Robert Strange McNamara, 1916-2009

When I was in college, I majored in History and minored in Asian Studies out of a desire to try to understand what happened in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, perhaps out of a larger desire to understand the problem of Evil. I suppose in retrospect, then, that my undergraduate education can be considered in many ways a fundamental failure, yet another passionate young leftist trying to grapple with the insoluble problems of the cosmic and eventually ending up in law school. (The alternative, obviously, was to go on and get a PhD. in something, and end up teaching somewhere, and just as the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, so too it's greener in the alternate-history parallel universe, unless it's the one where the Nazis won WWII. That one just sucks all the way around, man.)

I mention that bit of increasingly-faded history merely because I've found myself undecided about whether or how to write about the recent death of Robert Strange McNamara, Secretary Of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson who's considered the "architect" of the Vietnam War as if the Vietnam War wasn't the product of politics global and domestic and indigenous. My wrist hurts and my brain is too foggy, and ultimately McNamara's ghosts are foggy and shrouded. It's not a simple thing to write about. Robert McNamara is exactly what all his critics said he was and he got a bad rap he didn't deserve, and there's an irreconcilable contradiction. He wasn't what his critics said he was, is the thing, and he deserved hell for all the bad decisions he made one-after-the-other; and there we are, back at the contradiction we started with.

It was fashionable, a few years ago, to compare McNamara to Donald Rumsfeld, which was understandable when you look at them as technocrats who thought a war could be won by numbers, but completely unjustified when you remember that McNamara was smart and had a conscience, and that really isn't to slam Rumsfeld as much as it sounds: McNamara was the italicized kind of smart, and one might still concede Rumsfeld was an ordinary kind of smart while granting that McNamara was, by all accounts, the kind of smart that can be intimidating, kind of frightening. And maybe Rumsfeld even has a conscience, I don't know, but I know that there are a lot of accounts that McNamara wept over what he'd wrought, not just the soldiers' lives that had been expended on policies he helped craft but over what those policies have done to this country and its politics over the years, and I haven't heard of Rumsfeld crying any tears. I think I said in a comment I left at Jim Wright's blog some distant time ago that McNamara seems like the kind of guy that if a Vietnam vet had slugged him, he would have responded by saying he deserved it; McNamara accepted responsibility, maybe even when he shouldn't have--John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson could have said "no" at any time (sort of; except they couldn't, not really, dammit, see... and I said it was complicated, and I didn't want to get into it, so forgive me, I won't).

This was supposed to be a short post pointing you to a Salon piece by Michael Lind that I actually think is very, very good. And that's what you should be reading. It answers as many important questions as my college education did, but it also makes some good points, just like my college education did. I hope you'll find it as perceptive as I did.