McNamara Takes Much of Blame for Vietnam

After three decades of refusing to discuss publicly his central role in the Vietnam War, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara has written a brutally self-critical memoir assigning himself much of the blame for the most tragic international misadventure in U.S. history.

As recounted by McNamara in “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” the war could and should have been avoided and should have been halted at several key junctures, one as early as 1963. According to McNamara, he and other senior advisers to President Lyndon B. Johnson failed to head it off through ignorance, inattention, flawed thinking, political expediency and lack of courage.

Even when he and Johnson’s other aides knew that their Vietnam strategy had little chance of success, according to McNamara, they pressed ahead with it, ravaging a beautiful country and sending young Americans to their deaths year after year, because they had no other plan. And had the conflict known as “McNamara’s War” never been fought, McNamara now says, communism would not have prevailed in Asia, and the international strategic position of the United States would be no worse than it is today.

True to his lifelong passion for charts and statistics--made famous in the “body counts” that he still defends--McNamara lists “11 major causes for our failure in Vietnam.” The first and most basic is: “We misjudged then--as we have since--the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries . . . and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.”

Coming from another source, those would not be startling conclusions. Many scholars and military analysts made similar assessments years ago, even while the war was still raging. The Pentagon Papers, which McNamara commissioned, revealed in 1971 that McNamara himself had doubts about the war even as he was escalating it. The fact that McNamara now discloses the extent of the Johnson Administration’s inner turmoil about the war is news only because he has long maintained a Sphinx-like silence about his role.

McNamara’s memoir--”the book I planned never to write”--is to be published this week by the Times Books division of Random House, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon to Communist troops.

The book is based not only on his recollections but also on extensive research, including analysis of declassified documents not previously published, by McNamara and his associate, Brian VanDeMark.

To the question “Why now?” he responds: “There are many reasons; the main one is that I have grown sick at heart witnessing the cynicism and even contempt with which so many people view our political institutions and leaders.”

The Vietnam War, he notes, is a large part of the reason for that cynicism, along with the Watergate scandal. Now the time has come, he writes, for “Americans to understand why we made the mistakes we did.”

Dubbed “the best and the brightest,” he and his colleagues were all smart, dedicated people who “acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.”

McNamara writes that John F. Kennedy, who preceded Johnson in the White House, insisted that “he did not wish to make an unconditional commitment to prevent the loss of South Vietnam and flatly refused to endorse the introduction of U.S. combat forces.” After Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963, however, the military buildup in Vietnam was both inevitable and destined to fail, for many reasons, according to McNamara.

Johnson, challenged in the 1964 election campaign by conservative Republican Barry Goldwater, was determined not to appear weak against the perceived threat of Communist expansion. South Vietnam’s revolving-door governments were corrupt and ineffectual. Johnson’s style of governing was to play one set of advisers off others, blocking development of a coherent strategy. As important as Vietnam was, McNamara and his colleagues were distracted by events elsewhere, including the 1967 Mideast war.

Ignorant of Vietnamese history and culture, McNamara and his colleagues failed utterly to understand the dedication and staying power of the Communist North Vietnamese. They misconstrued the relationship between China and Vietnam, failed to appreciate the intense nationalism of the Vietnamese, and never grasped that Vietnam, as a largely agrarian society with a subsistence economy, could not be crippled by bombing.

McNamara admits that he helped Johnson deceive the public about the war, though he denies deliberately giving false information to Congress at the time it passed the 1964 Tonkin Gulf resolution. He also admits that Johnson and he misused the resolution to undertake a military commitment far beyond what Congress intended.

McNamara concludes that there were five key points between November, 1963, and December, 1967, when, “we could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam.”

The December, 1967, decision point came when the CIA delivered an analysis saying no amount of bombing would deter North Vietnam from its objective of winning the south and that a U.S. withdrawal would not undermine this nation’s overall security interests.

Those who have followed McNamara’s career will find in this new memoir an unexpectedly personal approach. He was always a charts-and-graphs type who kept his personal views to himself. Now at the age of 78, he has finally broken down that barrier.

Recalling the Johnson Administration’s dismay with the lack of progress in the crucial year of 1965, McNamara notes: “I had always been confident that every problem could be solved, but now I found myself confronting one--involving national pride and human life--that could not.”