Sorry, Mac--You’re Not Forgiven : Those who protested the Vietnam War remain the heroes, McNamara the fraud.

Jane Fonda and Daniel Ellsberg are looking pretty good these days. Traitors no more, they are now revealed as heroes who dared to speak truth to power. Remember how maligned they were for insisting what former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has now admitted: that the war in Vietnam was “wrong, terribly wrong.”

Some argued that Fonda, Ellsberg and hundreds of thousands in the anti-war movement went too far in urging resistance to U.S. policy. Now one has to ask if they went far enough. What would it have taken to reach the vast majority of editors, ministers and congressmen who for too long defended the indefensible? Those “good Americans,” who looked away while their government performed unspeakable acts in their name, should not have required a confession from McNamara to know right from wrong. They should ask themselves the question that McNamara’s son, who protested the war, put to his father through Diane Sawyer the other night: “Why was it so hard to listen to the people in the country who were saying get out?”

Why didn’t they listen to returning veterans like John Kerry, now a senator, who testified before Congress in 1971 that “to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam . . . by linking (it) to the preservation of freedom . . . is the height of criminal hypocrisy”? Or the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who in 1967 condemned the war as a “blasphemy against all that America stands for”?

But such eloquence failed to stop a war that caused the deaths of 3 million innocent people. That includes 58,191 Americans who were victims of their own government, which systematically lied about the purposes of this war. It is no consolation to learn now that the man who orchestrated these deaths had serious, but never publicly expressed, reservations.

The millions of Vietnamese dead, irrespective of their politics, were obliterated by the fiercest of modern military technology on their own ancestral lands, in a war waged by a foreign power that had no reason, let alone moral right, to be there.

We destroyed Vietnam, as Graham Greene predicted we would in his 1955 novel “The Quiet American,” out of a hubris so huge that the complex history of the Vietnamese people would never be more than a minor inconvenience to the crass ambitions of American politicians.

This was not solely McNamara’s folly. The Eisenhower Administration made the fatal decision to step into the bloody shoes of the French colonialists. Few recall that it was we, the self-proclaimed champions of democracy, who in 1956 prevented the elections to unify Vietnam that had been agreed to by France and the United States.

Instead, we became obsessed with a delusionary battle with the devil. The Vietnamese communists were demonized as a robotic advanced guard of a monolithic international communism bent on conquering the world. The facts, which McNamara now concedes, that the Soviets and the Chinese were already at each other’s throats, and that the Vietnamese communists had long led a nationalist struggle against the Japanese and the French, was simply ignored.

All of this was documented in the secret Pentagon study of the war that McNamara commissioned in 1967. Daniel Ellsberg, a once-hawkish participant in that study, became convinced that the American public had a right to the truth and released the classified so-called Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. For that public service, the Nixon Administration charged Ellsberg and his “co-conspirator,” Anthony Russo, with “espionage.” But once the Pentagon Papers were published, it was untenable to claim U.S. national security as the reason for continuing the war. Instead, supporters of the war followed President Nixon’s lead and cited “face-saving” as justification for the continuing carnage.

To acquiesce to the murderous carpet bombings by B-52s, it was necessary to deny the humanity of the victims. Jane Fonda is called a traitor to this day, in airports and at ballgames, because she traveled to North Vietnam and put a human face on the people we were bombing back to the Stone Age.

Some went further. Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan spent much time in jail for acting out their consciences with direct actions intended to jam a war machine that had no reasonable purpose.

McNamara was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1968 for his loyalty to President Johnson. Perhaps it is time to present the Berrigans, Ellsberg and Fonda with Medals of Freedom, in the hopes that children will grow up to follow their example and not that of the McNamaras who defined patriotism as blind allegiance to a government that was as arrogant as it was wrong.