conditions now emerging in that country are approaching, however
slowly, what I and others wanted to see twenty-five years ago; and
that it was the communist government's actions, not American
intransigence, which had held back the country during the last two
decades.
Before the next question was asked, I was interrupted by
another million-dollar-a-year man, who it turned out was a Yale
graduate and an Army veteran of the Vietnam War. He had become so
angry from old memories that his face was on fire.
"You're being too nice to this guy," he said. "I'll tell
you why I have no problem doing business in Vietnam. I spent
eighteen months there, and I never hated my enemy as much as I did
the people who ... on me when I came home."
The truth of this paradox is at the bottom of the intense
anger most Vietnam veterans felt over the recent publication of
Robert McNamara's memoir, and the tone in the media during the
observance of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of South
Vietnam. It is one thing to be comfortable with one's wartime
service, and to be willing to move into the future by working with a
government run by a former enemy. It is quite another to see the
whole history of an era twisted and manipulated during one's entire
lifetime in order to salve the consciences of a group of Americans
whose conduct during the war was less than commendable.
Preempting Historical Reflection
But that's the way it has been. And so with Robert
McNamara, who slipped quietly into town, robbed the bank in broad
daylight, shot the guards, and was gone before the reaction force
had a chance even to assemble. The former Defense Secretary's terse,
truncated memoir, coupled with a brief but intense publicity
campaign, dramatically upended what might otherwise have been a key
moment of historical reflection. And his quick disappearance
thereafter had all the elements of a successful raid deep into enemy
territory, of the sort he himself probably did not contemplate when
he decided to write his book, and to this day very likely does not
understand.
With a timing no doubt governed by those in publishing and
media circles who wished to capitalize on his odd mea culpa in order
to promote old and discredited views from the antiwar left, Mr.
McNamara became the key figure during the observances marking the
twentieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. It had taken years
following South Vietnam's 1975 demise before the cycle of war and
its aftermath was complete and a full body of facts, particularly
from the communist side, became available. The twentieth anniversary
of that overthrow offered a moment ripe for a re-examination of
American and South Vietnamese wartime successes in the face of
continuing derision at home, and of the now-undeniably ruinous
consequences to Vietnam of a communist victory. Instead, the world
was treated to a deliberate side-show.
In the first fifteen years or so following Saigon's fall,
there was nothing but bad news to report from Vietnam, and those who
had made their political and journalistic careers on the
wrongfulness of the war bear a culpability for persistently failing
to report it. Similarly, during the twentieth anniversary
observances these icons and their intellectual progeny persisted in
focusing almost solely on the conduct of the war during Mr.
McNamara's tenure as Secretary of Defense, which ended in disgrace
in late 1967. It was as if the political, military and even moral
issues had been decided in favor of the communists by that point,
and the ensuing eight years of fighting and twenty years of
suffering were merely an afterthought.
A Disservice to Understanding the War
The end result was a startling disservice to a full
understanding of the war. Media depictions of the fighting typically
showed tired and frustrated American and South Vietnamese soldiers,
while often using stock propaganda footage of communist troops
marching cheerfully down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The elders who made
their names in younger days on such allegations as U.S. troops lying
about their "body counts" gave almost no mention of the horrendous
communist military casualties, despite the most newsworthy item of
those few weeks: the Hanoi government officially admitting it lost
1. 1 million soldiers dead and another 300,000 still missing from
the fighting, compared to American losses of 58,000 and South
Vietnamese of 254,000. And few discussions recalled the Hanoi pledge
in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that Vietnam would be reunited only
by peaceful means, with guarantees of individual freedoms in the
South, as well as internationally supervised free elections.
To the contrary, on the heels of Mr. McNamara's comments
regarding the "unwinnable" strategy he concocted and failed to
adjust during the first four years of war, media air waves were
filled with a litany of speeches proclaiming "vindication" by those
who otherwise might have been forced to answer hard questions
regarding their conduct and beliefs during the late 1960s and early
1970s. For some, such conduct was betrayal. For others, it was only
a stupefying naiveté. But for most, there has been a persistent
conspiracy of silence that has lasted for decades, accompanied of
late by an attempt to leap over the carcasses and the devastation
that followed the communist takeover, to simply pretend it did not
happen.
