The Death Of Robert McNamara

[13 articles]

The Death Of Robert McNamara

http://www.countercurrents.org/chuckman070709.htm

By John Chuckman
07 July, 2009

McNamara may be the greatest modern example of the banality of evil.

He was, in his heyday, a dry, boring man with the appearance of a
corporate executive who taught Baptist Sunday School classes.

He was very bright and energetic, but dry and boring, driven by an
insane need for success and with no evident ethical standards beyond
those associated with the ferociously ambitious.

The United States, under his advice and that of others like McGeorge
Bundy, created the greatest holocaust since that of World War II.

An estimated three million Vietnamese were killed, many of them
suffering horrible deaths from napalm and early versions of cluster bombs.

Carpet bombing by B-52s made parts of that poor country resemble the
surface of the moon.

Left behind were millions of pounds of the hideous Agent Orange
oozing through the ground to cause birth defects for perhaps centuries.

Left behind too were hundreds of thousands of land mines to cripple
and kill farmers for decades after.

The reason for this horror? The Vietnamese were fighting a civil war
and the side with the wrong economic beliefs was winning.

Of course, it also relates to America's penchant for obsessions, its
Captain Ahab drive to chase and kill the great whale.

In the 1960s, it was communism.

Today it's Islamic fundamentalism.

In his later years, McNamara was a sad figure. He very much did come
to regret his role. He was almost driven by the ghosts of all those dead souls

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After the War Was Over

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opinion/07herbert.html

By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 6, 2009

Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson's icy-veined, cold-visaged and
rigidly intellectual point man for a war that sent thousands upon
thousands of people (most of them young) to their utterly pointless
deaths, has died at the ripe old age of 93.

Long after the horror of Vietnam was over, McNamara would concede, in
remarks that were like salt in the still festering wounds of the
loved ones of those who had died, that he had been "wrong, terribly
wrong" about the war. I felt nothing but utter contempt for his concession.

I remember getting my draft notice in the mid-1960s as Johnson's
military buildup for the war was in full swing. I'm not sure what I
expected. Probably that the other recruits would be a tough bunch,
that they would all look like John Wayne. I was staggered on the
first day of basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., to be part of a motley
gathering of mostly scared and skinny kids who looked like the guys
I'd gone to high school with. Who looked, basically, pun intended, like me.

That's who was shipped off to Vietnam in droves ­ youngsters 18, 19,
20 and 21. Many, of course, would die there, and many others would
come back forever scarred.

Johnson and McNamara should have been looking out for those kids, who
knew nothing about geopolitics, or why they were being turned into
trained killers who, we were told, could cold-bloodedly smoke the
enemy ­ "Good shot!" ­ and then kick back and smoke a Marlboro. Many
would end up weeping on the battlefield, crying for their moms with
their dying breaths. Or trembling uncontrollably as they watched
buddies, covered in filth, bleed to death before their eyes ­
sometimes in their arms.

I was lucky. The Army sent me to Korea, which was no walk in the
park, but it wasn't Vietnam. I served in the intelligence office of
an engineer battalion. But no one could truly escape the war. I would
get letters from home that would make my heart sink, letters telling
me that this buddy had been killed, that that buddy had been killed,
that a kid that I had played football or softball with ­ or had gone
to the rifle range with ­ had been killed.

For what?

McNamara didn't know. My sister's boyfriend got shot. A very close
friend of mine came back from Vietnam so messed up psychologically
that he killed his wife and himself.

The hardest lesson for people in power to accept is that wars are
unrelentingly hideous enterprises, that they butcher people without
mercy and therefore should be undertaken only when absolutely necessary.

Kids who are sent off to war are forced to grow up too fast. They
soon learn what real toughness is, and it has nothing to do with
lousy bureaucrats and armchair warriors sacrificing the lives of the
young for political considerations and hollow, flag-waving, risk-free
expressions of patriotic fervor.

McNamara, it turns out, had realized early on that Vietnam was a lost
cause, but he kept that crucial information close to his chest, like
a gambler trying to bluff his way through a bad hand, as America
continued to send tens of thousands to their doom. How in God's name
did he ever look at himself in a mirror?

Lessons learned from Vietnam? None.

As The Times's Tim Weiner pointed out in McNamara's obituary,
Congress authorized the war after President Johnson contended that
American warships had been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats
in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. The attack never happened. As
Mr. Weiner wrote, "The American ships had been firing at their own
sonar shadows on a dark night."

But McNamara, relying on intelligence reports, told Johnson that
evidence of the attack was ironclad. Does this remind anyone of the
"slam dunk" evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction?

More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam and some 2 million to 3
million Vietnamese. More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq, and
no one knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Even as I was
writing this, reports were coming in of seven more American G.I.'s
killed in Afghanistan ­ a war that made sense in the immediate
aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, but makes very little sense now.

None of these wars had clearly articulated goals or endgames. None
were pursued with the kind of intensity and sense of common purpose
and shared sacrifice that marked World War II. Wars are now mostly
background noise, distant events overshadowed by celebrity deaths and
the antics of Sarah Palin, Mark Sanford and the like.

The obscenity of war is lost on most Americans, and that drains the
death of Robert McNamara of any real significance.

--------

Robert S. McNamara dies at 93; architect of the Vietnam War

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-robert-mcnamara7-2009jul07,0,4810762.story

By Stephen Braun
July 7, 2009

Driven, cerebral and pugnacious, Robert S. McNamara was the
preeminent policymaker behind the massive buildup of American forces
in Vietnam between 1964 and 1968. As Defense secretary for two
administrations, he wielded blizzards of facts and figures to press
the case for deploying military advisors and then ground troops to
counter the advance of communist forces in North Vietnam and Viet
Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam.

By the time he left office in 1968, however, what had begun as a
"limited war" involved 535,000 U.S. servicemen, of whom nearly 30,000
had died. The casualties would mushroom to 58,000 Americans and 3
million Vietnamese over a decade of conflict.

McNamara, 93, who died at his home in Washington on Monday after a
period of ill health, came to harbor regrets about his role as the
architect of the war's deadly escalation, but he kept his doubts
private for nearly three decades before finally going public.

In a 1995 memoir and in the 2003 Oscar-winning documentary "The Fog
of War," he offered a carefully parsed reassessment of his wartime
decisions that mollified some critics and infuriated others.

A former president of Ford Motor Co., McNamara headed the Defense
Department for seven years in the Democratic administrations of John
F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and was the war's tireless
cheerleader, traveling to the battle zones more than 40 times.

A dynamic Washington figure whose trademark wire-rimmed glasses and
carefully slicked and parted hair gave him the appearance of a tautly
wound schoolmaster, McNamara had won over both Kennedy and Johnson
with his unflagging optimism, peerless management skills and
bureaucratic gamesmanship that raised his profile and cowed his rivals.

McNamara was a colossus of the briefing room, equipped with a
steel-trap memory and a facility with numbers that dominated Cabinet
meetings and congressional hearings. Early on, a dazzled Republican
Sen. Barry Goldwater called him "one of the best secretaries ever, an
IBM machine with legs." Goldwater later altered his view, echoing
veteran generals who felt McNamara was "a one-man disaster."

During one classic encounter in 1961, McNamara absorbed a complex
one-hour presentation on nuclear deterrence from a Rand Corp. expert,
glanced over 54 detailed slides and quickly decided to jettison the
Eisenhower administration's policy of nuclear targeting of Russian
cities and shift to military installations. Without debate, his
"doctrine at the flick of his pen" set in motion the nuclear
"counterforce" policy that would govern U.S. military strategy for
the next 40 years, wrote biographer Deborah Shapley.

A new type of bureaucrat

But McNamara's numerical wizardry had a dark side. Critics accused
him of misleading his presidential patrons and the American public by
manipulating statistics -- including battlefield casualty "body
counts" and underplayed enemy troop strength estimates -- and
presenting a falsely optimistic portrayal of the war's grim prospects.

"McNamara's loyalty was to his bosses and not the truth. He lied to
them. He had people under him lying. He did it with Kennedy and he
did it with Johnson and it was only when he was impaled with the
failure of the war that he didn't know what to do," said writer David
Halberstam, who excoriated McNamara as a "fool" in "The Best and the
Brightest," his account of the high officials who pressed for U.S.
involvement in Vietnam.

McNamara was the archetype of a new wave of management specialists on
the rise in Washington during the 1960s. He surrounded himself with a
bevy of analysts who became known as his "whiz kids," and they played
a prominent role in drafting the classified "Pentagon Papers," an
exhaustive history of the U.S. entry into Vietnam that McNamara
secretly commissioned in 1967.

Brimming with self-confidence, McNamara transformed the Defense
Department into the giant military and civilian fiefdom it remains today.

But it was Vietnam that defined him, from his assertive oversight of
the first contingents of Green Beret advisors sent by the Kennedy
administration to South Vietnam in 1961, to his backstage qualms that
led Lyndon Johnson to replace him as Defense secretary.

When Sen. Wayne Morse (D-Ore.), an opponent of the war, cracked in
1965 that the Vietnam conflict had become "McNamara's War" -- a
sardonic take on the 1940s Bing Crosby tune "McNamara's Band" -- the
Defense secretary unblinkingly took the line as a compliment. "I
don't mind it being called McNamara's War," he told a reporter. "In
fact, I'm proud to be associated with it."

But by 1968, after he had balked at further escalation and urged a
freeze on troop levels, McNamara was eased out by Johnson, then
appointed president of the World Bank, a position he held for 13
years before his retirement in 1981.

McNamara kept his private turmoil to himself for nearly 30 years, but
finally went public in 1995 with a memoir that methodically
deconstructed many of his once-cherished assumptions and landmark decisions.

His "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" questioned
"domino theory" fears that a loss in South Vietnam would have led to
a succession of communist takeovers elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
McNamara conceded that he and other administration officials had
misjudged Vietnamese popular support for Ho Chi Minh's National
Liberation Front and overestimated the limits of America's military reach.

"My aim is neither to justify errors nor to assign blame, but to
identify the mistakes we made," he wrote.

But his painstaking language and desire to instruct without admitting
guilt failed to reckon with the formidable emotional sway the war
still exerted on the American psyche. On a limited speaking tour,
McNamara was confronted by bitter Vietnam veterans and relatives of the dead.

He kept a tight rein on his private thoughts, but his haunted
features gave him away. He appeared "a ghost of all that had passed
and rolled on beneath his country in barely a generation," wrote Paul
Hendrickson in a devastating portrait of McNamara in old age.

McNamara took a final chance to salvage his reputation by sitting for
a series of filmed interviews with director Errol Morris that
resulted in "The Fog of War."

When Morris asked why he had not spoken out about his doubts while
the war was still being waged, McNamara held his ground. "These are
the kinds of questions that get me in trouble," he said. "A lot of
people misunderstand the war, misunderstand me. A lot of people think
I'm a son of a bitch."

Robert Strange McNamara was born June 9, 1916, in San Francisco. A
straight-A student, McNamara was also a disciplined athlete, an Eagle
Scout who hiked and jogged. He later developed an interest in
mountain climbing, and during his Cabinet years, scaled the
14,000-foot Matterhorn in Switzerland.

After attending UC Berkeley, he entered Harvard's Graduate School of
Business Administration in 1937, where he excelled in management and
accounting techniques. He took a business faculty post at Harvard,
where he married Margaret Craig, an old Bay Area friend.

Role in World War II

He volunteered for the Navy after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
in 1941, but was rejected for poor eyesight. But McNamara's expertise
in statistics made him valuable to the war effort. In 1943, he was
awarded a temporary captain's commission and worked to improve the
accuracy of long-range B-29 bombers that dropped tons of firebombs on
Japanese cities.

After the war, McNamara contemplated a return to Harvard, but when he
and his wife were briefly stricken with bouts of polio, he accepted a
better-paying offer at Ford Motor Co. McNamara joined a coterie of
young aides hired by Chairman Henry Ford II to shake up the firm with
statistical analysis, the rigorous use of figures to measure trends
and improve systems.

Although Ford's great 1958 flop, the Edsel, was launched on his
watch, McNamara moved quickly to shut the line down and cut losses.
He ascended rapidly through Ford's upper ranks and was named the
company's first president outside of the Ford family in 1960.

His tenure atop Ford was short-lived. A Democrat who moved in
Detroit's heavily Republican corporate circles, McNamara was offered
a Cabinet job in the new Kennedy administration: either Defense or
Treasury. McNamara chose Defense.

Vietnam loomed from the very beginning. Outgoing President Eisenhower
had warned Kennedy about Vietnam, and Kennedy responded by ordering
McNamara and his generals to devise a military strategy to brace the
wobbly, corrupt South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.

They set a cautious course of limited aid at first, sending 400 Green
Berets to train South Vietnamese troops. The contingent was the
vanguard of a force that grew to 17,000 by the time of Kennedy's
assassination nearly three weeks after Diem was killed in a coup. But
in internal meetings, McNamara pressed for an increased U.S. presence
of 200,000 troops.

McNamara was convinced "that the dominoes would fall if we lost
Vietnam," he said ruefully in a series of interviews at Berkeley in
1996. "It was certainly the conventional wisdom among the foreign
policy establishment. . . . I think we were wrong, and certainly misjudged it."

Concerns about Vietnam were quickly dwarfed by a series of more
urgent foreign policy concerns. A month before the first Special
Forces arrived in South Vietnam, the Kennedy administration gave a
green light for Cuban exiles to mount an effort to overthrow Cuban
dictator Fidel Castro. The insurgents met with disaster at the Bay of Pigs.

McNamara had advised Kennedy to go forward with the secret invasion,
which had been an Eisenhower project. McNamara later said the
decision was his biggest regret, a clear "error at the time."

A year later, McNamara played a central role in the Kennedy
administration's nuclear brinkmanship during the Cuban Missile
Crisis. The U.S. used a threatened blockade and private diplomacy to
bluster and cajole Russian leader Nikita S. Khrushchev into removing
nuclear weapons from Cuba. McNamara took satisfaction in his role in
the outcome, saying the stand "demonstrated the readiness of our
armed forces to meet a sudden emergency."

Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, shook McNamara
deeply. He had become an intimate in Kennedy's social circles, and
the slain president's brother, Robert, asked McNamara to accompany
him to meet JFK's casket when it arrived by plane in Washington. At
Kennedy's urging, McNamara also picked out the isolated spot at
Arlington National Cemetery where the president was buried.

Johnson, Kennedy's successor, kept McNamara on, and he was soon as
impressed as Kennedy had been.

In August 1964, a series of naval skirmishes between U.S. and North
Vietnamese vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin gave McNamara and his
generals a blank check to widen the war. The episode spurred a
near-unanimous congressional vote to authorize Johnson to deploy
ground troops. Years later, historians still spar over whether the
attacks were as serious as they were initially reported -- and
whether they justified a major escalation of the war.

McNamara insisted that the North Vietnamese attacks were real and
alarming enough to provoke a stern reaction. His only hesitance,
expressed years later, was the linkage between the skirmishes and
Congress' vote. "We failed to draw Congress and the American people
into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons," he
wrote in his memoir.

But internally, McNamara led hard-liners in blunting that debate.
When Undersecretary of State George Ball tried to present a landmark
memo to Johnson opposing further escalation, McNamara fought back. He
"implied that I had been imprudent in putting such doubts on paper,"
Ball recalled in 1994. Worse, Ball said, McNamara agreed with him in
private and then shot "me down in flames" when they met with Johnson.

By 1965, as American forces in South Vietnam passed 150,000, McNamara
privately advised Johnson that the U.S. had reached "a fork in the
road" and either had to escalate or withdraw. Yet in public, McNamara
remained publicly bullish, launching an aerial bombing campaign of
North Vietnamese cities and installations.

By the fall of 1966, McNamara was privately showing the strain. He
was now "visibly anguished" when he discussed the war, recalled
Anthony Lake, a junior foreign service officer at the time who later
became national security advisor to President Clinton.

In 1967, without authorization from Johnson, McNamara privately
ordered a team of analysts to report on the roots of U.S. involvement
in Vietnam. The study took three dozen researchers 18 months to
complete, but the 7,000 pages remained secret until analyst Daniel
Ellsberg leaked portions of the study to the New York Times in 1971.

When Johnson learned about the project in mid-1967, he suspected that
McNamara planned to use the results to aid a presidential challenge
by Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Aware that his days as Defense secretary were numbered, McNamara
began dropping hints of his interest in a top vacancy at the World
Bank. After months of silence, Johnson suddenly announced McNamara's
nomination to the post. By March 1968, McNamara had left the administration.

Even after he resigned from the World Bank in 1981, the war kept
tugging at him. Finally, in 1995, McNamara at last decided to speak
out. He wrote "In Retrospect" to examine the mistakes that he and
other top officials had made and codify the lessons for future policymakers.

But some Americans who still suffered from the war's psychological
wounds were less willing to forgive and forget.

During a 1995 appearance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government as
part of a speaking tour, McNamara was confronted by John Hurley, a
Vietnam veteran who would later become a top aide in Sen. John F.
Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. "I have to tell you, sir, and
there's no polite way to do this, your book and your presence is an
obscenity," Hurley told McNamara.

When Hurley pressed McNamara to explain why he remained silent about
his doubts during the war, McNamara suggested that he read the book.
When Hurley nudged again, McNamara snapped. "Shut up," McNamara
raged, then replayed an old argument he had made 40 years earlier.

"He never understood, never seemed to care about the human cost of
the war," Hurley said later. "To him, Vietnam was just policy issues,
sterile numbers to be managed."

It was much the same remorseless apologia that McNamara made on
camera during a solo turn in "The Fog of War."

"We all make mistakes," McNamara said at one point in the film. "I
don't know any military commander, who is honest, who would say he
has not made a mistake. There's a wonderful phrase: 'The fog of war.'
What the fog of war means is: War is so complex it's beyond the
ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our
judgment, our understanding, are not adequate."

McNamara's survivors include his second wife, the former Diana
Masieri Byfield, and three children from his first marriage, to
Margaret, who died in 1981: Craig of Winters, Calif., and Margaret
Pastor and Kathleen McNamara, both of Washington. He is also survived
by six grandchildren.

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Robert McNamara, chief architect of Vietnam War, dies at 93

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/07/robert_mcnamara.html

July 6, 2009
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Robert S. McNamara, who as secretary of defense during the Kennedy
and Johnson administrations was a leading architect of US military
involvement in Indochina, died this morning. He was 93.

His family told the Washington Post that Mr. McNamara died in his
sleep at his Washington home. The cause of death was not reported.

Besides the Defense Department, Mr. McNamara led two other
institutions of global importance. He became the first non-family
member to serve as president of the Ford Motor Company, in 1960. He
was also president of the World Bank from 1968-81.

Yet Mr. McNamara is best remembered ­ and in some quarters still
reviled ­ for the seven years he spent at the Pentagon and the part
he played in waging the Vietnam War. The controversy that erupted in
1995 when he published his memoir, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and
Lessons of Vietnam," demonstrated the extent to which the scars he
bore remained unhealed.

No one person can be assigned responsibility for escalating the US
role in the conflict. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B.
Johnson, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State
Dean Rusk: Each played his part. To many, though, it was "McNamara's
war," as US Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon once put it.

"I don't object to its being called McNamara's war," Mr. McNamara
said during a 1964 press conference. "I think it is a very important
war, and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can
to win it."

Those words would come to haunt him.

Two years earlier, he had visited Vietnam for the first time. "Every
quantitative measurement we have shows that we're winning this war,"
he said. It was a telling response from someone who would be
presiding over a struggle in which, as the United States came to
learn, hearts and minds did more to determine the outcome than body
counts or bomb tonnage.

It was also a characteristic response from a man who saw
number-crunching as equal parts contact sport and higher calling.
Give him enough statistics to analyze, Mr. McNamara seemed to
believe, and almost any problem might be solved. "You can't
substitute emotion for reason," he liked to say.

This quantitative bent was the foundation of his extraordinary
certitude, a certitude critics called inflexibility. No one was more
can-do, no one more gung-ho. Mr. McNamara brought an
almost-missionary zeal to problem-solving. "I would rather have a
wrong decision made than no decision at all," he once said. It was an
emblematic statement.

An avid skier, tennis player, and mountaineer, Mr. McNamara
personified the New Frontier. He was youthful (only Donald Rumsfeld,
during the Ford administration, was a younger defense secretary).
Famously intelligent, he was cited in a 1962 Saturday Evening Post
profile as having "the highest intelligence quotient of any leading
public official in this century." He was furiously dedicated,
routinely working six-day weeks and 13-hour days.

Kennedy reportedly wanted Mr. McNamara to replace Rusk as secretary
of state in his second administration. And Robert Kennedy said he and
his brother speculated about supporting Mr. McNamara for the
Democratic presidential nomination in 1968.

The Kennedys were not alone in falling under the spell of the
McNamara mystique. Johnson offered him the vice-presidential
nomination in 1964. "He's the best man available," LBJ told a friend.
When Mr. McNamara declined, Johnson pronounced him "No. 1 executive
vice president in charge of the Cabinet." He later awarded him the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

US Senator Barry Goldwater, who would become a harsh critic,
initially hailed Mr. McNamara as "one of the best secretaries ever,
an IBM machine with legs." David Halberstam, who would later assail
Mr. McNamara in his book "The Best and the Brightest," wrote in 1963
that "McNamara may well be this country's most distinguished civil
servant of the last decade."

Perhaps only Henry Kissinger, who simultaneously served as secretary
of state and national security adviser during the Nixon and Ford
administrations, surpassed him in the admittedly small category of
public servants who have attained cult status.

Nevertheless, the very things that gave Mr. McNamara such cachet ­
briskness, brilliance, decisiveness ­ came to undermine him. Vietnam
was only the most obvious example. His run-ins with senior military
leaders, Congress, and the media earned him widespread enmity in
Washington. A congressman dubbed him "I-Have-All-The-Answers McNamara."

The New York Times columnist James Reston wrote in 1966, "He is tidy,
he is confident, he has the sincerity of an Old Testament prophet,
but something is missing: some element of personal doubt, some
respect for human weakness, some knowledge of history."

What Mr. McNamara once described as his image of "cool efficiency"
even extended to his appearance. With his slicked-back hair and
rimless glasses, he looked to be part accountant, part recording angel.

Yet much of Mr. McNamara's fascination sprang from how he could
subvert that image. This supreme bean-counter also loved poetry. This
avatar of detachment and abstract reasoning was prone to bouts of weeping
.
The bouts increased as the war dragged on. "He does it all the time
now," a secretary remarked shortly before Mr. McNamara left the
Pentagon, in 1968. "He cries into the curtain."

The term "McNamara's war" arose from his very public enthusiasm for a
military solution to the conflict. As the statistics that crossed Mr.
McNamara's desk more and more indicated the improbability of victory,
the term remained fitting. For no one waging the war endured such
agonies of doubt: He mirrored the nation's own consternation. "My
sense of the war gradually shifted from concern to skepticism to
frustration to anguish," Mr. McNamara later wrote.

To arrive at some better understanding of how things could have gone
so wrong, Mr. McNamara commissioned a study called "United
States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967." The public would come to know
it by another name: "The Pentagon Papers."

A man of phenomenal abilities, Mr. McNamara discovered how few of
them were suited to the demands of Vietnam. "I had always been
confident that every problem could be solved," he wrote in his
memoir, "but now I found myself confronting one ­ involving national
pride and human life ­ that could not."

Mr. McNamara's 13 years as president of the World Bank were widely
seen as an act of atonement for what he had done in Vietnam, though
he denied this. He increased tenfold the amount of money the bank had
out on loans.

In particular, he championed the Third World, tripling the bank's
loans to developing countries and shifting its emphasis from
large-scale industrial projects to rural development and population
control. He also began publication of an annual World Development Report.

After leaving the bank, Mr. McNamara emerged as an elder statesman in
the field of nuclear affairs. He had played a leading part in
bringing about a limited test-ban treaty in 1963, and his propounding
the concept of mutual assured destruction, the cornerstone of the
nuclear balance of power for much of the Cold War, may have been his
single most important legacy as defense secretary.

Such credentials gave weight to Mr. McNamara's advocacy of a nuclear
freeze and a US policy of no first use of nuclear weapons.

Elder statesman or no, Mr. McNamara remained a controversial figure,
as the media firestorm that greeted "In Retrospect" made plain. Mr.
McNamara's growing doubts about the Vietnam War were widely known as
early as his final months at the Pentagon, but he had never directly
addressed the subject. Now he put them on the record. "Yet we were
wrong, terribly wrong," he wrote. "We owe it to future generations to
explain why."

The words were front-page news. "His regret cannot be huge enough to
balance the books for our dead soldiers," a New York Times editorial
declared. "What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time
apology and stale tears, three decades late." The New Republic asked,
"Has any single American of this century done more harm than Robert McNamara?"

Despite such withering criticism, Mr. McNamara remained a figure of
public fascination. In 2003, the filmmaker Errol Morris released an
Academy Award-winning documentary about him, "The Fog of War."

The son of Robert James McNamara and Claranel (Strange) McNamara,
Robert Strange McNamara was born in San Francisco on June 9, 1916.
His father was a sales manager for a shoe wholesaler, his mother a
housewife. He grew up in Oakland and graduated from the University of
California at Berkeley in 1937. Two years later, he earned a master's
degree at Harvard Business School. He briefly worked for a West Coast
accounting firm, then returned to Harvard as an assistant professor
of accounting.

During World War II, Mr. McNamara was part of an elite group of Army
Air Force officers specializing in statistical control of the
distribution of personnel, ordnance, and aircraft. The group became
known as the "Whiz Kids" and wielded great influence. It was at their
urging, for example, that B-29 bombers were employed over Japan
rather than B-17s. Mr. McNamara rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

After the war, 10 Whiz Kids were hired as a group by Ford. The
company had been close to bankruptcy. Thanks in part to the new group
and the statistical controls they brought, the company became a model
for other businesses and flourished.

Mr. McNamara flourished, too, rising in less than 15 years to the
company presidency. Business Week hailed him as a "prize specimen of
a remarkable breed in US industry ­ the trained specialist in the
science of business management who is also a generalist moving easily
from one technical area to another."

It was that technocratic vision Mr. McNamara attempted to institute
at the Pentagon, with great fanfare ­ and mixed results. He boasted
of "the most outstanding group ever to serve in a cabinet
department." Among his subordinates were future secretaries of the
treasury (John Connally); defense (Harold Brown); health, education
and welfare (Joseph Califano); and state (Cyrus Vance). Yet many of
his most-publicized initiatives, such as the TFX fighter, an aircraft
meant to serve both the Navy and Air Force, proved to be failures.

No one has served a longer single term as defense secretary. Even if
the war had not worn Mr. McNamara down, the combination of the job's
relentless demands and his own high expectations would have done so.
It was plain that it was time for him to leave. "I do not know to
this day whether I quit or was fired," he confessed in 1995. "Maybe
it was both."

A year before leaving the Pentagon, Mr. McNamara delivered an address
at Millsaps College, in Mississippi, which offered a particularly
revealing statement of both the limitations and sweep of his
worldview. However inadvertently, it also went a long way toward
explaining why he met with such impressive success and notable
failure during his career.

"Management is the gate through which social and economic and
political change, indeed, change in every direction, is diffused
throughout society,'' Mr. McNamara declared. "The real threat to
democracy comes from under-management," he added. "To undermanage
reality is not to keep it free. It is simply to let some force other
than reason shape reality."

Mr. McNamara married Margaret McKinstry Craig in 1940. She later
founded the literacy organization Reading Is Fundamental. The couple
remained married until her death, in 1981. He married Diana Masieri
Byfield in 2004.

In addition to his wife, Mr. McNamara leaves three children: Craig
McNamara, of Winters, Calif.; and Kathleen McNamara and Margaret
Pastor, both of Washington.

--------

McNamaranism Alive and Well

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski233.html

by Karen Kwiatkowski
July 8, 2009

Columnist Bob Herbert's homage to Robert McNamara on his peaceful
passage at age 93 is apropos. Herbert was a draftee in the mid-60s.
He, his friends and cousins, were sent to Southeast Asia to fight a
lie-based war that no one, we learned later, wanted or needed.

The boys drafted in the 60's and 70's for Vietnam duty had one
advantage over today's soldiers, in terms of their ability to morally
and intellectually deal with being sent to kill in the name of
Washington. Most of them didn't ask to go, and didn't understand why
they were there. They were tools, but most were honest tools.
Alternatives to patriotic uniformed slave labor in the draft era were minimal.

The politicians of McNamara's ilk had a moral and intellectual excuse
as well. LBJ was doing the "war" in Vietnam as a jobs and welfare
program. Jobs to keep the defense hawks out of his hair while he and
the Congress pursued, at the time, an unprecedented domestic spending
spree. Coming out of the 50's with federal and state revenues flowing
freely, there seemed to be plenty for both the warfare and the
welfare state. Vietnam was and remains a good war in the eyes of the statists.

I suspect that such gnarled and convoluted macro-logic helped keep
guys like McNamara sane, even as he reflected later on what it meant
to be responsible for killing 30 or 40 thousand young Americans, and
perhaps three million Vietnamese during his tenure as Secretary of Defense.

Justifying deaths of that magnitude is probably easier than living
with the memory of single victim in an accident you might have
prevented. I suspect many Americans employed by the state agonize
more running over a kitten or a puppy in their driveway on their way
to work than they do over the deaths of thousands, fallen because
they lied, veiled the truth, did what they were told rather than what
they knew was moral.

Today's wars are in a different place, yet McNamara-style
justifications, obfuscations, and moral hollowness prevail triumphant.

Instead of preventing a communist domino effect on the Asian rim,
Bush/Clinton/Bush and Obama are "preventing" independent republics,
Islamic and secular, from freely trading their own resources and
solving their own domestic problems. Americans like to think they
themselves would never tolerate this kind of treatment by a foreign
army and its diplomatic corps. We can only pray, as McNamara must
have, that there is no karma.

Washington executes this aggressive interference with smaller
countries as it has for a dozen decades ­ through economic pressure,
including both gifts and sanctions, through military threats and
attempted military occupations. Many would say our policies towards
Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iran today are not the same thing
at all as our policies toward Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and China in
the 50s and 60s. Thinking people must disagree. The pattern fits and
we ought to own up to that.

Oh, but communistic bleedover in the 60's was one thing, and Islamic
fundamentalism, oil control and Israel's security today is completely
different! For average Americans who don't recognize communism when
stares them in the face, have no clue about either fundamentalism or
Muslims, don't understand the global oil and financial marketplace,
and forgot about Israel's place as the richest per capita Middle
Eastern country and the only one with 400 nuclear weapons at the
ready ­ trust me, it's the same damn thing, with the same steady
stream of junk news at the spewing end of the state power catheter.

Let's leave for a moment the hypocritical and murderous way we
presently deal with the Middle East, a formal policy of threats,
military and political interference, and lack of humanity. For
Americans, this is mainly a political problem. We know politicians
are ignorant and venal, vain supplicants to power and money. As long
as our politicians and their appointees, McNamara-style, are killing
people and destroying productive infrastructure in other countries,
they are providing jobs for us, and what's a few deaths of otherwise
unemployable volunteers in the military?

McNamara lives in our hearts. If you liked this intellectual statist
and his clean-handed death-dealing, read no further. This is his
legacy, and it is us.

I am sitting here listening to William Shatner asking about Jon
Voigt's Raw Nerve. Apparently, Voigt and Shatner both find the
volunteer soldiers and Marines in Iraq, and presumably their
commanders and their leaders, to be pure ­ Voigt said they have a
"kind of purity" and they are "better than his generation" who didn't
want to go to Vietnam. These patriots love what they are doing in
Iraq, in Afghanistan. How sweet it is to lovingly serve the state, to
build schools while metaphorically and literally murdering the unruly
schoolchildren.

Why Robert McNamara lived to age 93 is not for us to know. He did
have second thoughts, but his decades-late utterances about the
Pentagon and Washington's lies and immorality only enraged those who
hated the war, as well as those who believed in the empire.

But to mourn his passing is unnecessary. We haven't learned a thing
from his life and crimes. We continue to trust our overseas wars and
our patriotic souls to soft-handed, finely dressed, wire-rimmed
statist intellectuals and pansy-hearted politicians, beholden to the
lobbies of democracy, of national industry, of foreign interests, of empire.

We trust them and we send our own unemployable and ill-educated
children into the maw, for their own good. To make them strong and
pure. To instill in them blind obedience to intellectuals in suits.
To train them in the ways of professional and political bean counters
who cannot count.

Until we the people completely turn our backs on the state, and its
beloved empire, we are all McNamarans.

--------

All sides blame McNamara for Vietnam

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/07/07/mcnamara/index.html

People for and against the war agree on one thing only: It was Robert
McNamara's fault

By Michael Lind
July 7, 2009

Robert McNamara has died. Notwithstanding his previous career at Ford
in the 1950s and his later career as president of the World Bank,
Robert Strange McNamara will always be remembered for his service as
secretary of defense for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations
during the height of the Second Indochina War, known in the U.S. as
"the Vietnam War." In death, as in life, he is likely to prove to be
a Rorschach test for what people think about that conflict and the
four-decade Cold War of which it was part.

The clue to McNamara's significance is that he was demonized by the
left, the right and the center. If there is a Rorschach Prize, he
deserved it. Other American public figures have been hated by one
side, but usually they have been defended by the other. I can't think
of anybody else in American history whom liberals, conservatives and
moderates all joined in denouncing.

Why? The vitriol that was directed against McNamara always seemed
excessive and even unhinged to me. After all, he wasn't the
president. Why not blame Kennedy for deepening the U.S. involvement
in Indochina, or Johnson for escalating it, or Nixon for prolonging
it? But Kennedy, Johnson and even Nixon have had their partisans, who
have sought to minimize the collateral damage done to the reputations
of these presidents by their failed Vietnam policies.

The partisans of the Kennedys have been particularly busy rewriting
history in order to turn the brothers from anti-communist cold
warriors who tried repeatedly to murder Fidel Castro and were
entranced by the romanticism of counterinsurgency into doves, while
casting the reluctant, cautious Lyndon Johnson as a deranged hawk. By
the end of the 20th century, more and more aging people were claiming
to remember that Jack Kennedy had secretly promised them that he
would abandon Indochina to the communist bloc if he were reelected, a
remarkable example of repressed-memory syndrome unknown elsewhere
except among people who claim to have recovered memories of UFO
abductions. How convenient it was, then, to declare that the
"architect" of the Vietnam War was neither Kennedy nor Johnson but
their secretary of defense. "The Tsar is good, the mistakes are to be
blamed on his ministers."

It was McNamara's misfortune that he, rather than other candidates
for sacrifice -- McGeorge Bundy, say, or Walt Rostow -- was singled
out to be the scapegoat for what, after all, was the central,
catastrophic failure of the Kennedy-Johnson administration as a
whole. Why the disaster in Vietnam came to be so widely blamed on the
secretary of defense rather than on National Security Advisers Bundy
and Rostow is not clear. Unlike Henry Kissinger, who for better or
worse was the strategic mastermind of the Nixon administration,
McNamara, who had intellectual interests including a love of poetry,
was not himself an intellectual, like Rostow, with his theory of
communism as a "disease of modernization," or theorists of limited
war, including the young Kissinger. Some of the traits that are often
attributed to McNamara, like excessive confidence in technocratic
solutions, were those of his generation, not personal idiosyncrasies.
And the self-assurance that seemed to irritate so many critics at the
time (many of whom were unaware of his private agonizing over the
war) was, and remains, a character trait common among the powerful in
Washington and other capitals.

For whatever reason, McNamara instead of other figures below the
presidential level was singled out in the public mind as the iconic
symbol of failure in Vietnam. But this still does not explain how
people who disagreed on everything else have so often agreed to make
McNamara the symbol of all that was wrong in American foreign policy.

The solution to the mystery is simple, if subtle. There have been
three influential critiques of the Vietnam War. The critiques are
those of the antiwar left, the pro-war right and the realist center.
Each critique generated its own image of McNamara to fit its own
theory of the Vietnam War.

On the left, many in the antiwar movement argued that the Vietnam
War was a Nazi-like atrocity. It was not a justified war in which war
crimes were committed. The war itself was a crime, a war of colonial
depredation that had no genuine relation to the larger Cold War,
except in American propaganda. It follows that Robert McNamara was a
war criminal. Needless to say, to denounce McNamara, the implementer
of Kennedy-Johnson policy, as a war criminal, without denouncing
Kennedy and Johnson as war criminals, too, was as absurd as
denouncing Himmler for the Holocaust but not Hitler. But this
inconsistency does not seem to have bothered many members of the antiwar left.

On the right, most conservatives supported the Vietnam War as one
of many legitimate battles, including the Korean War, to thwart the
expansion of the communist bloc by invasions or communist takeovers
supported by the Soviet Union and/or Mao's China. Just as they had
done during the Korean War, however, conservatives denounced a
Democratic administration for allegedly holding back the U.S.
military. Just as the right accused the Truman administration of
needlessly throwing away victory in Korea by restraining and then
firing Gen. MacArthur, so the right accused the Johnson
administration of needlessly throwing away victory in Indochina by
restraining Gen. William Westmoreland. This "stab-in-the-back" theory
of the Vietnam War, blaming timid civilians like McNamara and LBJ for
forcing the U.S. military to fight with one hand tied behind its
back, was popularized by the late Col. Harry Summers after the war
and is still the dominant view on the American right.

As if that weren't enough, McNamara was a convenient whipping boy
for the realist center, identified with George Kennan and Hans
Morgenthau. Both opposed the U.S. intervention in Indochina, as they
had earlier opposed the U.S. intervention in Korea (a fact that is
now forgotten), by claiming that according to their calculations of
geopolitical significance neither Indochina nor Korea was militarily
significant. Unlike the antiwar left, the realists did not oppose war
in principle, nor did they think that the U.S. was a malevolent
power. Unlike the anticommunist right, they argued that the Cold War
was really a clash of traditional great powers rather than an
ideological or civilizational struggle. The realists argued that
supporters of the Vietnam War had committed a mistake not of the
heart but of the head. They displayed the "arrogance of power," they
were "hubristic," and so on. (Note that desperate gambles that
succeed never display the arrogance of power or hubris; in hindsight,
successful policies are prudent and statesmanlike by definition.)

The Vietnam War was a crime to the left, a betrayal to the right,
and a mistake to the realists. It followed that Robert McNamara, the
ritual scapegoat chosen to stand in for the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations, was a war criminal to the left, a near-traitor to
the right, and a fool to the realists. Had another scapegoat like
Bundy or Rostow been chosen instead of McNamara to symbolize the
failure of Vietnam, that individual would have been denounced with
equal fervor as a hubristic fool by the realists, a near-traitor by
the conservatives, and a Nazi-like war criminal by the radical left.

One's view of McNamara, then, depends on one's view of the Vietnam
War. These three accounts of the Vietnam War continue to dominate the
debate. The problem is that each of the three accounts has
significant problems.

Nobody takes seriously anymore the claim made by many radicals at the
time that the Second Indochina War was merely an anti-colonial
rebellion that had nothing to do with the wider Cold War. Following
their victory in 1975, the aging Stalinists of Hanoi proudly boasted
of their sponsorship of the Viet Cong in South Vietnam and displayed
their orthodox Marxism-Leninism. After years of playing their Soviet
and Chinese sponsors against one another, the Vietnamese communists
became a completely dependent Soviet satellite state, inspiring
post-Mao China to attack it in 1979.

The moral case against the damage done to the Vietnamese population
and landscape by U.S. firepower and Agent Orange defoliation is
compelling. But the U.S. effort in Korea was even more devastating,
and the U.S. efforts in World War II included the incineration of
German and Japanese cities by conventional and atomic bombing. To the
historian, the case that the Vietnam War was a unique atrocity in
itself is hard to make.

The conservative stab-in-the-back theory of the Vietnam War has
flaws of its own. If only the Johnson administration had "unleashed"
the full power of the U.S. military, by invading the North or bombing
the dikes, then the war would have ended quickly, with far fewer
American and Vietnamese casualties, with a reunified noncommunist
Vietnam or perhaps a Korean-style stalemate lasting to this day. What
this attractive might-have-been ignores is the fact that the Johnson
administration feared that China, which was already supplying North
Vietnam with hundreds of thousands of logistics troops, might engage
in full-scale war with the U.S. in Vietnam as it had done in Korea.
The evidence that has emerged from China since the end of the Cold
War suggests that Mao very well might have intervened directly, had
the U.S. gone too far. The Johnson administration in retrospect was
far from stupid in trying to prevent Vietnam from escalating into a
second Sino-American war.

The realist account probably has the most adherents today. Vietnam
was of no long-term strategic significance and could have been
sacrificed by the U.S. without a fight, with no lasting damage to
America's power and reputation. Perhaps. And perhaps the U.S. could
have forgone the Berlin Airlift -- West Berlin, after all, was of no
intrinsic strategic significance -- and the Korean War and the
defense of Taiwan, as well. Maybe U.S. allies both great (like West
Germany and Japan) and small would not have appeased the Soviet Union
out of fear, as Moscow went from victory to victory, defeating the
U.S. through intimidation or proxies in one conflict after another.
Seven presidents disagreed. From Truman to Reagan, American
presidents, liberal and conservative alike, thought that from Berlin
to Indochina and Korea they were defending America's reputation as a
powerful and determined defender of weak allies, not simply physical
assets, like the sea lanes and iron deposits so beloved by realist thinkers.

One problem with realism during the Cold War was the tendency of many
realists to denigrate the ideological aspects of conflict as somehow
insignificant compared to material factors, or to explain them away
as camouflages for "real," that is, material and military, interests.
This line of thought was as inadequate in accounting for zealous
Marxist-Leninists then as it is in understanding zealous Islamists
today. The realist case is weakened further by the fact that realists
seem unable to disagree on what areas are strategic and what are not,
except, in all too many cases, after the fact. How many realists
today denounce the Korean War along with the Vietnam War? Had the
Vietnam War ended in a Korean-style stalemate, with a rotting North
and a rapidly modernizing South, how many realists today would be
arguing that containing communism in Southeast Asia was folly?

What will historians in the future say about Robert McNamara and his
role in Vietnam? I suspect that in the decades to come, historians
will increasingly integrate the Second Indochina War -- and the
first, and the third -- into the overall history of the Cold War,
rather than treat it as an isolated episode or free-standing morality
play. Beyond that, it will all depend on who writes the history. One
prediction is safe: What historians of tomorrow think of Robert
McNamara will depend on their view of the Vietnam War.

--------

Reading an Obit With Great Pleasure

http://www.truthout.org/070709M?n

Monday 06 July 2009
by: Joseph L. Galloway

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with
great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
--

Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally
shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.

McNamara was the original bean-counter - a man who knew the cost
of everything but the worth of nothing.

Back in 1990 I had a series of strange phone conversations with
McMamara while doing research for my book We Were Soldiers Once And
Young. McNamara prefaced every conversation with this: "I do not want
to comment on the record for fear that I might distort history in the
process." Then he would proceed to talk for an hour, doing precisely
that with answers that were disingenuous in the extreme - when they
were not bald-faced lies.

Upon hanging up I would call Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam
and run McNamara's comments past them for deconstruction and the
addition of the truth.

The only disagreement i ever had with Dave Halberstam was over
the question of which of us hated him the most. In retrospect, it was
Halberstam.

When McNamara published his first book - filled with those
distortions of history - Halberstam, at his own expense, set out on a
journey following McNamara on his book tour around America as a
one-man truth squad.

McNamara abandoned the tour.

The most bizarre incident involving McNamara occurred when he
was president of the World Bank and, off on his summer holiday, he
caught the Martha's Vineyard ferry. It was a night crossing in bad
weather. McNamara was in the salon, drink in hand, schmoozing with
fellow passengers. On the deck outside a vineyard local, a hippie
artist, glanced through the window and did a double-take. The artist
was outraged to see McNamara, whom he viewed as a war criminal, so
enjoying himself.

He immediately opened the door and told McNamara there was a
radiophone call for him on the bridge. McNamara set down his drink
and stepped outside. The artist immediately grabbed him, wrestled him
to the railing and pushed him over the side. McNamara managed to get
his fingers through the holes in the metal plate that ran from the
top of the railing to the scuppers.

McNamara was screaming bloody murder; the artist was prying his
fingers loose one at a time. Someone heard the racket and raced out
and pulled the artist off.

By the time the ferry docked in the vineyard McNamara had
decided against filing charges against the artist, and he was freed
and walked away.

--------

McNamara's Ghost

http://www.truthout.org/070709R?n

Tuesday 07 July 2009
by: William Rivers Pitt

Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he's
speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application
of military power. He's killed people unnecessarily - his own troops
or other troops - through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A
hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred
thousand. But, he hasn't destroyed nations. And the conventional
wisdom is don't make the same mistake twice, learn from your
mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the same mistake three times,
but hopefully not four or five.
-- Robert S. McNamara
--

One of the last knights of Camelot, of the New Frontier, is
gone. Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense under presidents
Kennedy and Johnson, former president of Ford Motor Co. and the World
Bank, husband, father and chief architect of America's catastrophic
war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, passed away at home after years of
declining health. He was 93.

"Mr. McNamara is best remembered and in some quarters still
reviled for the seven years he spent at the Pentagon and the part he
played in waging the Vietnam War," read McNamara's obituary in the
Boston Globe. "In 1995, he published his memoir, 'In Retrospect: The
Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,' in which he wrote that he and other
top officials were 'terribly wrong' to pursue the war. The
controversy that erupted demonstrated the extent to which the
nation's scars remained unhealed. Others can also be assigned
responsibility for escalating the US role in the conflict during that
time: Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, National
Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. To
many, though, it was 'McNamara's war,' as US Senator Wayne Morse of
Oregon once put it."

The timing of his passing saw McNamara join a motley crew of
notables and celebrities who have shuffled loose the mortal coil in
the last two weeks. Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson,
Billy Mays, Steve McNair; each of these luminaries got a share of
media coverage - some more than others, of course - and McNamara was
no different. Every major newspaper in America treated the death of
McNamara as front-page news, and the only reason his passing was not
part of the rotation on the cable networks on Tuesday was because
they were very slowly burying Michael Jackson in Los Angeles.

Some other people also died in the last two weeks. Two
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) soldiers were killed
in Afghanistan on July 1. Three members of a family were killed by
rocket fire on the same day. Two British soldiers and one American
soldier were killed in Afghanistan on July 2. Another American
soldier was captured. A Canadian soldier was killed by a roadside
bomb in Afghanistan on July 3. Two American soldiers were killed on
the Fourth of July. A US Marine and three UK troops were killed in
Afghanistan on July 5. Seven US troops were killed in Afghanistan on
July 6. In the last two days, five Iraqi policemen and two Iraqi
soldiers were killed in Baghdad. Five more policemen were killed in
Mosul. Thirty-eight Coalition troops were killed in June in
Afghanistan, and 19 have been killed in the first week of July. In
Afghanistan, 1,220 Coalition troops have died since 2001. Fifteen US
troops were killed in June in Iraq, and 4,321 have died since 2003.

None of these people got the same kind of ink as McMahon,
Fawcett, Jackson, Mays, McNair or McNamara, but they are just as
dead. The passing of McNamara and the deaths of all those soldiers
belong in the same column, because they are all part of the same
long, sad, blood-soaked story.

Vietnam was an exercise in hubris, deception and profiteering
that McNamara spent the latter half of his life trying to justify,
live down and explain away. The soldiers who have died in Iraq and
Afghanistan would recognize Robert McNamara, for they were consigned
to the grave by McNamara's modern replacements. Rumsfeld, Powell,
Wolfowitz, Feith, Rove, Libby and the other Bush administration
officials who ginned up two wars and made abject debacles of both are
the modern inheritors of McNamara's curse. As are the soldiers and
civilians who have been chewed up and annihilated. As are we all.

Robert McNamara taught us all we needed to know about the folly
of war, about aftermath and about regret. Nobody listened, nobody
learned, except for the dead.

--------

McNamara Was "Wrong, Terribly Wrong" About Vietnam

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/449270/mcnamara_was_wrong_terribly_wrong_about_vietnam

by John Nichols
07/06/2009

Robert McNamara's actions during the Vietnam War were wrong, terribly wrong.

Such was the assessment of a knowledgable critic: McNamara himself.

The Secretary of Defense during the administrations of Presidents
John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who has died at age 93, was in his
day portrayed as the most brilliant technocrat in an era when
brilliant technocrats were worshipped by the media and political
elites. Unfortunately, his own tragic trajectory confirmed that the
best and the brightest were fallible -- in the extreme.

A Ford Motors "whiz kid" who brought his management skills to
Kennedy's Camelot and stayed around long enough to watch the dream
crumble under Johnson. When he arrived at the Department of Defense,
McNamara admitted that his knowledge of military matters was scant.
But he was confident enough -- arguably "arrogant enough" -- to
believe he could master the Pentagon with a mumbo-jumbo of management
platitudes -- announcing his intention to apply an "active role"
management philosophy that involved "providing aggressive leadership
questioning, suggesting alternatives, proposing objectives and
stimulating progress."

In other words, McNamara winged it.

Badly.

McNamara peddled the fantasy that something happened in the Gulf of
Tonkin that justified giving him a blank check for a massive war in
southeast Asia. And McNamara cashed the check, flooding Vietnam with
U.S. troops -- 535,000 by 1968 -- and bringing tens of thousands of
those young soldiers home dead or horribly wounded. The Secretary of
Defense had tried to fight a war with statistical theories and
anti-communist, Domino-theory fantasies. And the project failed.

McNamara recognized this by late 1967 and made some effort to alter
U.S. strategies. But it was too late, for him and for Lyndon
Johnson's presidency, which crashed and burned in the Mekong Delta.

Johnson sent McNamara off to run the World Bank -- where the master
manager did considerable harm as a pioneering proponent of
neo-colonial development schemes that the managerial class continues
to inflict upon the poorest people on the planet -- and that was that.

Except for one thing.

McNamara felt guilty about his management of the Vietnam imbroglio.

His best-selling 1995 reflection on the personal and global nightmare
that the war in southeast Asia became, In Retrospect was read by many
Americans as an apology. While it may have fallen short of what was
required, McNamara did admit that he and is compatriots fouled up -- horribly.

Specifically, McNamara wrote: "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."

Noam Chomsky offered a tough but fair review of the McNamara memoir:
"The one interesting aspect of the book is how little he understood
about what was going on or understands today. He doesn't even
understand what he was involved in. I assume he's telling the truth.
The book has a kind of ring of honesty about it. What it reads like
is an extremely narrow technocrat, a small-time engineer who was
given a particular job to do and just tried to do that job
efficiently, didn't understand anything that was going on, including
what he himself was doing."

Almost a decade later, in the documentary Fog of War McNamara would
admit to a many more failures. Most importantly, he expanded on his
earlier acknowledgement that, "We do not have the God-given right to
shape every nation in our image or as we choose."

McNamara applied that standard to the Bush-Cheney administration's
mad misadventure in Iraq, saying that: "(If) we can't persuade other
nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merit
of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely
change it. And if we'd followed that rule, we wouldn't have been in
Vietnam, because there wasn't one single major ally, not France or
Britain or Germany or Japan, that agreed with our course or stood
beside us there. And we wouldn't be in Iraq."

Does getting Iraq right offer absolution for getting Vietnam wrong?

Do admissions of errors ease the burden of those errors?

McNamara lived long enough to raise these questions.

History will answer them, perhaps unkindly.

But we ought not underestimate the significance of McNamara's
admission that he was "wrong, terribly wrong."

He displayed a measure of self-awareness, and self-doubt, that is
healthy -- and all too rare among major figures in the
military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower warned
about on the eve of Robert McNamara's confirmation as Secretary of
Defense, and of which McNamara was an embodiment.

Consider the prospect that Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld will ever
admit to having been "wrong, terribly wrong" about Iraq and you begin
to get a measure of the meaning of the former Defense Secretary's
late-in-life admissions. It can easily be argued that he was
insufficiently repentant, and insufficiently insightful. But there
was something refreshing about the fact that McNamara felt compelled
to try and explain himself.

--------

McNamara's Evil Lives On

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090707_robert_scheer_july_8_column/

Jul 7, 2009
By Robert Scheer

Why not speak ill of the dead?

Robert McNamara, who died this week, was a complex man­charming even,
in a blustery way, and someone I found quite thoughtful when I
interviewed him. In the third act of his life he was often an
advocate for enlightened positions on world poverty and the dangers
of the nuclear arms race. But whatever his better nature, it was the
stark evil he perpetrated as secretary of defense that must indelibly
frame our memory of him.

To not speak out fully because of respect for the deceased would be
to mock the memory of the millions of innocent people McNamara caused
to be maimed and killed in a war that he later freely admitted never
made any sense. Much has been made of the fact that he recanted his
support for the war, but that came 20 years after the holocaust he
visited upon Vietnam was over.

Is holocaust too emotionally charged a word? How many millions of
dead innocent civilians does it take to qualify labels like
holocaust, genocide or terrorism? How many of the limbless victims of
his fragmentation bombs and land mines whom I saw in Vietnam during
and after the war? Or are America's leaders always to be exempted
from such questions? Perhaps if McNamara had been held legally
accountable for his actions, the architects of the Iraq debacle might
have paused.

Instead, McNamara was honored with the Medal of Freedom by President
Lyndon Johnson, to whom he had written a private memo nine months
earlier offering this assessment of their Vietnam carnage: "The
picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously
injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny
backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly
disputed, is not a pretty one."

He knew it then, and, give him this, the dimensions of that horror
never left him. When I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times in
1995, after the publication of his confessional memoir, his
assessment of the madness he had unleashed was all too clear:

"Look, we dropped three to four times the tonnage on that tiny little
area as were dropped by the Allies in all of the theaters in World
War II over a period of five years. It was unbelievable. We
killed­there were killed­3,200,000 Vietnamese, excluding the South
Vietnamese military. My God! The killing, the tonnage­it was
fantastic. The problem was that we were trying to do something that
was militarily impossible­we were trying to break the will; I don't
think we can break the will by bombing short of genocide."

We­no, he­couldn't break their will because their fight was for
national independence. They had defeated the French and would defeat
the Americans who took over when French colonialists gave up the
ghost. The war was a lie from the first. It never had anything to do
with the freedom of the Vietnamese (we installed one tyrant after
another in power), but instead had to do with our irrational Cold War
obsession with "international communism." Irrational, as President
Richard Nixon acknowledged when he embraced détente with the Soviet
communists, toasted China's fierce communist Mao Tse-tung and then
escalated the war against "communist" Vietnam and neutral Cambodia.

It was always a lie and our leaders knew it, but that did not give
them pause. Both Johnson and Nixon make it quite clear on their White
House tapes that the mindless killing, McNamara's infamous body
count, was about domestic politics and never security.

The lies are clearly revealed in the Pentagon Papers study that
McNamara commissioned, but they were made public only through the
bravery of Daniel Ellsberg. Yet when Ellsberg, a former Marine who
had worked for McNamara in the Pentagon, was in the docket facing the
full wrath of Nixon's Justice Department, McNamara would lift not a
finger in his defense. Worse, as Ellsberg reminded me this week,
McNamara threatened that if subpoenaed to testify at the trial by
Ellsberg's defense team, "I would hurt your client badly."

Not as badly as those he killed or severely wounded. Not as badly as
the almost 59,000 American soldiers killed and the many more horribly
hurt. One of them was the writer and activist Ron Kovic, who as a kid
from Long Island was seduced by McNamara's lies into volunteering for
two tours in Vietnam. Eventually, struggling with his mostly
paralyzed body, he spoke out against the war in the hope that others
would not have to suffer as he did (and still does). Meanwhile,
McNamara maintained his golden silence, even as Richard Nixon managed
to kill and maim millions more. What McNamara did was evil­deeply so.

--------

Robert S. McNamara, Architect of a Futile War, Dies at 93

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html

By TIM WEINER
Published: July 6, 2009

Robert S. McNamara, the forceful and cerebral defense secretary who
helped lead the nation into the maelstrom of Vietnam and spent the
rest of his life wrestling with the war's moral consequences, died
Monday at his home in Washington. He was 93.

His wife, Diana, said Mr. McNamara died in his sleep at 5:30 a.m.,
adding that he had been in failing health for some time.

Mr. McNamara was the most influential defense secretary of the 20th
century. Serving Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson
from 1961 to 1968, he oversaw hundreds of military missions,
thousands of nuclear weapons and billions of dollars in military
spending and foreign arms sales. He also enlarged the defense
secretary's role, handling foreign diplomacy and the dispatch of
troops to enforce civil rights in the South.

"He's like a jackhammer," Johnson said. "No human being can take what
he takes. He drives too hard. He is too perfect."

As early as April 1964, Senator Wayne Morse, Democrat of Oregon,
called Vietnam "McNamara's War." Mr. McNamara did not object. "I am
pleased to be identified with it," he said, "and do whatever I can to win it."

Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than
16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come.

The war became his personal nightmare. Nothing he did, none of the
tools at his command ­ the power of American weapons, the forces of
technology and logic, or the strength of American soldiers ­ could
stop the armies of North Vietnam and their South Vietnamese allies,
the Vietcong. He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the
war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public
until late in life.

In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war,
confessing in a memoir that it was "wrong, terribly wrong." In
return, he faced a firestorm of scorn.

"Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his
countrymen," The New York Times said in a widely discussed editorial,
written by the page's editor at the time, Howell Raines. "Surely he
must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers
of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon
by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid
by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late."

By then he wore the expression of a haunted man. He could be seen in
the streets of Washington ­ stooped, his shirttail flapping in the
wind ­ walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White
House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.

He had spent decades thinking through the lessons of the war. The
greatest of these was to know one's enemy ­ and to "empathize with
him," as Mr. McNamara explained in Errol Morris's 2003 documentary,
"The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara."

"We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us
through their eyes," he said. The American failure in Vietnam, he
said, was seeing the enemy through the prism of the cold war, as a
domino that would topple the nations of Asia if it fell.

In the film, Mr. McNamara described the American firebombing of
Japan's cities in World War II. He had played a supporting role in
those attacks, running statistical analysis for Gen. Curtis E. LeMay
of the Army's Air Forces.

"We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo ­ men, women
and children," Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians
died in all. "LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been
prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He ­ and I'd
say I ­ were behaving as war criminals."

"What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?" he
asked. He found the question impossible to answer.

From Detroit to Washington

The idea of the United States' losing a war seemed impossible when
Mr. McNamara came to the Pentagon in January 1961 as the nation's
eighth defense secretary. He was 44 and had been named president of
the Ford Motor Company only 10 weeks before. He later said,
half-seriously, that he could barely tell a nuclear warhead from a
station wagon when he arrived in Washington.

"Mr. President, it's absurd; I'm not qualified," he remembered
protesting when asked to serve. He said that Kennedy had replied,
"Look, Bob, I don't think there's any school for presidents, either."

Kennedy called him the smartest man he had ever met. Mr. McNamara
looked steely-eyed and supremely rational behind his wire-rimmed
glasses, his brown hair slicked back precisely and crisply parted on
top. Mr. McNamara had risen by his mastery of systems analysis, the
business of making sense of large organizations ­ taking on a big
problem, studying every facet, finding simplicity in the complexity.

His first mission was to defuse the myth of the missile gap. Kennedy
had argued in his 1960 presidential campaign that the strategic
nuclear arsenal of the United States was less powerful than the
Soviet Union's, and that the gap was growing. His predecessor as
president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, called the missile gap a fiction in
his final State of the Union address, on Jan. 12, 1961.

Mr. McNamara took office nine days later. He recalled that "my first
responsibility as secretary of defense was to determine the degree of
the gap and initiate action to close it."

"It took us about three weeks to determine, yes, there was a gap," he
told an oral historian at his alma mater, the University of
California, Berkeley. "But the gap was in our favor. It was a totally
erroneous charge that Eisenhower had allowed the Soviets to develop a
superior missile force."

The problem was a lack of accurate intelligence; the estimate of
Soviet forces had been a product of politics and guesswork.

By year's end, new American spy satellites had determined that the
Soviets had as few as 10 launchers from which missiles could be fired
at the United States, while the United States could strike with more
than 3,200 nuclear weapons.

At the same time, Mr. McNamara was enmeshed in plans for the Bay of
Pigs invasion, in which some 1,500 Cubans, trained and equipped by
the Central Intelligence Agency, were badly defeated by Fidel
Castro's forces in a bloody battle in April 1961. Mr. McNamara
doubted that the C.I.A.'s Cubans could overthrow Mr. Castro, who had
taken power in 1959, but he asked few questions beforehand and gave
his go-ahead to the plan, which had been conceived under the
Eisenhower administration.

Kennedy's first order to Mr. McNamara after the invasion of Cuba
collapsed was to develop a proposal for overthrowing the Castro
government with American military force. Ten days later, he submitted
a plan of attack that included 60,000 American troops, excluding
naval and air forces. The plan proved impossible to fulfill.

One lesson of the Bay of Pigs, Mr. McNamara told the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, was that "the government should never start anything unless it
could be finished, or the government was willing to face the
consequences of failure," according to the State Department's
official record of American foreign policy, "The Foreign Relations of
the United States."

At a White House meeting on Nov. 3, 1961, Kennedy authorized a
program designed to undermine the Castro government, code-named
Operation Mongoose. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's handwritten
notes on the meeting say Mr. McNamara was assigned to survey the
situation and help him devise ways "to stir things up on island with
espionage, sabotage, general disorder." This operation also failed.

By 1962, the White House and the Pentagon had devised a new strategy
of counterinsurgency to combat what Mr. McNamara called the tactics
of "terror, extortion and assassination" by communist guerrillas. The
call led to the creation of American special forces like the Green
Berets and secret paramilitary operations throughout Asia and Latin America.

"Counterinsurgency became an almost ridiculous battle cry," said
Robert Amory, who in 1962 stepped down after nine years as the
C.I.A.'s deputy director of intelligence to become the White House
budget officer for classified programs.

While the United States flailed at Cuba, the Soviet Union decided, in
the words of its leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, "to throw a hedgehog
at Uncle Sam's pants." It began sending nuclear missiles to Cuba,
establishing a direct threat that evened up the balance of power with
the United States, which had placed its own missiles near the Soviet
border in Turkey.

At the height of the missile crisis, on Oct. 27, 1962, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff recommended that Cuba be invaded within 36 hours. As
the secret White House taping system installed by Kennedy recorded
his words, Mr. McNamara laid out the prospects for war.

"The military plan is basically invasion," he said. "When we attack
Cuba, we are going to have to attack with an all-out attack."

He continued, "The Soviet Union may, and, I think, probably will,
attack the Turkish missiles." The United States would then have to
attack Soviet ships or bases in the Black Sea, he said. The chances
of an uncontrolled escalation were high.

"And I would say that it is damn dangerous," he said. "Now, I'm not
sure we can avoid anything like that if we attack Cuba. But I think
we should make every effort to avoid it. And one way to avoid it is
to defuse the Turkish missiles before we attack Cuba."

That idea ­ a secret deal in which Kennedy offered to withdraw his
missiles in Turkey if Khrushchev removed his warheads from Cuba ­
resolved the crisis. "In the end, we lucked out ­ it was luck that
prevented nuclear war," Mr. McNamara said in "The Fog of War," 40
years after the fact.

Mr. McNamara spent countless hours as secretary of defense trying to
fine-tune American plans for nuclear war, turning what had been a
hair-trigger, all-or-nothing strategy into a series of more limited
options. The underlying principle of nuclear deterrence became known
as "mutual assured destruction" ­ meaning that Washington and Moscow
each knew it could destroy the other even if the other struck first.

In retirement, Mr. McNamara argued that planning for nuclear war was
futile. "Nuclear weapons serve no military purposes whatsoever," he
wrote. "They are totally useless ­ except only to deter one's
opponent from using them."

He had come close to that conclusion after the Cuban missile crisis.
"In wars prior to the advent of nuclear weapons, damage was reparable
and victory attainable," Mr. McNamara said on Dec. 14, 1962, in a
speech to NATO foreign ministers in Paris. "But after a full nuclear
exchange such as the Soviet bloc and the NATO alliance are now able
to carry out, the fatalities might well exceed 150 million."

"The devastation would be complete and victory a meaningless term," he said.

Remaking the Pentagon

"This place is a jungle, a jungle," Mr. McNamara said after a few
weeks at his desk at the Pentagon. He sent teams of bright young
civilians ­ the whiz kids, as they were known ­ out across the
Pentagon to tame it.

They set out to make sense of a cacophony of war strategies, weapons
systems and budgets among the Army, the Navy and the Air Force. The
office of the secretary of defense had been established in 1947 for
precisely that purpose, but the task had defeated everyone who held
the job before Mr. McNamara. He applied the tools of systems analysis
and succeeded in clearing some swaths through the jungle. But he
alienated key members of Congress and military commanders in battles
over choosing weapons and closing bases.

The Pentagon consumed nearly half the national budget when he took
office. He had 3.5 million employees ­ including 2.5 million in
uniform, a number that increased by a million during his tenure. He
said his goal was "to bring efficiency to a $40 billion enterprise
beset by jealousies and political pressures."

Under Mr. McNamara, the Pentagon's budget increased to $74.9 billion
in fiscal 1968, from $48.4 billion in 1962. The 1968 figure is equal
to $457 billion in today's dollars.

That was largely the cost of the war that erupted in Southeast Asia.

"Every quantitative measurement we have shows we are winning this
war," Mr. McNamara said after returning from his first trip to South
Vietnam in April 1962. His statistical analysis showed that the
military mission could be wrapped up in three or four years.

After Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. McNamara found
that Johnson depended on him to win the war, which became a
full-fledged conflict for the United States the following year. The
new president thought so highly of Mr. McNamara that he asked him to
be his running mate in 1964.

"I said no," Mr. McNamara recounted in his Berkeley oral history.
"You shouldn't start your elective career running for the vice
presidency." (Johnson chose Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota.)

Johnson relied on Mr. McNamara in other sensitive matters, including
negotiations over weapons sales to Israel and the full racial
integration of the armed services, the reserves and the National
Guard after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When
Johnson, early in his presidency, announced he wanted to keep the
federal budget below $100 billion, Mr. McNamara ordered weapons
programs canceled and military bases closed in a matter of days.

But by the fall of 1964, Vietnam was the all-consuming obsession.

Congress authorized the war after Johnson contended that American
warships had been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats in the
Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 4, 1964. The attack never happened, as a
report declassified by the National Security Agency in 2005 made
clear. The American ships had been firing at radar shadows on a dark night.

At the time, however, the agency's experts in signals intelligence,
or sigint, told Mr. McNamara that the evidence of an attack was
iron-clad. "McNamara had taken over raw sigint and shown the
president what they thought was evidence," said Ray Cline, then the
C.I.A.'s deputy director of intelligence. He added, "It was just what
Johnson was looking for."

Nor was this the only case of faulty intelligence underlying American
military action under Mr. McNamara. In April 1965, Johnson ordered
24,000 American troops to the Dominican Republic after a revolt
against the government; it was the first large-scale American landing
in Latin America since 1928.

In public, Mr. McNamara said the deployment had showed the "readiness
and capabilities of the U.S. defense establishment to support our
foreign policy." In private, he voiced dismay. The C.I.A. had told
the White House and the Pentagon that the rebels were controlled by
Cuban revolutionaries. But Mr. McNamara had deep doubts.

"You don't think C.I.A. can document it?" Johnson asked him,
according to tapes of White House telephone conversations recorded on
April 30, 1965.

"I don't think so, Mr. President," McNamara replied. "I just don't
believe the story."

Johnson nonetheless insisted in a speech to the American people that
he would not allow "Communist conspirators" to establish "another
Communist government in the Western Hemisphere." This led some
newspapers to assert that the president and the Pentagon had a
"credibility gap." The phrase stuck when applied to Vietnam.

Turning on Vietnam

In 1965, tens of thousands of American combat troops were arriving in
Vietnam and American warplanes were pounding the enemy in a bombing
campaign code-named Rolling Thunder, which sent 55,000 flights with
33,000 tons of bombs over North Vietnam; the next year, it was
148,000 flights with 128,000 tons. The number of aircraft lost went
from 171 in 1965 to 318 the next year; the costs soared to $1.2
billion, from $460 million.

Rolling Thunder never stopped the flow of enemy arms and soldiers
into South Vietnam.

When Mr. McNamara held a rare private briefing for reporters in
Honolulu in February 1966, he no longer possessed the radiant
confidence he had always displayed in public. Mr. McNamara said with
conviction, "No amount of bombing can end the war."

By 1966, Mr. McNamara was planning to build an electronic barrier
across the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Vietnam.
Soldiers called it the McNamara Line, after the Maginot Line, a
futile French defense against Germany built before World War II. The
barrier proved to be worthless.

On Aug. 26, 1966, Mr. McNamara read a book-length C.I.A. study called
"The Vietnamese Communists' Will to Persist," which concluded that
nothing the United States was doing could defeat the enemy. He called
in a C.I.A. analyst, George Allen, who had spent 17 years working on
the question of Vietnam.

"He wanted to know what I would do if I were sitting in his place,"
Mr. Allen wrote in his 2001 memoir of Vietnam, "None So Blind." "I
decided to respond candidly."

"Stop the buildup of American forces," he said he told Mr. McNamara.
"Halt the bombing of the North, and negotiate a cease-fire with Hanoi."

After that moment of truth, Mr. McNamara told his aides to begin
compiling a top-secret history of the war ­ later known as the
Pentagon Papers ­ and he began asking himself what the United States
was doing in Vietnam. Many Americans were asking the same, giving
rise to a growing antiwar movement that even Mr. McNamara's own son
participated in as a student protester at Stanford.

On Sept. 19, 1966, Mr. McNamara telephoned Johnson.

"I myself am more and more convinced that we ought definitely to plan
on termination of bombing in the North," Mr. McNamara said, according
to White House tapes.

He also suggested establishing a ceiling on the number of troops to
be sent to Vietnam. "I don't think we ought to just look ahead to the
future and say we're going to go higher and higher and higher and
higher ­ 600,000; 700,000; whatever it takes."

The president's only response was an unintelligible grunt.

Departure and Guilt

The turning point came on May 19, 1967, when Mr. McNamara sent a long
and carefully argued paper to Johnson, urging him to negotiate a
peace rather than escalate the war.

The war, the paper began, "is becoming increasingly unpopular as it
escalates ­ causing more American casualties, more fear of its
growing into a wider war, more privation of the domestic sector, and
more distress at the amount of suffering being visited on the
noncombatants in Vietnam, South and North."

"Most Americans," Mr. McNamara continued, "are convinced that somehow
we should not have gotten this deeply in. All want the war ended and
expect their president to end it. Successfully. Or else."

That was the last straw for Johnson, who came to believe that Mr.
McNamara was secretly plotting to help Robert Kennedy, then a
Democratic senator from New York, run on a peace ticket in the 1968
election. The president announced on Nov. 29, 1967, that Mr. McNamara
would give up his defense post to run the World Bank. Mr. McNamara
left the Pentagon two months later, never comprehending, in his
words, "whether I quit or was fired." It was clearly the latter.

Mr. McNamara had sought to transform the armed services. But his
often aloof and occasionally arrogant conduct left him with few
allies inside the Pentagon when the war began to go wrong. At a
going-away luncheon given by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Mr.
McNamara wept as he spoke of the futility of the air war in Vietnam.
Many of his colleagues were appalled as he condemned the bombing,
aghast at the weight of his guilt.

He had thought for a long time that the United States could not win
the war. In retirement, he listed reasons: a failure to understand
the enemy, a failure to see the limits of high-tech weapons, a
failure to tell the truth to the American people and a failure to
grasp the nature of the threat of communism.

"What went wrong was a basic misunderstanding or misevaluation of the
threat to our security represented by the North Vietnamese," he said
in his Berkeley oral history. "It led President Eisenhower in 1954 to
say that if Vietnam were lost, or if Laos and Vietnam were lost, the
dominoes would fall."

He continued, "I am certain we exaggerated the threat."

"We didn't know our opposition," he said. "We didn't understand the
Chinese; we didn't understand the Vietnamese, particularly the North
Vietnamese. So the first lesson is know your opponents. I want to
suggest to you that we don't know our potential opponents today."

An Analytical Mind

Robert Strange McNamara ­ Strange was his mother's maiden name ­ was
born June 9, 1916, in San Francisco to Robert and Clara Nell
McNamara. His father, the son of Irish immigrants, managed a
wholesale shoe company.

"My earliest memory is of a city exploding with joy," he said in "The
Fog of War." It was Nov. 11, 1918 ­ the end of World War I. He
remembered the tops of the streetcars crowded with people cheering and kissing.

In 1937, Mr. McNamara graduated with honors in economics from the
University of California, Berkeley, where he also studied philosophy.
After two years at Harvard Business School, he spent a year with
Price, Waterhouse & Company, the accounting firm. He returned to
Harvard in 1940 as an assistant professor of business administration.

That year, he married his college sweetheart, Margaret Craig. She
created Reading Is Fundamental, a literacy program for poor children,
while he was at the Pentagon. By the time she died in 1981, the
program served three million children.

Mr. McNamara and his second wife, the former Diana Masieri Byfield,
were married in 2004 in San Francisco.

Besides his wife, Mr. McNamara is survived by his son, Robert Craig,
of Winters, Calif.; two daughters, Margaret Elizabeth Pastor and
Kathleen McNamara, both of Washington, and six grandchildren.

When World War II came, Mr. McNamara taught young air officers the
statistical methods he had learned at Harvard, with the aim of
orchestrating the air war in Europe by determining how many planes
could fly each day in every theater. He served in England, then
India, and held the rank of lieutenant colonel at war's end in 1945.

"After the war, my wife and I both came down with polio, if you can
imagine, infantile paralysis," Mr. McNamara remembered in his memoir.
"My case was relatively light; I was out of the hospital in a couple
of months. But she was in the hospital for nine months, and they
thought she'd never lift an arm or a leg off the bed again."

Unable to pay the hospital bills on a Harvard salary, he accepted a
job offer from the Ford Motor Company.

He and nine other air-war statisticians, none older than 30, were
hired by Henry Ford II to reorganize a mismanaged company.

"He wanted some individuals who he could feel were his men, if you
will, because the company was staffed with old-line executives who
had been associated with his father and grandfather," Mr. McNamara recalled.

The company lost $85 million in the first eight months after Mr.
McNamara's arrival, the equivalent of about $925 million adjusted for
inflation today. But Mr. McNamara and his young team turned Ford
around. He rose swiftly ­ comptroller, general manager of the Ford
division, vice president for all car and truck divisions.

In November 1960, one day after Kennedy's election, Mr. McNamara was
named president of the company, the No. 2 position under Mr. Ford,
who was chairman and chief executive. Five weeks later, Kennedy asked
him to run the Pentagon.

The World Bank Years

Mr. McNamara's time at the Pentagon came close to breaking his
spirit. But he immediately followed that ordeal with 13 years as
president of the World Bank. He set out to expand the bank's power
and to attack global poverty. He succeeded in part, but with
unintended consequences.

The industrialized nations created the bank at the end of World War
II to help rebuild Western Europe, but it later expanded its
membership and shifted its focus to lending in the third world to
increase economic growth and forestall war. In 1973 Mr. McNamara
dedicated himself to the reduction of what he called "absolute
poverty ­ utter degradation" in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

As he had done at the Pentagon and Ford, Mr. McNamara sought to
remake the bank. When he arrived on April 1, 1968, the bank was
lending about $1 billion a year. That figure grew until it stood at
$12 billion when he left in 1981. By that time the bank oversaw some
1,600 projects valued at $100 billion in 100 nations, including
hydroelectric dams, superhighways and steel factories.

The ecological effects of these developments, however, had not been
taken into account. In some cases, corruption in the governments that
the bank sought to help undid its good intentions. Many poor nations,
overwhelmed by their debts to the bank, were not able to repay loans.

The costs of Mr. McNamara's work thus sometimes outweighed the
benefits, and that led to a concerted political attack on the bank
itself during the 1980s.

Mr. McNamara saw some of these problems as they developed and shifted
the emphasis of the bank's lending toward smaller projects ­
irrigation, seeds and fertilizer, paving farm-to-market roads. But
progress was often hard to measure. At the end of his tenure, the
bank estimated that the world's poorest numbered 800 million, an
increase of 200 million over the decade.

Public Contrition

Mr. McNamara left the bank when he turned 65, after his wife died,
and for a time he tried to unwind and get away, taking a 140-mile
hike up to the 18,000-foot level of Mount Everest. But within two
years, he began to speak out against the nuclear arms race. In 1995,
14 years after leaving public life, he published his denunciation of
the Vietnam War and his role in it, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and
Lessons of Vietnam" (Times Books/Random House), for which he was
denounced in turn.

Unlike any other secretary of defense, Mr. McNamara struggled in
public with the morality of war and the uses of American power.

"We are the strongest nation in the world today," Mr. McNamara said
in "The Fog of War," released at the time of the 2003 invasion of
Iraq. "I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic,
political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that
rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there. None of our allies
supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we
can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our
cause, we'd better re-examine our reasoning."

"War is so complex it's beyond the ability of the human mind to
comprehend," he concluded. "Our judgment, our understanding, are not
adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily."

--------

McNamara stuck to Vietnam War despite doubts

http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/07/06/mcnamara-stuck-to-vietnam-war-despite-doubts/

The former defense secretary went on to head the World Bank but could
never escape his association with Vietnam.

By Dave Cook
July 6, 2009

Robert S. McNamara's public life was defined by his role as a leading
architect of the war in Vietnam, despite major achievements in the
corporate and non-profit worlds. He passed on Monday.

An enthusiastic supporter of the war in public, Mr. McNamara later
admitted in a court case that he had begun to have doubts as early as
1965 or 1966 about whether the Vietnam War could be won militarily.
He sent a detailed paper to President Lyndon B. Johnson in May 1967,
arguing for a negotiated end to the conflict. Americans, he wrote,
"want the war ended and expect their president to end it."

Critics castigated McNamara for staying silent about his doubts while
58,000 American troops died and thousands more were grievously
wounded. It was not until his 1995 memoir, "In Retrospect: The
Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," that McNamara detailed his concerns.
"We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted according to
what we thought were the principles and traditions of our country,"
he told the Associated Press. "But we were wrong. We were terribly wrong."

When the book appeared, The New York Times published an editorial
arguing that McNamara "must not escape the lasting moral condemnation
of his countrymen," adding that what he took from the "poor boys in
the infantry" who died for no purpose "cannot be repaid by prime-time
apology and stale tears, three decades late."

McNamara said it was absurd to suggest his later career as president
of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981 was atonement for what some
critics called "McNamara's War." Whatever the motivation, McNamara
was tireless in trying to help the world's poor. He tripled loans to
developing countries and changed the Bank's emphasis from large
industrial projects to fostering rural development. The goal, he
said, was the reduction of "absolute poverty ­ utter degradation" in
the poorer nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

After leaving the World Bank, McNamara became a vocal opponent of the
nuclear arms race as well as a consultant to scores of organizations.
He was a director of The Washington Post Company and a trustee of the
Ford Foundation.

But his overarching legacy is as Defense Secretary and major
strategist in the first war that resulted in US withdrawal rather
than victory. He was named to that post by President Kennedy who
called McNamara the smartest man he had ever met.

At the time Kennedy tapped McNamara for the Pentagon, he had recently
been named president of Ford Motor Company, the first person outside
the Ford family to hold the job. He was just 44 and had already
served as an Army lieutenant colonel in World War II and as a
professor at Harvard Business School, where he earned his MBA.

McNamara's term at the Defense Department, from 1961 through early
1968, was one of the most consequential in US history. One of his
first assignments was to investigate the "missile gap" that President
Kennedy had charged the Eisenhower administration with allowing to
develop. There was a gap but in favor of the US, McNamara found.

He was involved in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in which US-backed
forces were defeated in an attempt to overthrow Cuba's Fidel Castro.
He was also one of Kennedy's key advisers during the Cuban missile
crisis in 1962, when the Soviet Union sent nuclear missiles to Cuba
prompting a tense confrontation.

McNamara also ordered the preparation of a secret history of the
Vietnam war that became known as the Pentagon Papers, which were
leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 to various news organizations
including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Monitor.

His life became fodder for art when the 2003 documentary "The Fog of
War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara" won the
Oscar for best documentary feature.

--------

Robert McNamara and Vietnam: A Basic Reading List

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenneth-c-davis/robert-mcnamara-and-vietn_b_226705.html

Kenneth C. Davis
Posted: July 7, 2009

For many Americans, the news of Robert McNamara's death at age 93 on
July 6th brought back the whole cascade of difficult memories about
what the war in Vietnam meant to this country.

Here is McNamara's New York Times obituary.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html

But for many others, especially younger Americans, the Vietnam War
has fallen into the "black hole" of American History and is as remote
as the Peloponnesian War. For them and anyone else who needs a
refresher course on America in Vietnam, here is a short reading list
from among the thousands of books written about the war:

Known as the "architect" of America's Vietnam policy, McNamara
embodied the phrase The Best and the Brightest, the title of David
Halberstam's classic account of the group of advisors who surrounded
John F. Kennedy and took America into the war. Halberstam did not
use, nor intend, the phrase as a compliment.

Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow, a companion book to the PBS
series mentioned below in the Video section, is an excellent
single-volume history of the war.

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and American in Vietnam by Neil
Sheehan, an account of a military adviser in Vietnam who became
disillusioned with the war, written by one of the journalists who
broke the "Pentagon Papers" story.

The Pentagon Papers is the widely used name for a top secret history
of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, commissioned by
Robert McNamara. The papers were leaked to the New York Times and
published on the paper's front page in 1971, precipitating a major
First Amendment case when the government tried to suppress
publication of the documents. There are several editions of the
Pentagon Papers available in book form. They can also be accessed online.

We Were Soldiers Once and Young: Ia Drang -- the Battle that Changed
the War in Vietnam by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and Joseph L.
Galloway, a compelling wartime memoir of a battlefield commander (and
made into a film starring Mel Gibson).

Four Hours in My Lai by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, is an
investigation of the most notorious atrocity of the Vietnam era, in
which American troops methodically killed hundreds of Vietnamese villagers.

I would also recommend several books that capture some of the
"atmospherics" of the era:

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo, a memoir of a Marine lieutenant.

Dispatches by Micheal Herr, correspondent for Esquire magazine.

When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip and Jay Wurts,
for a perspective on the world of war through the eyes of a
Vietnamese woman (also made into a film which I have not seen).

Video Resources:

Robert McNamara was also the central figure in Errol Morris's Academy
Award-winning documentary The Fog of War

PBS "The American Experience" also produced a classic documentary on
the war, Vietnam: A Television History.

.

Blood, Sweat & Tears singer grateful for fan following

Blood, Sweat & Tears singer grateful for fan following

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,705314499,00.html

By Scott Iwasaki
Deseret News
Published: Thursday, July 2, 2009

Blood Sweat & Tears singer/guitarist Steve Katz rejoined the band
back in 2008 to celebrate the band's 40th anniversary.

To this day, he is still amazed at how much the band means to a lot of people.

"To think that people still like to hear the songs we did almost 42
years ago," said Katz during a telephone interview from his home in
Kent, Connecticut. "I remember the first show I did when I came back.
I walked on stage and people started to applaud. I looked behind me
because I didn't know who they were applauding for."

Katz was one of the original members of BS&T, which included
keyboardist/vocalist Al Kooper, trumpeters Randy Brecker and Jerry
Weiss, saxophonist Fred Lipsius, keyboardist Dick Halligan, bassist
Jim Fielder and drummer Bobby Colomby.

Throughout the years, the band lineup has gone through a bucketful of changes.

These days, the lineup features Katz, vocalist Rob Paparozzi,
guitarist Dave Gellis, keyboardist Glenn McClelland, bassist Gary
Foote, drummer Andrea Valentini, trumpeters Teddy Mulet and Steve
Jankowski, trombonist Jens Wendelboe and saxophonist Tom Timko.

Katz said he lived "in a bubble for 35 years," before rejoining BS&T.

In actuality, he was the vice president of Mercury Records, a
producer who worked with Lou Reed and was the director of Irish-music
label Green Linnet Records.

Not bad for a blues-loving folkie who cut his teeth in Greenwich Village.

"We made a conscious decision deciding what we wanted as a band,"
Katz said. "We were heavily influenced by the Buckihgham's album
'Time and Charges.' They used horns and that's where we got the idea."

Blood Sweat & Tears' contemporaries included Tower of Power, early
Chicago and the Average White Band, to name a few.

With the hits "You've Made Me So Very Happy," "Spinning Wheel" and
"And When I Die," all of which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot
100, BS&T hit the big time.

"We still play the hits," said Katz. "People want to hear them. But
we also play new stuff and some jazzy stuff.

"We have always had the tradition of stretching out," he said. "And
it's good to be able to do different things, and to have fans that
will allow us to that."

Sifting through the past for Katz is like unearthing a goldmine of memories.

"We were awarded Best Album by the Grammys in 1970 for our 1969
(self-titled) album," said Katz. "And the guy who gave us the Grammy
was Louis Armstrong. We also played the Monterey Pop Festival. And we
played the original Woodstock.

"But don't ask me about that because I can't remember," he said with
a laugh. "We played at something like 3 a.m."

One of the other fun memories was finding out the band had a No. 1
album with "Blood Sweat & Tears."

We would call Billboard to see what our album did that week," Katz
said. "And the first week we called, it was at No. 16. The next week
we called, the lady said the album wasn't on the charts. So, we hung
up and scratched our heads.

"Then she called back and said, 'I didn't think of looking at No. 1'.
And that's where we were. We went from No. 16 to No. 1 in a week."

Katz said he is grateful for fans who have continued to support BS&T.

"In the past couple of years, we have had very successful tours," he
said. "This year, with the economy the way it is, we still are seeing
wonderful audiences."
--

E-mail: scott@desnews.com

.

Album Cover Artist Tom Wilkes Dies

Album Cover Artist Tom Wilkes Dies Unexpectedly at Home in California

http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2009/7/prweb2608414.htm

July 5, 2009

Award winning artist and designer Tom Wilkes died unexpectedly on
Sunday, June 28 at his home in Pioneertown, CA at the age of 69.
Wilkes was the art director of the Monterey International Pop
Festival in 1967. He designed many classic album covers like Rolling
Stones' "Beggars Banquet" and Neil Young's "Harvest." He was awarded
a Grammy in 1974 for Best Recording Package for "Tommy" as performed
by the London Symphony Orchestra and Choir.
--

Pioneertown, CA (Billboard Publicity Wire/PRWeb) -- Renowned album
cover artist and designer Tom Wilkes died unexpectedly on Sunday,
June 28, at his home in Pioneertown, California. He was 69.

Thomas E. Wilkes was born July 30, 1939 in Long Beach, California and
was raised in southern California. He attended Long Beach City
College, UCLA and the Art Center College of Design in the 1950's and 1960's.

In 1967 Wilkes was the art director of the Monterey International Pop
Festival. He created all graphics and printed materials for Monterey
Pop, including the program book and the festival's psychedelic and
iconic foil poster.

From 1967 through 1969, Wilkes was the art director of A&M Records.
He was partner with Barry Feinstein from 1970 through 1973 in
Camouflage Productions, which became record label Blue Thumb's house
art department.

He was partner in Wilkes & Braun, Inc. from 1973 through 1974, and
art director of ABC Records from 1975 through 1977. In 1978 he
started Tom Wilkes Productions and became President of Project
Interspeak, a not-for-profit environmental and human rights
organization devoted to planetary enhancement programs.

Wilkes designed and directed such hit record covers as Rolling
Stones' "Flowers" and "Beggars Banquet", Neil Young's "Harvest", and
George Harrison's "Concert for Bangladesh" and "All Things Must Pass."

He received a Grammy Award in 1974 for Best Recording Package for The
Who's rock opera "Tommy," as performed by the London Symphony
Orchestra & Choir.

Among his many album cover credits:

Janis Joplin - "Pearl"
Ike & Tina Turner - "Outta Season"
Eric Clapton - "Eric Clapton"
Dave Mason - "Alone Together"
Joe Cocker - "Mad Dogs & Englishmen"
Flying Burrito Brothers - "Gilded Palace of Sin"
John Prine - "John Prine"
Emmylou Harris - "Blue Kentucky Girl" and "Elite Hotel"
Leon Russell - "Stop All That Jazz"
REO Speedwagon - "You Can Tune a Piano, But You Can't Tuna Fish"

In addition to creating hundreds of posters, logos, books, trade ads
and illustrations, Wilkes produced and directed TV and radio spots,
music videos, films, mixed media presentations and special events.

He recently completed a book of his artwork and memoirs, called
"Tommy Geeked a Chicken," and was negotiating publishing
arrangements. At this time, plans are being made to proceed with
publication of the book.

A memorial service will be held for Wilkes on Saturday, July 11th, in
Orange, CA.

Read More about Tom Wilkes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wilkes

Contact:
Carey Hays, Marketing Manager
The Allan Hays Company, LLC
405 S. Walnut, Suite 206, Muncie IN 47305
Cell: 765-760-3187 Main Office: 1-800-284-8745

.

Their Magic Moment [Leiber/Stoller]

Their Magic Moment

http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/music/8898/their-magic-moment/

How Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller tapped into the soul of '50s
America­and made it sing

By Wesley Yang
July 2, 2009

Though it has been the subject of history textbooks and PBS
documentaries for decades, rock and roll still retains the power to
make the learned things said of it seem hopelessly pedantic. It is,
on the one hand, a slight musical endeavor: three chords; four
accented beats; bass, guitar, and drums; an excitable front man who
will carry on shouting for three minutes; a simple verse-chorus
structure; repetition; overpowering volume; rhyming couplets, most of
them unswervingly fixated on the subject of sex between teenagers
(or, let's face it, statutory rape). On the other hand, everything
thrilling and grotesque about America is implicated in the rise of
this vernacular art. It was the sound of America's poorest, most
despised people­slaves who became sharecroppers who migrated north to
became tenement dwellers in Memphis, Chicago, and Kansas City, and
trashy whites from the brawling culture of the Appalachian mountains.
It turned out that America's most despised people were also its most
creative, and that some of them weren't upright and God-fearing
(though many of them were), but in fact mischievous, irreverent,
impulsive, drunken, and sex-obsessed. Through the medium of
television and recording, the sound of their erotic delirium became
the common property of its white middle-class teenagers, and through
these exemplary consumers, the world.

It was the instrument of a revolution in bourgeois manners and mores.
What other country would dress its privileged children in the garb of
its sharecroppers and coal miners, or school them, three minutes at a
time, in the sexual mores of the ghetto, selling them commercial
fantasies of freedom and authenticity that would seduce the young
everywhere? The industry spawned by the music has long since grown
(like the old Elvis) cynical, corpulent, corporate, and corrupted;
and (like the aging Michael Jackson) inhumanly strange, sequestered
in appalling opulence, frozen in childhood, and besieged by
creditors. But as with all things that go wrong on a grand scale,
rock and roll was once, like the young Elvis, extraordinary­a vision
of a miscegenated American future as compelling as the linked arms of
Freedom Fighters that were then rising up across the South.

It was the early 1950's and America was changing. Who would serve as
the vanguard of this change? You would need people eager to embrace
the new, able to serve as intermediaries linking black and white,
high and low, sensitive enough to hear joy where others heard only
squalor, clever enough to hear opportunity where others only heard
noise, alive to the mordant humor of the ghetto, heedless of existing
prejudices and conventions, enterprising enough to invent an industry
where none had existed before. You needed Phil and Leonard Chess in
Chicago; Syd Nathan at King Records in Cincinnati; Lester, Jules,
Saul, and Joe Bihari at Modern Records in Los Angeles; Leo and Eddie
Mesner at Aladdin Records just down the road; and Alan Freed on first
the Cleveland, then the New York City airwaves. You needed Jerry
Wexler and Herb Abramson at Atlantic Records in New York; a teenaged
Michael Bloomfield playing in the first integrated electric blues
band in Chicago in 1963; and the former Robert Zimmerman in the cafes
of Greenwich Village. You needed people who could operate at the
bloody crossroads where commerce, art, and social change were
converging. All of which is to say that you needed Jews.

Here is how Lester Sill, national sales manager for the independent
blues label Modern Records explained it to a teenaged Jerry Leiber,
("Kid, I think you're going to like this music," Sill told Leiber
before handing him a recording of John Lee Hooker's "Boogie
Chillun,") then a part-time clerk at Norty's, a little record shop in
Los Angeles that sold Frankie Laine records and cantorial music from
Russia and Poland:

"'The big labels,' explained Lester, 'like RCA, Columbia and Decca
are ignoring the really great popular Negro artists because they just
don't understand or care about the music. They don't think it's
worthwhile, artistically or commercially. Well, I don't have to tell
you how wrong they are.'"

The voice reminiscing above belongs to Jerome Leiber, who would go on
to become one half of the songwriting team that wrote and produced
some of the most important and best rock and roll singles ever,
including "Kansas City," "Stand By Me," "Poison Ivy," "Yakety-Yak,"
"This Magic Moment," "Spanish Harlem," "Searchin'," "Jailhouse Rock,"
and "Hound Dog." Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller began writing songs in
1951, at the age of 18, for a label producing what were then known as
"race records" for Ray Charles, Charles Brown, Jimmy Witherspoon, the
Robins, the Drifters, Big Joe Turner, and Ruth Brown. By 1958, at the
age of 25, Leiber and Stoller had been dubbed "the Gilbert and
Sullivan of rock and roll," and "the Grandfathers of Rock and Roll."
They would go on to write and produce the major hits of the Drifters
and the Coasters, establish themselves as the first independent
record producers in the industry, and nurture the talent of one Phil Spector.

Hound Dog, the Leiber and Stoller Autobiography, just released by
Simon and Schuster, is a slight volume of edited interviews that
recapitulates much of what was already known about the songwriting
duo, and some delightful new anecdotes of uncertain veracity. The
first third of the book captures the excitement of those early days
when the music was still unknown to white audiences and the big
record companies had no regard for it. For anyone remotely
susceptible to the heartbreaking innocence of that period, the sly,
keen, slightly-outdated hip patois recorded in that book is an
unmitigated delight.

