A Confession That Confirms Old Suspicions : Thirty years late, McNamara says, ‘We were wrong, terribly wrong’ in Vietnam.

Thirty years ago, I crossed paths with Robert McNamara in Indochina and questioned how he could justify introducing the most brutal of modern wars into that fragile world. Why define this still-primitive land as the essential battleground of the Cold War and, I wrote, reduce “a hodgepodge of peoples, each possessing its own lengthy, confused and emotionally charged history and cultural patterns, into neat black dominoes ready to fall?” Now he has written a confessional that tells us that he and the two presidents he served never thought it through at all.

“We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why,” writes the man who was secretary of defense for both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. But his explanation of why the top policy-makers went wrong robs us of even the slight solace that those who authored this carnage were evil in their calculations and therefore at least serious. Instead, they stand revealed as bumblers of the worst sort, contemptuous and ignorant of the land and people they sought to save, preoccupied in the most irrational of ways with global games, using the cloak of national security to mask a paucity of logical thought.

“When it came to Vietnam, we found ourselves setting policy for a region that was terra incognita, “ McNamara writes. Thanks to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s decimation of the State Department a decade earlier, there was no sophistication about China, either. As a result, McNamara says, the Administration “badly misread China’s objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony. We also totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement.

“Such ill-founded judgments were accepted without debate by the Kennedy Administration, as they had been by its Democratic and Republican predecessors. We failed to analyze our assumptions critically, then or later. The foundations of our decision-making were gravely flawed.”

The result was a tissue of lies. Ngo Dinh Diem, who McNamara knew to be “autocratic, suspicious, secretive and insulated from his people” was hyped by Washington as the “democratic alternative” until the very day we overthrew him.

Now McNamara concedes that the domino theory was bogus. The communists in Vietnam and China were first and last nationalists, which is why the U.S. defeat in Vietnam resulted in a war between China and Vietnam rather than a red sweep through the rest of Asia.

As the peaceniks argued, a negotiated withdrawal, not military escalation, was always the only sound option. McNamara cites five occasions, before 1967, when “we could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam.” Plenty of Americans, Bill Clinton included, have had their patriotism challenged for saying just that, and some went to jail for resisting a massacre that McNamara so belatedly assures never had any reasonable justification.

But the information arrives a bit late to be helpful to the millions who suffered so. While I respect the moral Angst reflected in this memoir, one must ask why McNamara compounded his crime of complicity with the crime of silence.

Imagine how many lives could have been saved if, back in 1967, McNamara had released to the public the warning he wrote in a letter to L.B.J.: “There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. 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. “

And it didn’t get any prettier. By war’s end, that tiny nation had been pounded by more explosives than were used in all of World War II, and 58,191 Americans and millions of Vietnamese lay dead.

McNamara left the government in 1968. Why did he maintain his silence through seven even bloodier years and Nixon’s extension of the madness to Cambodia?

The point here is not recrimination. McNamara is not the first to go seriously astray, and it is honorable that he now shares his misgivings with us. What needs to be condemned is a style of governance that assumes that the security of the people is preserved by keeping the truth from them. Or that patriotism is best served by those who go along with what is wrong.

Fine that McNamara now weeps publicly during an interview with Diane Sawyer recalling what he wrought. But think of the lives that could have been saved had he publicly shed even one tear while that genocidal war was still being “won.”