McNamara's War

Robert Strange McNamara has died. The man was a strategic bombing planner when we firebombed Tokyo and Nagasaki, killing a million. He recounted years later that Gen. Curtis LeMay had remarked to him that if we had lost WWII they would have been tried for war crimes, according to the account in the Times obit.

There has been a lot written, like this LA Times blog post which quotes the late David Halberstam's harsh reaction to McNamara's 1995 memoir `In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam', and James Fallows remarks here in which he acknowledges that he wouldn't be as harsh today as he was then - when the book came out.

The man had a lot to apologize for. His legendary 800 on the GMAT, the master of statistics and management, the "whiz kid" showed us that the "best and brightest" lacked moral vision. They went with the flow - but unlike dead fish - they built a fearsome military machine and used it relentlessly. To me the incendiary bombing of Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam war were all of a piece - exaggeration of risk and devaluation of life, especially Asian life.

I selected the photo above to remind us that those who had moral vision - John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson - when it came to civil rights - did not overcome the prevailing blind exaggeration of the "communist threat". And in Johnson and McNamara's case they did not appreciate the moral bankruptcy of our "strategic bombing" - the years of hell in Vietnam that Nixon and Kissinger prolonged.

McNamara wanted to be understood, I guess, as someone who regretted much. But the evil the man did lives after him and the good was interred with his bones.

ps. - James Fallows updates his observations by recounting Mark Feeney in the Boston Globe's recollection of a man greeting "Secretary McNamara" as a "hero"in a chance encounter. McNamara's crestfallen look said that he was not so proud of himself, a moment of moral vulnerability unimaginable for "Secretary Rumsfeld" or V.P. Cheney. It does speak well of the character of the man. -gwc