The recent death of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had many of us revisiting the Vietnam era that was so synonymous with the late, less-than-lamented secretary of defense. McNamara, who died at 93, was the reluctant warrior who, not unlike Colin Powell, couldn’t resign in honor when it mattered most.
When he finally did — in early 1968 — it was too late. Many of those 58,000 American G.I.s were already dead.
The man who turned “architect” into an epithet was often Exhibit A for the Kennedy Administration’s “Best and Brightest” self-paean. But here’s what we never figured out: Why McNamara for that job? Because as the young, well-pedigreed president of Ford he was a bona fide “whiz kid” when it came to crunching numbers, improving procurement practices and finding efficiencies? Obviously.
But how about the pressing issues of the day? Where, how and whether or not to apply America’s military might? Obviously not a priority.
The Defense Department gave bureaucratic morass a bad name, and McNamara was brought in to tame and transform it. He was, as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius has pointed out, brought in “to challenge outmoded practices, politics be damned.” He was “the ultimate rationalist,” said Ignatius, whose father worked for McNamara at the Pentagon.
Talk about “outmoded practices.” How ironic.
Was anything more on its way to being outmoded than the paranoid, 1960s, anti-communist prism through which too many American leaders still saw the world?
* A prism that rationalized Vietnam as a necessary and righteous proxy fight and not a civil war. One that theorized geopolitical “dominoes” and put America on the side of a corrupt South Vietnamese regime and in league with the assassins of President Ngo Dinh Diem. One that defined Ho Chi Minh, who once helped the Brits against the Japanese, as an implacable, ideological enemy of a country on the opposite side of the world.
* A prism that obscured the reality that it was the U.S.-backed South that wanted no parts of the Geneva agreement that included national elections.
* A prism that so distorted history that it actually seemed to make sense for America to have replaced the French in IndoChina.
Ultimately, McNamara presided over Kennedy-Johnson Administration policy that asked young Americans to die for something far less than the legitimate defense of their country. It was more than wrong. It was morally repugnant. It was to become his legacy.
McNamara was bright enough to see the need for a more efficient fighting machine, but not astute enough to see soon enough that U.S. military might wasn’t meant for guerilla warfare. Hearts and minds could never be won with napalm. A legacy subset.
The “Best and Brightest?” No, McNamara wasn’t the best nor the brightest choice for a job that should have required so much more than slide-rule acumen.