The Fog of War, Part 3
by Connie Corcoran Wilson
Where we left off:
We hear LBJ saying, “We’re not getting out, but we’re trying to hold on
to what we have,” and, later, “This is a nasty little war that has
turned into a nasty middle-sized war. But America wins the wars she
declares. Make no mistake about that!”
McNamara
tellingly declares (after Lesson #8, “Be prepared to re-examine your
reasoning,” appears onscreen), “What makes us omniscient? Do we have a
record of omniscience? None of our allies supported us. If we can’t
persuade nations with comparable values of the rightness of our cause,
we had better re-examine our reasons.” In Robert Dallek’s extensive
biography of JFK (An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963.), on
page 685, Dallek notes, “Briefings of McNamara tended to be sessions
where people tried to fool him, and he tried to convince them they
cannot.” In the film, McNamara also relates how Tommy Thompson,
former Ambassador to Russia, stood up to the President during a
meeting, telling him that he (JFK) was wrong about whether Russia would
accept the intended blockade of Cuba. “We must try to put ourselves
inside their skins,” said Thompson, echoing McNamara’s Rule #1. Were it
not for cautionary voices like Thompson’s, war might have erupted with
the Soviet Union during three crises that occurred on JFK’s and
McNamara’s watch. But, during the Kennedy years, open debate was the
name of the game. Intelligent dissent was encouraged, not discouraged.
The lack of healthy debate in the current administration is a point
made most tellingly in Paul O’Neill’s book “The Price of Loyalty.”
Dissent is not encouraged and nobody dares stand up to the President.
One is “assigned” to speak. In fact, Cabinet members are not even
encouraged to speak in their areas of expertise, such as Christie
Whitman (former Governor of New Jersey) of the EPA (Environmental
Protection Agency) on topics that one would think should be their
bailiwick, such as the issue of global warming and what the US position
on the Kyoto Protocol should be. There is no debate in the George W.
Bush White House; it is filled with ideologues who have already made
their conservative Christian minds up, and who follow few, if any, of
McNamara’s “eleven lessons.” They most certainly do not attempt to
apply Lesson 6 (Get the data), as we now know from the 9/11 Commission
report, nor Lesson 7 (Belief and seeing are both often wrong), nor
Lesson 8 (Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning.).
When
asked why he continued to aid LBJ in his escalation of the war, if he
philosophically disagreed with him, the former Secretary of Defense
(McNamara) gives what sounds chillingly like something we might have
heard in Nazi Germany from Himmler or Goebbels, saying, “It was my
responsibility to try to help him (LBJ) to carry out the office as he
thought was in the interests of our people.”
When
discussing Lesson #9 “(“In order to do good, you may have to engage in
evil.”) McNamara says, “Human beings must stop killing other human
beings. How much evil must we do to do good?” Yet we see
him lying to the press, as her returns from a trip to Vietnam, at a
time when he knew that “the frank answer is we don’t know what is going
on out there,” saying, instead, for public consumption, “The military
operation continues to show substantial progress.”
McNamara
is quoted as saying (November 1, 1967), “The course we’re on is totally
wrong. We’ve got to change it.” Yet, in regards to the bull-headed
Texas President, he says, “I love this man. I respect him, but he’s
totally wrong. At the end, Johnson and I found ourselves poles apart,”
adding, “Something had to give.”
What
“gave” was McNamara, as he was dismissed…followed not long after, on
March 31, 1968, by President Johnson’s public appearance on television
to say that he “would not seek, nor would he accept” his party’s
re-nomination as President. McNamara told Washington “Post” editor Kay
Graham, “To this day, I don’t know whether I quit or got fired.” To
which the popular editor said, with a laugh, “Oh, Mac. Of course you
got fired.”
After
that, there is a shot of LBJ awarding the departing McNamara the Medal
of Freedom, and McNamara becoming all choked up at the ceremony, to the
point of speechlessness. Indeed, at many points, he seems to
“tear up” and won’t touch the question of whether he feels “guilt” at
his involvement in the deaths of 58,000 American soldiers. (When he
left office, the nation had experienced 25,000 deaths…less than half of
the eventual total.) He becomes especially emotional when he describes
how Jackie Kennedy asked him to select the exact grave site at
Arlington for the dead President, her husband.
From his
vantage point as an elder statesman, Robert Strange McNamara says,
“What I’m doing is thinking it through in hindsight. We all make
mistakes. We all know we make mistakes.” And he quotes T.S. Eliot
tellingly: “We shall not cease from exploring and at the end of
exploration we shall return to where we started and know the place for
the first time.”
Copyright
2004 by Connie Corcoran Wilson, M.S. You may reproduce any or part of
this article, as long as you give proper attribution, and you may read
more of Connie Corcoran Wilson’s writing by ordering her book “Both
Sides Now” from the web-site www.ConnieCorcoranWilson.com.
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