Posted on 07/07/2009 1:17:55 PM PDT by Interesting Times
Rather than absolving him of his sins, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s pseudo-mea culpa, “In Retrospect: Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” is a self-indictment. His lesser crime is self-indulgence. His arrogance and duplicity during the Vietnam conflict is echoed throughout his book as he recounts his mismanagement of the war.
If as he admits, ignorance was his guiding light, then, it has grown to be a beacon today, proving that he has learned little about Vietnamese communism in the almost three decades that it took him to write his book. Besides the war, another tragedy is that McNamara seems to have lost his memory, and has difficulty distinguishing between facts and fantasy.
Nowhere in his book does McNamara mention his asinine idea of building a “technological” wall to keep the North Vietnamese out of the South in order to reduce the need to bomb North Vietnam. (Perhaps he was going to build the wall out of surplus Edsels, a car designed and built while he was CEO of Ford Motor Company that was a total failure.) McNamara didn’t succeed in keeping the North Vietnamese out of the South, but the wall was built; not on the 17th parallel as he planned; rather, it can be found just off Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC. It’s called the Vietnam Memorial; built with the names of 58,000 dead Americans.
McNamara is flat wrong in his claim that “Our government lacked experts for us to consult to compensate for our ignorance about Southeast Asia.” Rather than accepting advice, McNamara and the other “Whiz Kids” arrogantly and deliberately chose to ignore the experts. In fact, McNamara claims there were no experts.
The fact was there were several experts, including the well known French journalist and author Bernard Fall. It wasn’t that Fall had been “painted as a suspect communist sympathizer” as claimed in the book, it was because McNamara and his coterie were running the war and were to arrogant to consult with a damn “Frog.” They felt that the French couldn’t be trusted because the Vichy French had collaborated with the Axis during World War II, and their colonial administrators in Indochina had been treated as allies by the Japanese. And the US had never lost a war, and the French had already lost in Indochina; therefore, McNamara and his cohort wouldn’t be caught dead consulting with a bunch of colonials and losers.
And what memory lapse would cause McNamara to forget another expert for whom President John F. Kennedy had great respect for, General Edward Geary Lansdale? Lansdale had been a personal advisor and confident to Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay, and had been instrumental in the defeat of the communist movement there. Lansdale’s expertise wasn’t limited to the Philippines, for he was extremely knowledgeable about the entire situation across Southeast Asia.
Lansdale had been in North Vietnam during the two year grace period accorded by the Geneva agreements of 1954. He assisted the anti-communist Vietnamese to go south while Ho Chi Min solidified power in the North. He was also a personal advisor and close friend to South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem.
On January 28, 1961, President Kennedy read a report by General Lansdale about his recent trip to Vietnam. The following Saturday morning, Kennedy had his chief political advisor call Lansdale at his home and asked him to come immediately to the White House. When he arrived, President Kennedy interrupted a briefing on foreign policy and introduced Lansdale to the group as his next ambassador to Vietnam.
On March 1, 1961, a cable was sent to the American Embassy in Saigon from JFK’s staff ordering the desk-bound Embassy and its top field officers to read Lansdale’s January report, absorb its concepts, and apply them as a new priority in reaching the people in the provinces and villages of Vietnam. However, Lansdale’s counterinsurgency and pacification efforts were undermined by ambitious people in the State Department and the over-achievers in the Pentagon, who knew that the only way to gain promotion, get their “stars” and win medals was to expand the Vietnam conflict militarily in the conventional way.
In his book, McNamara belittles General Lansdale by stating, “I knew of only one Pentagon officer with counterinsurgency experience in the region, ...but Lansdale was a relative junior officer who lacked broad geopolitical expertise.” Geo-political thinking from 18th Century Europe wasn't needed in Vietnam, rather Lansdale’s ideo-and ethno-political expertise is what would have carried the day. McNamara didn’t even know that General Lansdale was on his staff until President Kennedy pointed him out. And when did a General become a junior officer?
McNamara also wrongly compares Ho Chi Minh, as a Vietnamese nationalist, to Yugoslavia’s Marshall Tito. Ho was as much of a nationalist as McNamara is a historian.
Ho Chi Minh was an international communist, who co-founded the French communist party in 1920. He was trained at the Lenin Institute in Moscow in 1925; he was a nationalized Soviet citizen; and he took a Russian name, Linov. He was assigned as a Russian citizen in the Soviet Consulate in Canton, China, under the renowned Machiavellian Russian Consul, Bordin, when fighting broke out between Chiang Kai Shek and Mao Tse Tung. Joseph Stalin supported Chiang and Mao never forgave, nor trusted, Moscow after that.
