A Wound That Time Has Not Healed : Publishing: Instead of bringing the country together, Robert McNamara’s confession about Vietnam seems to be tearing it apart--again.

Robert McNamara’s new memoir confessing that “we were wrong, terribly wrong” in Vietnam has polarized the nation all over again--20 years after the end of America’s most divisive war.

“We anticipated this book would generate a lot of controversy,” says Peter Osnos, publisher of Times Books, which released the former defense secretary’s “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam” last week. “But it has gone significantly beyond what we imagined. We were not prepared for how raw the wound still is.”

The stark simplicity of McNamara’s confession--and its implication for millions who had believed that even if we lost, we were right-- has produced an unexpected howl of pain and rage in newspapers, on radio and on TV.

Both those who fought and those who opposed the war have found untapped reservoirs of animosity to fuel angry new statements about what was called “McNamara’s war.”

The author, now 79, has said repeatedly that he intended this work to have a healing effect, to help future generations avoid the errors of the past. But the passage of two decades apparently has not bestowed on most Americans the same calm historical perspective McNamara displays.

On Tuesday, William Detweiler, commander of the American Legion veterans’ organization with 3.1 million members, suggested that McNamara donate profits from his book to charity.

“If Secretary McNamara is sincere about atoning for sending Americans into a war he knew they couldn’t win, then he shouldn’t profit financially from this sad, tragic, late confession,” Detweiler said. “The consequences of (his) failed judgment can be seen hobbling down the corridors of our nation’s VA hospitals.”

On Wednesday, Allen F. (Gunner) Kent, national commander-in-chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, urged McNamara to donate all proceeds from the book “to the families of those killed and missing in action from Southeast Asia, as well as to programs which serve to benefit those who served in Southeast Asia during the war.”

It’s not as if the book is filled with previously unknown facts. War-era Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and secretaries of state Dean Rusk and Henry Kissinger, among others, weighed in long ago with literary explanations of the quagmire that was Vietnam--and the government bungles that caused it.

Max Frankel, reviewing “In Retrospect” in the New York Times, said McNamara had waited so long to write his memoirs that now “no one under 50 can be expected to fathom” what went on in the Vietnam years.

Apparently, Frankel was wrong.

Radio talk shows have been inundated with calls from veterans who say McNamara’s book makes them sorry they ever fought in Vietnam, or who still think “we could have won if the government hadn’t made us fight with one hand tied behind our backs,” or who simply wish McNamara would shut up and keep his embarrassing confessions to himself.

Editorial writers have heaped almost the entire burden of the war on McNamara’s back:

“It is important to remember how fate dispensed rewards and punishment for Mr. McNamara’s thousands of days of error,” opined the New York Times. “Three million Vietnamese died. Fifty-eight thousand Americans got to come home in body bags. Mr. McNamara . . . got a sinecure at the World Bank and summers at the Vineyard. . . . (He) must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen.”

The Wall Street Journal leaped to McNamara’s defense, calling the New York Times editorial vicious and ridiculous for placing blame on the aging author.

The war was “a group effort led by a string of Presidents,” the Journal editorial said, and McNamara was only “a player in a long-running drama” that was “authored by history, not by any individual.”

Newsweek prefaced its excerpt from McNamara’s book with the revelation that the author’s middle initial, S , stands for Strange (his mother’s maiden name). And with the grudging admission that while “no confession can bring back the dead or absolve guilt . . . McNamara’s public remorse took some guts.”

Meanwhile USA Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Sacramento Bee, among other newspapers, printed off-the-cuff interviews with people on the street.

“I felt betrayed when I heard about this,” one Vietnam veteran told the Plain Dealer.

“I won’t be satisfied until I go to McNamara’s funeral and stick a pin in the S.O.B. to make sure he’s really dead,” vowed another.

“McNamara has the blood of more than 50,000 Americans on his hands, and no apologies or crocodile tears . . . will erase the depths of his infamy,” wrote Col. Harry G. Summers Jr. of the Army War College, on the commentary page of the Los Angeles Times.

Hated or not, McNamara’s book is definitely selling. After one week, it is in its fifth printing for a total of 194,000 copies. Asked whether the controversy would affect the author’s plans for an extensive book tour, publisher Osnos replied, “Of course he’s going on tour. Mr. McNamara is a very vigorous man. He has a tour planned and he fully intends to complete it.”

The book also has sparked a national debate on the responsibility of citizens to question our government and the orders we are asked to obey.