Losing Orange County Hearts and Minds to Cynicism

A small group of men embark on a course of public policy that seems promising. Short-term payoffs are banked; long-range risks are kept quiet. By dint of their positions, great deference is paid to the men in power.

Then, as happens, people begin criticizing the policies. Those in charge, however, keep their own counsel and disdain challenges from outside the loop. Rather than debate the policies, they construe the challenges as attacks on their integrity and intelligence.

They equate changing course with defeat. Men in power hate to admit defeat. Doing so is tantamount to weakness. In their eyes, no fate is worse than that.

Pride does, indeed, precede the fall.

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Robert McNamara is on a public tour to explain what went wrong during the Vietnam War era. Yet, he hasn’t said anything in his TV interviews that millions of people didn’t know 30 years ago. Including himself, as it turns out. The series of miscalculations McNamara cites as driving the pursuit of the Vietnam War through the late 1960s and early 1970s forms the exact catalogue of those given by the anti-war faction back then.

Worse, even as that faction was branded as being unpatriotic or misguided, McNamara silently agreed with its assessment of the war.

Reading and hearing that from McNamara now, 30 years after the fact, leaves no other conclusion than that he was part of a prideful Administration more willing to expend lives than admit a mistake and appear as a “loser” in the war.

McNamara says he’s coming clean because he’s troubled by the cynicism and contempt many people feel toward government. An amazing statement, considering that history will record him as one of the chief architects of that cynicism. Large chunks of an entire generation grew into adulthood believing that the Vietnam War was as cynical as McNamara now concedes it to have been.

It’s a leap from the Vietnam War to the Orange County bankruptcy, but we have our own brand of cynicism brewing. It isn’t the war revisited, unless you narrow it to a discussion of the arrogance of power.

The exact number of Orange County culprits isn’t quite as easy to finger as it was during the Vietnam War, but many of the traits are the same. It begins with a small circle of power figures and leads through their eventual miscalculations and, finally, defiance and fatal pride in the face of challenges to their policies.

The chief perpetrator of the local debacle was former Treasurer Robert Citron. True, he didn’t preside over years of willful neglect, but he had ample time before the ultimate collapse to change course and, perhaps, spare the county what it has been suffering.

Citron doesn’t bear blame alone. Before the collapse, others in Orange County government were growing wary of Citron’s strategies but didn’t publicly voice their concerns. Warning flags from the auditor’s office, for example, apparently went to the Board of Supervisors, but were never made public. Nor did the county counsel tell the board that the Securities and Exchange Commission queried Citron about his policies, although it didn’t cite him at the time.

In his remarks to a special state Senate committee in January, Citron said, “In retrospect, it is clear that I followed the wrong course. I will carry that burden the rest of my life. I am not here seeking to place blame or shirk responsibility. I am here simply to tell the truth.”

That bears an eerie resemblance to printed excerpts from McNamara’s just-released book, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.” McNamara writes: “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. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”

The fund’s collapse and resultant chaos has left thousands of Orange County residents with an overarching cynicism toward local government. It isn’t inconceivable that, just like Vietnam, this wave of cynicism could last a generation.

Today, Robert McNamara and Orange County government both ask us not to be cynical toward them. They implore us to believe in our leaders and to trust our institutions.

On our honor, we’ll try. But they’re asking a lot, and they must promise to give us reasons to do so again.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.