Ho was then sent to Thailand in 1928 under Moscow’s orders, where he shaved his head and become a Buddhist monk and awaited further orders. They came in 1930, when he was sent by Moscow to Hong Kong to found a new communist party, which Ho named “The Indochina Communist party.” Only a French communist would use that term, for a true Vietnamese nationalist would never have used the colonialist term Indochina. Ho was more of a Stalin than a Tito, and arranged the betrayal and annihilation of all opposition including: nationalists, such as Phan Boi Chau (1926); the murder of South Vietnamese Trotskyite communists (1945), who had been an enemy of Stalin’s policies since the 1920s; and the selective elimination of the non-communist Viet Minh leaders (1954-56), who had greatly contributed to the defeat of the French.
McNamara is even rebuked today by Hanoi’s communist party theoretical journal, which stated that Ho was not a nationalist but was an “internationalist,” loyal to Moscow’s Comintern policies to the end of his days. Robert McNamara, please call your publisher.
The Vietnam conflict was neither a “peoples' war” nor a civil war, as McNamara claims. Rather, it was a proxy war between superpowers – the Soviet Union and the United States, and the wannabee superpower, China. Vietnam was never one country, but had always been divided into there distinct political entities, North, Central, and South Vietnam, and each region had its own distinct political faction and dialect. Both the Central and Southern Vietnamese disliked the arrogant and aggressive North Vietnamese, and the communists fighting in the South were primarily directed by the North.
In turn, the North Vietnamese communists distrusted the Central and Southern communists, and in 1954 and again in 1968, the North Vietnamese communists used their comrades as cannon fodder in order to purge the party ranks of untrustworthy Central and Southern communist brethren, as well as to gain total control of the communist movement in Vietnam. The North’s invasion of the South is comparable to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
McNamara is also dead wrong in saying that our goal of stopping the communist take over of Indochina was unworthy. This is an insult to the 58,000 Americans and the hundreds of thousands of people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia whom he sent to be killed in an attempt to stop the dominos from falling and to help win freedom for the people of the region. Because of McNamara, and in spite of those deaths, some of the dominos fell when the US pulled out.
And McNamara has the gall to say that it was unworthy to try to prevent the slaughter of the almost two million Cambodians who were murdered by the Vietnamese-inspired, trained, and armed Khmer Rouge (who were supported by Vietnamese artillery and troops). And unworthy to try to prevent the pain and hardship suffered by the tens of thousands of people thrown into the concentration camps (“re-education camps”) in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
McNamara’s statement that President Eisenhower’s domino theory was wrong reflects his total ignorance of Ho Chi Minh’s Southeast Asian “time bombs” of the 1930s when Ho, as a Moscow agent, organized the communist parties of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (Indochinese Communist Party), as well as those in Thailand, Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia. It is highly unlikely that the Generals in Indonesia would have stood up to and defeated the communist movement there without the demonstration of American resolve in Vietnam in 1965. Furthermore, without the hundreds of millions of dollars and large amounts of military hardware pumped into the Thai economy, Thailand would have become the fourth domino to fall, after Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Without America’s resolve and commitment, the Vietnamese communists would have continued to fuel the insurrection in Thailand until it too fell, invading it as they did Cambodia.
It isn’t that the Vietnam conflict was unwinnable as he claims, rather McNamara ensured its loss by dictating “rules of engagement” and limited bombing. McNamara arrogantly micro-managed the war by remote, as if playing a board game and possessed by Dr. Strangelove, sending daily encoded messages to the Generals and Admirals in Vietnam on the specific targets he chose to bomb that day. He ordered planes to make multiple bombing runs on the same target on the same day because it was more cost-effective, but it provided a “duck shoot” for the North Vietnamese.
From the onset of the American involvement, the North Vietnamese communists had openly professed they would fight a protracted war and defeat the Americans, not on the battlefield, but politically at home as they had the French. When he voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, an “expert” on international law, warned the White House and the Pentagon that the US must either declare and fight an all-out war against North Vietnam, or the war would be lost politically.
It wasn’t a lack of experts to consult with, as he professes; the problem was that McNamara chose to ignore expert advice. McNamara’s failed policies of the 1960s turned the American people totally against even a minor involvement in Vietnam, thus ensuring the fulfillment of Hanoi’s prophesy and guaranteeing the communist victory.