When forced to comment, those who opposed our attempt to
assist the building of a democracy in the South picked up the debate
in its present makeup, pointing to the Hanoi government's efforts in
the past few years to liberalize the economy and reach out to the
Americans in the wake of the collapse of their Soviet ally and the
continuing menacing growth of the Chinese.
As a consequence, the best opportunity of a lifetime was
lost for the many who still wish to put a generation's most bitterly
divisive period into proper historical perspective.
Few, if any, of the old anti-war luminaries, Stanley Karnow,
Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, George McGovern, Peter Arnett, 'Tom
Harkin, Bill or Hillary Clinton-the list could fill the page-could
find it in themselves to conjure up an apology, or admit they were
wrong in judging a communist apparatus that brought Southeast Asia's
strongest and most pro-Western culture back into the dark ages, only
to haltingly emerge fifteen years later reeking of torture, prison
camps, Stalinism and corruption.
The Anti-War Left: Hoping for a Communist Victory
The reason, which remained either unspoken or unreported
during the anniversary coverage, was stated most honestly and
directly to me by George McGovern, who unfortunately was off-camera
at the time. During a break while taping the CNN Crossfire show,
after I had made a comment regarding the ability of the U.S. under
the right leadership to have adjusted its strategy early on and
prevailed in the war, the antiwar candidate who had once promised to
go to Hanoi on his knees if he were elected President turned to me
and announced in his emotionless monotone, "What you don't
understand is that I didn't want us to win that war."
The people who directed the antiwar movement did not care
whether McNamara had a workable strategy, or whether it could have
been adapted to circumstances. They did not care whether Nixon's
Vietnamization program might have worked. They did not care whether
the South Vietnamese should have been given an adequate chance to
adjust their strategy after the American withdrawal. And they did
not care whether the communists signed a pledge guaranteeing free
elections and a peaceful reunification of the country. Quite simply,
they wanted the communists to win. Those who were adults during the
Vietnam era know this truth full well. Others, however, particularly
our children, have seen it glazed over and even denied as the
reality of what happened after 1975 became ever more clear.
The failure of the media to show these old luminaries and
their younger disciples in this true light is important for reasons
beyond anger, finger-pointing and the assignment of blame. Only by
understanding their deeper motivations can future generations
comprehend the making and ultimate failure of American policy during
that period, and the subsequent refusal of our media elites to speak
and write honestly after South Vietnam's fall.
Only by comprehending that Vietnam was the first war where
a generation's elite not only excused itself from fighting but often
openly supported the side that was killing their own countrymen can
we understand the persistent defamation of those who served. And
only by comprehending that the antiwar movement's dilatory effect
was Hanoi's greatest ace in the hole can we understand why the
communists had few reasons ever to compromise at the negotiating
table.
These are lessons whose omissions from the debate cannot
help but affect one's view of the honesty of history as an academic
discipline. They have vital implications for the study of
policymaking. And they tell us of the divisions that still exist in
our society, not only when it comes to discussing the national
trauma of Vietnam but in the increasingly visible emergence of the
United States as a country whose cultural institutions are dominated
by a veneer of protected elites.
The Vietnamese Deserved Better
And what of Vietnam-the country, not the war? Those who
served there and grew to love not only the country but its people in
large part share the view of David Halberstam, at least in the years
before he became an intellectual leader of the antiwar left. Writing
in 1964 in his book The Making of a Quagmire, Halberstam opined that
"Vietnam is ... perhaps one of only five or six nations in the world
that is truly vital to United States interests," and warned that a
communist takeover would bring about 'a drab, lifeless and
controlled society for a people who deserve better.'
The Vietnamese do deserve better, and it is a tribute to
their amazing resilience that those who became exposed to Western
ideals and practice before Saigon's fall were able to keep hope
alive despite the conditions into which American naiveté and
abandonment delivered them. One doubts whether Mr. McNamara, who
understood only numbers, or the antiwar leaders, who found solace
and even hope in the preaching of Hanoi's hard-line leaders, will
ever understand the true Vietnamese character-or for that matter the
nobility of the Americans who attempted to save it.
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS