Angry Poodle Barks at Robert McNamara
http://www.independent.com/news/2009/jul/16/heat-dog/
Thursday, July 16, 2009
By Nick Welsh
LET 'ER R.I.P.: Lost in the din of Michael Jackson's cataclysmic
death throes and postmortem prognostications was the demise of Robert
Strange McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense under presidents
Kennedy and Johnson, who died peacefully in his sleep on July 6, at
the ripe old age of 93. As is clearly not the case with Michael
Jackson, no one is fretting what will become of McNamara's body. But
wherever he's planted, I'm inclined to dig up his remains and whack
him with my shovel. It won't change a thing. But it might make me
feel better. Maybe for a second.
McNamara last spoke in Santa Barbara in 2006 to agonize, as an
age-ripened sage, over the infinite perverseness of the species and
the attendant risks of nuclear Armageddon. It's unclear how many
times he visited Santa Barbara before. But we do know that in his
less benign incarnation as Secretary of Defense McNamara
dispatched hundreds of young Santa Barbarans off to Vietnam during
the fruit of their youth. We also know 98 of these young men would
never make the return trip, blown to bits in a war we'd discover
later that no one really believed in, least of all McNamara. You
could never have known this at the time, watching McNamara in action.
With his hair shellacked into total submission and his index finger a
perpetual motion machine, McNamara personified absolute and
irresistible certitude. He always was the smartest guy in any room,
and it would take computer technology 40 years to match the man's
staggering recall.
McNamara was not just a brain. He also had, we would have to learn
later, a heart. He was an intensely tormented man, it turns out,
about the Vietnam War, which he confessed was all a big mistake. Even
so, he could never bring himself to actually say he was sorry. He had
been acting in service of the president; the war was Johnson's fault.
It was Kennedy's fault. And besides, we acted upon the best
information and wisdom of the day. In some ways, he's right; in many,
he's wrong. But when I think of the 58,000 Americans and 3.4 million
Vietnamese killed, I'm most inclined to reach for my shovel.
McNamara's life is a cautionary tale for those of us too easily
dazzled by sheer brilliance. The youngest and highest-paid assistant
professor at Harvard Business School, McNamara was recruited by the
Air Force to apply his business skills to the art of war. WWII
airplane production increased exponentially almost overnight.
Crunching the numbers, he figured out why 20 percent of all American
bombers turned around before dropping their bombs pilot fear. And
even in the last good war, fought by America's "Best Generation,"
McNamara would be struck by the scale of death. On one night alone,
100,000 Japanese civilians would be burned alive in firebombing raids
he helped orchestrate. After the war, he joined Ford Motor Company,
then badly failing, bringing wartime skills and talents to the
manufacture of cars. He turned Ford around, promoting the small and
sporty Ford Falcon as an antidote to all the oversized beautiful gas
hogs then choking the roads. And he greatly reduced traffic
fatalities by removing steering columns that impaled drivers involved
in head-on collisions; he added seat belts, too.
When President Kennedy tapped McNamara for the Defense Department,
McNamara's sole and overriding fixation was preventing nuclear war.
It was a legitimate fear. Many generals enthusiastically embraced the
first-strike, kill-'em-while-you-can philosophy. As an alternative to
this nuke-happy mindset, McNamara supported the buildup and
deployment of conventional forces to contain the commies, wherever
they were and, in some cases, where they were not. In that context,
Vietnam was an insignificant speck of dust. But it was an opportunity
for McNamara to say yes to the generals to whom he'd been saying no.
The war would be won because the United States could not afford to be
punked by a third-rate nation and maintain street cred with the
Soviet Union or China. The facts, however, rudely intruded. South
Vietnam, as a state, was a fiction imposed by Western nations without
regard to either history or reality. At best, South Vietnam's
government was 20 pounds of crap wrapped in a wet paper bag. It could
not hold up. Yet we were winning the war because Bob McNamara told us
so. Every night on national TV, with charts, maps, and fingers flying.
Initially, McNamara thought we were winning, too. But he quickly
found out the generals were either clueless or playing him for a
fool. Rather than expose such deceit, he embraced it, embellished it,
and sold it as his own. The ultimate number cruncher, McNamara broke
down the war to body counts. McNamara became, as David Halberstam
described in The Best and the Brightest, "the quantifier trying to
quantify the unquantifiable." Later, when other members of Johnson's
cabinet indicated doubts, McNamara would invite them to private
meetings. In such intimate encounters, he was encouraging,
sympathetic. But in full meetings with Johnson present, he would
attack the doubters with cold ferocity. As always, McNamara's weapons
were facts and figures. McNamara's victims would be awed by his
arsenal of data. Later, they'd discover, he was not above making
things up: It got the job done. With McNamara's foot squarely on the
gas, Johnson accelerated the war effort. Congress duped by tall
tales of an alleged attack on a Navy ship gave Johnson a blank
check to attack the North Vietnamese. When it was over, we dropped
three times the tonnage on North Vietnam than we did on all of
Western Europe throughout World War II. We killed more than half as
many Vietnamese as the Nazis killed Jews. Despite the mind-boggling
enormity of this carnage, we still hear how the United States could
have finished the job if not for the meddlesome intrusions of the
media, the peace movement, and the politicians. At some point,
McNamara found he could not make up any more facts. He was forced to
concede victory was not an option. For this betrayal, Johnson cut him loose.
Subsequent presidents learned well the tragic lessons of the
shiny-headed Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War. Disarm the media by
keeping reporters contained, if not quarantined; keep any footage of
flag-draped coffins off the nightly news. And squash the potential of
any peace movement by avoiding at all costs the draft. Congress,
likewise, learned its lesson. Whenever a president submits a blank
check to wage war, sign first and ask questions later. My first
impulse, as always, is to reach for my shovel. I'm just not sure whom
to whack first.
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