We Were Solders Once...And Young

Robert McNamara's death has elicited the predictable round of naval-gazing and pompous denunciations of America's misbegotten adventures in Viet Nam. McNamara has been such a lightning rod for so long, it's easy to forget that he was a Big Government liberal who served in the JFK and LBJ Administrations that gave us the New Frontier (whatever that was) and the Great Society (sadly, we know what this was). McNamara's epitaph was written decades ago, and has been all too predictable: Robert S McNamara, Architect of a Futile War, Dead at 93

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.

If you did not grow up in the Sixties, it can be very difficult to learn the history of the Viet Nam War in the same straight forward manner you may learn about WW2 or the Civil War. The excuse is always that the "passions of the era" are still too raw. The truth is that liberals have been trying to obscure their igniminious behavior throughout the War. Viet Nam was a liberal's war. They started it. Then, they waged it so poorly that we were declared to have "lost" (but, not really). And, finally, liberals were the ones who abandoned our South Vietnamese allies to their fate. The Greatest Generation liberals lost the war, while the Baby Boomer liberals burned flags to protest the war. Both groups have tried desperately to blame Nixon, Kissenger, Westmoreland, McNamara, anyone but themselves for the war's disasters. For decades after, a US soldier couldn't flick off his safety in a foreign country without Ted Kennedy, or whoever, intoning that "America cannot fight another Viet Nam." In Viet Nam, liberals were revealed to be, almost simultaneously, as bellicose and treasonous, pro-war and anti-war, sanctimoneous and sniveling.

I can remember back in 1995 when McNamara wrote his book "atoning" for his errors in conducting the war, and claiming outrageously that he hadn't thought it was winnable, even as he was leading the massive escalations that turned a police action into a land war. MacNeil/Lehrer had a panel discussion featuring, among others, John McCain and George McGovern. McCain - who, remember was one of the young men fighting the "unwinnable war" whom McNamara was supposedly wasting - was the soul of equnimity, saying that too much time had passed for him to feel any anger towards McNamara. George McGovern, meanwhile, acted like it was 1972, intoning over and over again "If I had been president..." and telling us what he would have done differently. Finally, McCain, who had been doing a slow boil, snapped, "If you had been elected president, I would still be there!" McGovern shut the hell up after that. If only we could do that everyday...

By my count, McNamara's life saw three betrayals. He betrayed the American public by waging a war so poorly that the American military - which had defeated the Japanese Empire 20 years earlier - was unable to defeat a poor country like Viet Nam. He betrayed the soldiers, sailors and airmen who fought and died under his watch by announcing decades later that he never thought the war was winnable (Nixon was to prove him wrong). He betrayed our erstwhile allies in South Viet Nam by befriending the detestable General Giap late in life.

There was little in the man that was admirable. And there is little that is admirable in the people trying to bury him with the anti-war slogans of 40 years ago, rather than wonder how a "whiz kid" Big Government liberal could have gone so terribly wrong.