If “we were wrong; terribly wrong,” as McNamara claims, and he realized it in the mid-sixties and never resigned, then he’s ultimately responsible for sending thousands of America’s “best and brightest” to their deaths. McNamara’s cop-out is, “You shouldn’t use your power that you’ve accumulated in a sense as the President’s appointee… to attack and subvert the policies of the elected representative of the people.” However, the standards set at Nuremberg defeat McNamara’s logic.
Some draft evaders say that McNamara’s book vindicates them for their actions, but when do two wrongs make a right? Rather than donating his book earnings to help heal the Vietnam veterans he helped wound, McNamara plans to use them to increase communications with the draconian dictatorship in Hanoi; the second time he has handed the Hanoi communists a victory.
That miserable SOB along with Johnson and their insane war planning is the reason that I have some dear friends names on the wall. In honor of them I will find out where he is buried and give him a beer bath after I run it through my system first!
I know of no one who lived though his time in office that admire the job he did. Make excuses for him, but never admire.
You may have to stand in line.
Thanks for the ping IT. May he rest in hell....I lost a dear neighbor because of his ignorance.
IMHO, the war drove him crazy. He was in at least some respects like Stanton, Lincoln’s war minister. Stanton was also unstable. But Johnson was no Lincoln, so there was no one to balance McNamama. Indeed, many of the charges the reviewer makes against McNamara should be laid against Johnson and his other close advisers.
Let’s not leave out another of the cynical, arrogant and ambitious on the backs of others - Henry Kissinger.
I’m awaiting his obituary as well.
Agreed. But the "brilliant" McNamara was arguably the most arrogant and wrongheaded of the bunch.
Exposing him would expose the lie that somehow Richard Nixon was responsible for a war started by the guy who beat him, Kennedy, that the war that really got going in 1965 was somehow started by the guy who took office in 1969. So, the media cone of silence was dropped.
Johnson and especially McNamara thought they were way smarter than their military people, shutting out the Joint Chiefs from decision-making on Vietnam. You wonder where the idea came from that the politicians never let the military fight Vietnam to win? McNamara and his micromanaging of the war.
He's also hailed as some kind of charitable genius at the World Bank. But the only countries that emerged from poverty on his watch were the ones NOT developing on World Bank loans, but by freeing their economies and supporting business and export expansion. On the other hand, a lot of dictators in countries getting World Bank loans got really rich.
He is Exhibit A why an off the charts IQ and fine education are not enough to make a wise leader.
Yes, but I do not recall that military leaders offered an alternative strategic vision. Westmoreland doesn’t seem to have much of one at all. On the other hand, no telling what he would have done if he had had as much authority as Eisenhower did.
Oh, and the Edsel fiasco was on his watch at Ford, but that probably doesn’t mean anything to someone of your age!
indeed.
You don’t know arrogant if you never not met Lyndon. That guy could really dominate a room.
Don't forget LBJ.
The Media is really attracted by the figure of Robert McNamarra. Could it a sort of collective guilt at work? I mean JFK is ‘sainted’, and LBJ would have been ‘great’ if it hadn’t been for Vietnam. Somebody has to be the fall-guy, right?
Not saying that McNamarra wasn’t an arrogant, puffed-up piece of work. He was. But there have been reasonably successful SecDefs who had similar problems.
Especially when he granted interviews to female reporters while sitting on the commode, as was his charming habit.
There’s no denying that LBJ tried to micromanage the war from the Oval Office, a terrible thing to do. I still think it was McNamera that skewed his vision of how the war should be waged.
So what you kind of had was Johnson making the formal decisions after McNamera had counseled him improperly.
That’s my take on it. I may be wrong. People who disagree should set me straight.
I am reminded of Herman Wouk’s book,” The Winds of War.” and the way that FDR reach down into the ranks and found experiences officers to give him advise. Pug Henry was a composite of several such men. I wonder of Lyndon was capable of employing such men. He seemed to favor sycophants, guys like Bill Moyers.
He loved to intimidate.
IMHO, they were pretty much in sync. McNamara from a tactical/strategic standpoint told the the boss exactly what the boss wanted the hear. LBJ was a micro-manager on thing other than the war as well. Their policies, especially to on again-off again bombing campaigns and avoiding any target if they knew there were Russian 'advisers' there were beyond insane.
They were a bad team.
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