The title of Robert McNamara's recent publication, In Retrospect, is generic enough to be applied to any historical work. Nevertheless, in this case, there is an undeniable irony attached to these two words. Twenty years after the fall of Saigon, McNamara finally chose to relate his experiences as Secretary of Defense during the initial stages of the Vietnam conflict. Given McNamara's essential role in creating the bitterness that is still with us today, the reader would only be disappointed with a play-by-play of McNamara's experiences in government. The reader rightfully expects more.
McNamara provides more. Anyone flipping through the pages of In Retrospect hoping to find an apology for the tragedy in Vietnam, however, will be disappointed. McNamara states, "We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong." For McNamara, though, this idea of wrong is not a moral issue of the sort might arise if one were to condemn an innocent man to death. Instead, it is a scientific wrong, of the sort one might expect a professor to admit after an experiment goes awry. One gets the impression that given the same information, McNamara would have taken the same action.
McNamara skillfully dodges any guilt which he might find threatening. He proudly makes use of the pronoun "I" when taking credit for persuading President Johnson to send Federal troops to Montgomery in 1965. By contrast, the pronoun "we" manages to rear its ambiguous head whenever issues involving Vietnam are seriously discussed. In fact, McNamara manages to evade the question of whether it was moral both to begin and to continue a losing war, for he admits to having indications of the latter as early as November 1963. McNamara states "eleven major causes for our disaster in Vietnam" which deserve careful individual consideration. Cause #5, for instance, asserts that "we failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture." What is missing from each and every one of these points is a sense of compassion, for those who fought in the war as well as for those who objected to it. McNamara tries to reduce the conflict to an equation. If one can plug numbers into the proper variables concerning who is willing to fight on the enemy's side (#1), the ally's will to fight for democracy (#2), the determination of the enemy (#3), and so on, a clear yes or no answer will result.
McNamara's failure to grasp reality conclusively shows through when he mentions that "we failed to retain popular support in part because we did not explain fully what was happening and why we were doing what we did. We had not prepared the public to understand the complex events we faced and how to react constructively." This statement, if anything, implies that those who objected to sending troops were na•ve, and had they truly understood the purpose of US intervention, they would have had no reason to protest. The fact of the matter is that not only did many believe that American intervention was immoral, but many simply objected to the killing. No amount of explaining by any government official, including Robert McNamara himself, could ever have changed this.
During McNamara's recent visit to Harvard, Professor Ernest May remarked that In Retrospect is "a blow-by-blow account of the Crusades written by someone who has forgotten just why he went to Jerusalem in the first place." For someone whose expressed purpose in ending his twenty-five year silence is to offer advice which may prevent future conflicts, McNamara fails miserably to see that he cannot obliterate his responsibility for his actions in the past merely by having high hopes for the future. An apology is definitely in order.
On Tuesday, April 25, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came to the Institute of Politics, an event that former Kennedy School Dean Graham Allison stated to be "in the best tradition of this school." While the panel discussion on McNamara's book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam may have been in the best tradition of the Kennedy School, the events of that evening were in the worst tradition of our nation. The vehement and wrathful actions of audience members towards McNamara, a seventy-eight-year-old man asking the nation for forgiveness, showed once again that twenty years after the fall of Saigon, the tragedy of Vietnam still haunts America. The war that claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans, many of whom never knew what they were fighting for, is still an unresolved issue in the American conscience.
The panel discussion itself was tame, even tepid. McNamara opened by discussing his book, quoting a passage in which he stated that he and his colleagues had been "wrong - terribly wrong." He explained that he had written the book so that subsequent generations could see what had gone wrong and learn from the horrible lessons of Vietnam. The panelists responding to McNamara showed great restraint. All three diplomatically endorsed the book and praised McNamara for writing it.
What followed this pacific, academic debate, however, was a testament to the nation's continuing pain over Vietnam. A veteran, called upon by moderator Allison to ask a question, said to McNamara, "Your book, and your presence, are an obscenity." He went on to cite the names and describe the deaths of his friends, and the plight of their surviving families. McNamara tried to tell the man to "read the book," but the angry veteran would not listen. Finally, McNamara leaned forward to shout, "Wait a minute! Shut up!"
McNamara's vehemence was followed by hisses from the crowd and a voice from the crowd taunting, "Should have dropped the bomb, Bobby! They would have respected us more! You should have resigned!" Minutes later, a woman stepped up to the microphone, explaining that in 1968, her husband had been shot down over a Vietnamese island, and in a top secret meeting, McNamara himself had ordered that no rescue be attempted. The woman, by this point in tears, told McNamara that she had waited twenty-seven years for an apology, and demanded one of him. McNamara told her that he did not remember the meeting, but stated, "If I said it, I'm not sorry, I'm horrified."
The evening ended with John Kenneth Galbraith, a leader of the antiwar movement, giving his "word of admiration" to McNamara. Clearly, McNamara had won over the academics that evening. It was equally obvious that McNamara would receive no such acceptance from the crowd. There was a profound sense of anger, a sense that the book had opened up old wounds and yet offered no answers.