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July 7, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: What Robert McNamara learned about war, we need to remember

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — Would it have been better if Robert S. McNamara had kept all his regrets to himself?

The former defense secretary, whose place in history is forever fixed to the 1960s and the Vietnam War he helped choreograph, spent the last 14 years of his life publicly admitting his mistakes, his ambivalences and the hard wisdom he had gained.

After publication of his 1995 memoir, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” McNamara sealed his fate among many people who had always hated him. His most vehement critics asked why he waited so long and what possible good his long-delayed confessions could do for the 58,000 U.S. troops who died in Vietnam.

All the hating, however, tends to distract from what McNamara had to say. For a world power bent on exporting freedom and democracy, we should consider his observations and revelations crucial. That they came from a person with his extraordinary access, experience, analytical mind and — sorry, to those who believe his veins ran with ice water — troubled conscience, only increases their value.

McNamara died Monday at 93. As someone who despised him for close to 25 years (and missed much of his anti-nuclear weapons work), I could not imagine I would ever think of him and the word “redeemed” together.

My attitude began to change after “In Retrospect.” The operative phrase about Vietnam from the book: “We were wrong, terribly wrong.” By 2004, after watching Errol Morris’ Oscar-winning documentary, “The Fog of War: 11 Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara,” my assessment of the man was permanently altered.

Do I think he’d morphed into Mother Teresa? Not hardly.

But for a military war strategist and Cabinet-level official, who served two powerfully persuasive (and different) presidents as defense secretary, McNamara cleaned his bloody hands better than many. He did this by continually examining the remains of war and, eventually, owning up to the failings of his own and others’ leadership.

In “The Fog of War,” McNamara revealed the duality that marked his long, hugely lived life, enthusiastically describing the numbers crunching he did in World War II to help plan the fire bombing of Tokyo. (Statistics management was a McNamara strength, one of the skill sets he later used to turn Ford Motor Co. around in the 1950s.)

Moving in his mind from the brilliant strategic engineering job he’d done for his commanding general, Curtis LeMay, he then stated the other “truth” for Morris. In an admission we likely will never hear from the architects of the current, ill-advised Iraq conflict, McNamara said:

“In that single night we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians … men, women and children … LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals, and I think he’s right. He, and I’d say, I, were behaving as war criminals.”

The fault, McNamara told Morris, lay at the feet of many: “The human race prior to that time — and today — has not really grappled with what I’ll call the rules of war … Was there a rule then that said you shouldn’t … burn to death 100,000 civilians in a night?”

Even as he combed the past for mistakes and held them up for display, McNamara never apologized strongly enough or often enough for many of his critics. In an NPR interview in 2004 with “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross, documentarian Morris — as anti-Vietnam War then as in his student protest days — addressed the frequent complaint.

“I would ask myself, ‘What is it that they want to hear? What exactly are they looking for?’” Morris said. “And I ask myself, ‘Do I want to hear McNamara apologize for the war?’ Here’s my answer: Not really … because I don’t think there is any apology for the war, in this sense: How do you apologize for the death of 58,000 Americans and two to three million Vietnamese?”

Rather, the filmmaker said, McNamara had “done something far more interesting” than apologize. He had gone back over the history of the war looking to understand how and what went wrong on every level.

Several years earlier when “In Retrospect” had just been published, McNamara himself was the interviewee on Gross’ show. She asked if an apology was “appropriate.”

Almost impatient, he said, “Of course,” in a way that said, “You’re all missing the point; I’m trying to do something more useful than say I’m sorry.”

“We owe an explanation to future generations of what happened and how to avoid that in the future,” he said. “That’s the purpose of the book … The issue isn’t apologizing … You don’t correct a wrong by apologizing. You can only correct a wrong if you understand how it occurred and you take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

In his years in government, McNamara also helped oversee the buildup of the nation’s, and world’s, nuclear arsenal. Not unlike the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, McNamara then spent much of the last part of his life trying to dissuade anyone in leadership from considering nuclear warfare.

On Errol Morris’ Web site, the filmmaker has posted a quote about that subject from “The Fog of War.” Talking about the fatal mistakes any military strategist makes in his career, McNamara said that no matter how many people die as a result of those mistakes, the strategist “hasn’t destroyed nations” and can learn from his mistakes.

“There’ll be no learning period with nuclear weapons,” McNamara warned. “You make one mistake and you’re going to destroy nations.”

In the 1995 radio interview with Gross, McNamara inadvertently touched on something that seems to me a more productive path to follow regarding him, his role in Vietnam and his subsequent exhaustive analyses. Reading from a letter from the widow of a Quaker war protester who burned himself to death in 1965 under the secretary of defense’s window, McNamara repeated her words, his voice breaking:

“To heal the wounds of that war, we must forgive ourselves and each other and help the people of Vietnam to rebuild their country. I’m grateful to Robert McNamara for his courageous and honest reappraisal of the Vietnam War and his involvement in it. I hope his book will contribute to the healing process.”



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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