"Like Lester, many of the label owners were Jewish. 'Look at the way
the big iron and steel companies threw the scraps to the Jews,' said
Lester. 'That's how Jews started in the scrap metal business. Same
thing in music. The majors see a great artist like Jimmy Witherspoon
as scrap. They don't want to deal with what they consider junk. Well,
some of these small labels were actually junk dealers before they got
into the music game. Through experience, they learned what some see
as junk might actually be precious jewels.'"

Jerry Leiber first heard black music in homes where he delivered
"five-gallon cans of kerosene and ten-pound bags of soft coal," as an
errand boy for his mother, who owned the only grocery store willing
to extend credit to blacks in the neighborhood. His father had been a
"door to door milkman who died penniless," when Leiber was five.
Leiber's first language was Yiddish; his earliest attempt to play
boogie-woogie on piano ended when his Uncle Dave, "without warning,
violently slammed down the wooden keyboard cover," in the midst of a lesson.

Mike Stoller's aunt was a child prodigy who graduated from the Vienna
Conservatory at 12, but his introduction to boogie-woogie came under
the gentle direction of the stride pianist James P. Johnson. Stoller
grew up listening to Richard Strauss, Shostakovitch, and Sibelius,
but "it was black music," he explains, "that excited my deepest
passion. I heard the lyricism in Richard Strauss, I felt the elegance
of Bach, but boogie-woogie really reached my eight-year old soul."
Where music had been, for his mother's German Jewish family, the
hallmark of social superiority, young Stoller's interest in music
"was purely visceral." Is there a clearer illustration of the Old
World's cultural hierarchies succumbing to the blandishments of the
New World's freedom to reinvent oneself in any guise?

Stoller would write the music, noodling along on the keyboard while
Leiber tossed out phrases off the top of his head. Many of their hits
were written in fifteen minutes or fewer. The story of their ascent
within their field is rapid and untroubled. "Our interest was in
black music and black music only," Stoller declares. His own musical
vocabulary spanned the blues, R&B, avant-garde jazz and classical
music of his day, but he deployed all of it in search of the most
immediate impact, and without any consciousness that the music they
were making was other than ephemeral. "If you had asked me and Mike
back then," Leiber says about the great Robins song "Smokey Joe's
Cafe," we would have said that we loved the recording, that it might
even be a hit, but we assumed that in a few months the song­and, for
that matter, all our songs­would be, like a pile of old comic books,
discarded and forgotten." Stoller observes that when he was writing
hit songs "stratification of popular music was absolute. At the top
were giants like George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. At the bottom
were guys like us." Leiber quotes Random House's co-founder politely
inquiring: "Why did you write something called 'Hound Dog'?" The
"highbrow view of the day" was that "rock and roll was trash." The
view had something to recommend it, according to the sexual mores of
the day. Leiber wrote the lyrics with a vocabulary, as Stoller puts
it that was "black, Jewish, theatrical, comical," telling stories, as
Leiber tells it, about "heartache and pain, but also unrestrained joy
and unrestrained sex."

"She wasn't built for power
She wasn't built for speed
But she was built for comfort
And that's what I need."

In 1953, Leiber and Stoller wrote a song for Big Mama Thornton called
"Hound Dog," which became a hit on the R&B charts. At one point
during the session Leiber encourages Thornton to "attack" a certain
part of the song. Thornton interrupts him. "'Come here boy,' she
said, motioning me to stand even closer to her. 'I'll tell you what
you can attack. Attack this…' she added, pointing to her crotch." The
opening lyric, as Thornton had sang it, went like this:

You ain't nothing but a hound dog
Quit snooping 'round my door
You can wag your tail,
But I ain't gonna feed you no more"

In 1956, Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan show singing

You aint' nothing but a hound dog
Crying all the time
You ain't never caught a rabbit
And you ain't no friend of mine"

"The song is not about a dog," Leiber observes. "It's about a man, a
freeloading gigolo. Elvis's version makes no sense to me," going on
to opine that "there's no comparison between the Presley version and
the Big Mama original. Elvis played with the song. Big Mama nailed
it." Nonetheless, Presley's choice of the song made Leiber and
Stoller, as Leiber puts it "awfully goddamn lucky," to be placed at
the forefront of "the bigger commercial revolution in American music:
teenage rock and roll."

The book then settles into the rhythm of professional success,
punctuated by conflict, as the duo negotiates the treacherous waters
of the music business. They go on to write Peggy Lee's signature
mid-life crisis hit "Is That All There Is?" in which the aging singer
faces mortality with resignation that is at once cheerful, rueful,
and mordant. The book ends with the obligatory flourish of showbiz
gratitude for blessings bestowed by fate, but ends on a note struck
all those decades ago by the nihilistic chanteuse. Leiber and Stoller
began life as "horny teenagers" obsessed with the sound, rhythm, and
preoccupations of the lustful music emerging from the black
underground. They managed to make being a horny teenager into a
profitable vocation, and became rich, honored, and successful men,
carving out a permanent place in American cultural history for the
ephemeral songs they wrote in 15 minutes or fewer. Facing mortality
and clinging to life amid failing health, Leiber admits that he
thinks back "to the days of cognac and tobacco with deep nostalgia."
Aging and mortality­the insistent facts for which rock and roll has
no reply. And he tells his interlocutor that:

"If my next medical report is 'Leiber, you've run out of options.
You've got a month at most to put your affairs in order,' then this
is my plan: I'm going to buy a fifth of Maker's Mark bourbon, a
carton of Camels, and as many Billie Holiday records as I can carry.
I'm going to break out the booze and have a ball."

"If that's all there is."

.

Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie

Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie:
book signing with author Iris Keltz at Starr Interiors, Taos, New Mexico

http://www.examiner.com/x-1964-Northern-New-Mexico-Travel-Examiner~y2009m6d29-Scrapbook-of-a-Taos-Hippie-book-signing-with-author-Iris-Keltz-at-Starr-Interiors-Taos-New-Mexico

June 29, 2009
by John Lamkin

Author Iris Keltz will be signing her book "Scrapbook of a Taos
Hippie" at Starr Interiors, 117 Paseo del Pueblo Norte, Taos, New
Mexico (2 Doors South of the Taos Inn) from 12 noon until 4 pm, July 12, 2009.

The booksigning is in conjunction with the Taos Summer of Love Celebration.

Her book, "Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie" has become the definitive
reference to the early seventies in Taos during the counter culture
movement of that time. The featured photos by noted photographer,
Paul Dembski, with her descriptive stories of the people portrayed,
capture the magic of those moments in an important chronicle of those
very special times.

This is the second event held by Starr Interiors to feature a
specific artist in the Taos Summer of Love celebration. Don't miss
this special event and the opportunity to meet the author.

Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie
by Iris Keltz
Cinco Puntos Press
Paperback
10-digit ISBN 0-938317-50-4
13-digit ISBN 978-0-938317-50-0

The '6os ­ the music, the clothes, the political and sexual idealism,
the experimentation with drugs, the hunger for peace, creativity, and
sharing were a watershed in the way America sees itself. Hippie
culture was at the very zenith of that watershed, and Taos was its
beating heart, a Mecca that beckoned young pilgrims from all over the
country. Iris Keltz was one of those pilgrims who came to Taos in the
'6os. She stayed to become a folk historian of the tribe.

Iris' book has all the old timey vibes of a family scrapbook, a
marvelous collection of stories and oral histories from the people
who lived in the communes that flourished in Taos Morningstar, New
Buffalo, Lama, Reality Construction Company, and others. Here,
decades later, they talk openly about communal life, about making
adobes and growing gardens, about natural childbirth and raising
children, about New Age mysticism and the Native American Church,
about money and food stamps, about regret and what's been learned.
Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie is full of wonderful then and now
photographs with up to date biographies, newspaper articles, and
other memorabilia that give the reader a true sense of the passionate
life of hippies during the great flowering of communes in New Mexico.
(from book review)

"This is a clear and dedicated account of how we lived and who we
were, written with an alert eye and a big open hearted, humorous
voice. Keltz leads us deep into a particular American landscape with
beautiful prose that makes us want to follow her."
­Natalie Goldberg

About Iris Keltz:

Iris Keltz, author of Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie, first arrived in
northern New Mexico the summer that Woodstock was happening on the
East Coast. Fresh from the Lower East Side, Iris and her Palestinian
husband were embraced by the inhabitants of the New Buffalo
Commune. Iris fell in love with the land, the culture and the
diversity of people. She stayed to make northern New Mexico her home
to this day. Although her grown children have left for the East and
West Coasts, Iris still wanders the Rio Grande Valley between
Albuquerque and Taos.

Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie is filled with eye witness accounts, oral
histories, historical photographs, newspaper articles from local and
alternative presses and other memorabilia, creating a clear picture
of the perils and pitfalls of young idealistic city folk trying to
create a utopian back to the land society.

Keltz cut her eye teeth as an activist on the Lower East Side where a
group of New York Jewish and Arab activists held benefits and
teach-ins, trying to raise awareness of the situation back in the
Middle East. She joined Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and thousands of
others at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 to support the
nomination of Senator Eugene McCarthy who promised to stop the Viet Nam War.

Before the summer of love, Iris was caught in the '67 War, where she
was living with a Palestinian family from Jerusalem. The
repercussions of that unresolved war still festers. While visiting a
Palestinian village near Hebron, Keltz came to understand that
village life was the sustainable antidote to a consumer society that
offers comforts, toys and technology but leaves people alienated and
never satiated. Village life became her ideal. For over forty years,
she has shared stories about her experiences in the Middle East and
the counter-culture of northern New Mexico.

As a reading teacher for the Albuquerque Public Schools for over
twenty-five years, Keltz brought her love of reading, writing and
story telling to her students. Now retired, she is free to harvest
all the stories to pass on to her brand new grandson and the next generation.

For more info:
Starr Interiors
117 Paseo del Pueblo Norte
Taos, New Mexico
575 759.3065

Cinco Puntos Press
http://www.cincopuntos.com/

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The Stones and the summer of '69

The Stones and the summer of '69

http://www.thesouthernreporter.co.uk/life/The-Stones-and-the-summer.5415702.jp

02 July 2009

BORDERS-based writer Richard Havers releases his latest book on the
group labelled 'the greatest rock and roll band in the world' in 1969.

'The Stones in the Park' charts the rollercoaster summer of that year
for The Rolling Stones, including friend to Havers, bassist Bill Wyman.

On the 40th anniversary, Havers names that summer as the one that
changed the band forever.

In the book he says they moved away from the blues band that Brian
Jones had put together in 1962, had stopped being a pop band, and had
hardly performed on stage since 1967 ­ despite the Stones excelling
as live performers.

And Havers goes on to tell the story of 33 days which included drug
busts, fall-outs, and at least one album that failed to live up to
expectations.

He also discusses the uncertainty that surrounded the band, having
flirted with psychedelia and moved onto the cusp of becoming the
'greatest rock and roll band in the world', as former tour manager
Sam Cutler named them in 1969.

It tells how, on Sunday, June 8, 1969, Brian Jones left the band he
had founded, and less than a month later died just days before the
Stones played a free concert in London's Hyde Park for somewhere
close to half a millon people.

Undaunted, the Stones, who Havers believes have always been greater
than the sum of their parts, recruited Mick Taylor to play guitar in
place of Brian and recorded one of their greatest singles.

They went on to play the largest concert in Britain to that point,
and Mick Jagger, like many pop singers before him, went off to be a film star.

Havers has already written a number of books on The Rolling Stones,
including how the band began in their early years.

Richard Havers will be signing copies of The Stones in the Park at
Kelso's Latimer Books on Saturday from 11am to 1pm.

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Uneasy peace greets Rainbow Gathering

Uneasy peace greets Rainbow Gathering

http://www.krqe.com/dpp/news/environment/environment_krqe_cuba_uneasy_peace_greets_rainbow_gathering_200907032250

Reporter: Jim Winchester
7/3/09

CUBA, N.M. (KRQE) - Rainbow Gatherers have flooded the Santa Fe
National Forest near Cuba preparing for Saturday's July Fourth peace
observance.

Still the peaceful theme of the annual event has not prevented its
share of clashes between participants and law enforcement.

Call them hippies, call them free spirits, but the Rainbow Gatherers
have endured for this their 38th annual gathering.

So has law enforcement reporting problems.

"Most of what we are seeing up there is a lot of drugs being brought
into this gathering," Denise Ottaviano of the U.S. Forest Service
said. "Not just small amounts.

"One seizure by itself was almost a pound of marijuana."

Law enforcers also have issued hundreds of traffic tickets, and that
has these gatherers beating a drum of disgust

"They're bothering people, giving tickets for taillights, they're
giving tickets for not having a seat belt in the back seat of a
cover," Rick Schwichtenberg said. "To me that's overboard."

On Friday law enforcers were taking no chances of clash like one they
had at last year's gathering.

Gatherers told News 13 they still felt they were being targeted.

"Many of us consider this our cathedral of nature, and guns have no
place in a church," John Roadrunner said.

"Armed men coming in with pepper spray guns," added Barry Summers.
"They are trying to provoke something, and it's just wrong."

But three days into the gathering and despite the complaints no major
problems have been reported.

"I think the cooperation this year has been better than in years past
Ottaviano said.

Authorities insisted they are handling enforcement no differently
than they would any other large gathering of people.

The event officially ends on Tuesday.

Following the gathering, volunteer Rainbow participants said they
will spend a few weeks cleaning up and restoring the area where they camped.

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