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Robert S. McNamara

How the bright came to quick confusion...

Syed Badrul Ahsan
It was not until mid 1967 that Robert McNamara began to feel his first stabs of pain about the war. More than 500,000 US soldiers had gone to South Vietnam and yet the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were increasingly gaining ground.***
THE quiet, almost unnoticed death of Robert S. McNamara at the age of ninety-three is hardly any reason not to recall the times he lived in and influenced to a degree not many are capable of. He belonged to that exclusive club of the best and the brightest that came to be symbolic of the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s. As John F. Kennedy would famously tell his people and the world beyond the frontiers of his country, the torch had been passed to a new generation of Americans, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace. McNamara was pan of that generation. Only a year older than Kennedy and having served for quite a while as president of Ford Motors, he almost breezed in to take charge of the Pentagon once the. president-elect asked him to. But, then, nearly every member of Kennedy’s charmed circle was breezing in --Theodore Sorensen, McGeorge Bundy, Kenny O’ Donnell, Robert Kennedy, Pierre Salinger, Dean Rusk -- and send-
ing out the clear message that after years of Eisenhower-era stupor, government was in the process of re-energising itself.
And then it began to go badly wrong. First, there was the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Then there was the near nuclear confrontation with Moscow over Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962. But if these were difficulties that were soon to be sorted out or papered over, Vietnam was beginning to show that it was going to be an issue America would struggle with for a time longer than anyone could imagine. Where the Dwight Eisenhower administration had, as a way of containing communism in South Vietnam, sent in a handful of advisors to Saigon (today Ho Chi Minh City) to assist President Ngo Dinh Diem in formulating policy against the communist North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, the Kennedy White House decided, on McNamara's prodding, that sending American soldiers into South Vietnam would be a forceful way of rolling back the communist threat.
And that was precisely the course the
new president took. President Kennedy was not destined to live long and yet in the short time he had remaining between the decision to be more involved in Vietnam and his assassination in November 1963, he appeared to have begun to worry about the consequences of his action in South East Asia. One instance was the effort to deal with the Pathet Lao in Laos. Matters were not helped by the fact that the Diem government was turning increasingly corrupt, to a point where fears of a coup against the Saigon leader and his influential brother Ngo Dinh Nhu began to be voiced. The climax was reached on 1 November 1963, when Diem and Nhu were ousted in a military coup and soon after were shot John Kennedy himself was murdered in Dallas a mere twenty-one days later.
Robert McNamara's power and influence as secretary of defence clearly went up quite a few notches in the Lyndon Johnson administration that replaced the Kennedy team after JFK's assassination. President Johnson loved shooting from the hip. Intent on bombing the communists into the Stone Age, he found in McNamara the man who would help him bring his plans of saving South Vietnam into fruition. In 1964, Johnson and McNamara invented the lie of the Tonkin Gulf incident to perpetuate the war in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese, it was alleged, had attacked American ships in the gulf. The president asked Congress for more powers in order to be able to prosecute
the war. Congress obliged readily, though soon enough it became clear to politicians like Senator J. William Fulbright that they had been duped into taking the lie for the truth. In all this convoluted plan of expanding the war, McNamara played a vigorous role. He and the president made it appoint to travel frequently to Saigon, where they were briefed by General William Westmoreland and other officers on how 'well' the war was going for Washington.
It was not until mid 1967 that Robert McNamara began to feel his first stabs of pain about the war. More than 500,000 US soldiers had gone to South Vietnam and yet the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were increasingly gaining ground. Body bags containing the remains of dead American soldiers were arriving in American cities with alarming frequency. Respected journalists like Walter Lippmann were beginning to question the wisdom of prosecuting a war that was proving to be pointless. Young Americans were beginning to demonstrate on campuses and in the streets to demand an end to the war. LB J was jeered day and night. The slogan, 'Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?' became a refrain at antiwar rallies. David Halberstam was to write scathingly of McNamara in his sarcasm-drenched tome. The Best And The Brightest.
McNamara went from doubt to despair. And then he told President Johnson of his plans to leave. McNamara left the Pentagon in
February 1968. A few months later, he took charge as president of the World Bank, where he was to serve with credit for thirteen years until 1981, when he decided to quit voluntarily. He then went into consultancy and also found a new role as a commentator on defence issues. But all this carving out of a new role did not quite help McNamara tide over his part in the making of the Vietnam War. He stayed silent on the conflict for nearly three decades after leaving office as defence secretary, until 1995 when he chose to come forth with his version of events in a book he called In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons if Vietnam. He was properly
contrite about the way things had turned out, acknowledged the flaws that had marked his policies and wept on television as he recalled the 58,000 Americans who had gone to their deaths in Vietnam.
Robert McNamara's was a brilliant mind. The tragedy is that he quite ruined the brilliance through a misplaced belief in his own perceptions of how the world needed to be run. Then again, all those others in that grand accumulation of Kennedy-era ^rey matter were guilty of similar misdemeanours.