Never Again

Coincidentally yet appropriately, Robert McNamara’s middle name is Strange. From 1961 to 1967, as defense secretary in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he was the chief architect and principal promoter of America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam. He managed the war the way he had run the Ford Motor Co., his job before becoming a bureaucrat. Just as he had displayed balance sheets to demonstrate to his stockholders that the corporation was registering profits, he regularly exhibited maps, graphs, flip charts, assorted documents and reams of statistics to bolster his claim that we were making progress. But his performance was a sham. While publicly exuding optimism, he consistently warned in his private memos that the situation was deteriorating. Gradually, however, he started to express his pessimism publically, if informally.

I initially discerned the change in him in February 1966 at a conference in Honolulu, one of Lyndon Johnson’s periodic conclaves on the war. Though most of his colleagues radiated confidence, he invited a few reporters to his hotel suite for a rare background briefing. I had observed him during his buoyant days in Washington and was shocked by the transformation in his appearance. His face was grayer, his patent leather hair thinner and his voice lacked the strength it had when he had projected his rosy appraisals. The U.S. air offensive against North Vietnam launched the previous year would never succeed, he emphasized. An agrarian society could not be blasted into submission, he said with unaccustomed passion: “No amount of bombing can end the war.” In August 1967, he reiterated the thesis in closed hearings before a Senate subcommittee. His testimony enraged the hawkish brass and braid. Worse still, it infuriated Johnson, who circulated the word that McNamara was suffering from a nervous breakdown and ignominiously shunted him shortly afterward to the World Bank.

Following the conflict, McNamara lapsed into silence. Again and again, he refused requests by me and others for interviews. He also rejected the suggestion from friends that he write a memoir, claiming that it might sound “vindictive and self-serving.” Then, in 1995, he published “In Retrospect,” in which he confessed in an emotional outburst that he and his associates had been misguided or, as he put it: “We were wrong, terribly wrong.” Surprisingly, it was a bestseller. But apart from divulging his feelings, the cathartic mea culpa added virtually nothing of value to the vast body of Vietnam literature. It conspicuously omitted any apology for his duplicitous rhetoric during the war; far more important, his remorse offered cold consolation to the nearly 60,000 American and estimated 2 million Vietnamese families whose sons, brothers and husbands died in the conflagration. Democratic Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, a severely wounded veteran, evoking a sarcastic GI phrase dating to Vietnam, commented that the book ought to have been captioned, “Sorry ‘Bout That.”

Still, Vietnam continued to obsess McNamara. He had organized a series of symposiums in Moscow and Havana in 1989 and 1992 to reexamine the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and calculated that a similar endeavor would shed new light on the Vietnam experience. I suspect that his goal was, once again, to cleanse his conscience by showing that both protagonists in the tragedy were responsible. But whatever his motive, he mobilized a team of American scholars and former civilian and military officials, and he brought them together with their Vietnamese and communist counterparts in an effort to reassess the war from their respective angles. The prestigious Council on Foreign Relations declined to collaborate on the grounds that it did not want to salvage McNamara’s tarnished reputation. The two groups conducted seven sessions in Hanoi and at a center in Italy between November 1995 and July 1998, and their discussions spawned this volume, “Argument Without End.” Much of it resembles a Harold Pinter play in which the characters speak to each other in oddly disjointed dialogue. Even so, it contains nuggets that make it worthwhile reading.

The meetings opened with predictable fanfare as McNamara shook hands with Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the legendary commander of the Communist forces. The purpose of McNamara’s venture was to explore the misperceptions on both sides that had led to the conflict, but Giap spurned him. “I don’t believe we misunderstood you,” he responded. “You were the enemy; you wished to defeat us. . . . For us the war was a noble sacrifice . . . for our cause of freedom and independence. There were no missed opportunities for us. . . . I think we would do nothing different, under the circumstances.” McNamara’s only reply was a lame, “Well, General, I hope you’ll agree to put issues like that--our mind-sets, yours and ours--on the agenda.”

The rest of their conversation was equally peculiar. Until then, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, McNamara had maintained that communist patrol boats had twice attacked American destroyers cruising off North Vietnam in August 1964--the Tonkin Gulf incident used by Johnson to gain authority from Congress to deploy U.S. troops in Southeast Asia. He recanted, however, when Giap told him that the first assault had been triggered by a local officer and that the second never occurred. But, as though to score a debating point, McNamara stubbornly denied that the destroyers were intimately linked to a clandestine intelligence mission--a version that strains credulity.

Little in McNamara’s marathon, often convoluted recapitulation of events is not already well known to Vietnam specialists--and, of course, to the Vietnamese themselves. Reaching back decades, he conceded that Presidents Truman and Eisenhower had erroneously supported France’s futile crusade to reestablish its colonial rule in Indochina. He disavowed the “domino theory,” which held that the fall of Vietnam would spark the collapse of countries elsewhere in Asia and even in the Middle East. Above all, he admitted that the United States had been mistaken to regard communism as a global monolith and Ho Chi Minh as a pawn of Moscow. But he sought to justify America’s growing commitment to protect South Vietnam by recalling that Kennedy had been alarmed in 1961 by the Bay of Pigs catastrophe, by the erection of the Berlin Wall and by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s strident threat to spur “national liberation” movements throughout the world and was hence determined to stand firm in Southeast Asia.

In contrast to McNamara’s familiar narrative, however, the Vietnamese participants provided some fresh insights that explain their behavior in the struggle against America. Prime among them was their bitter memory of the Geneva conference of 1954. They had just crushed the French at the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu and felt that their dramatic triumph entitled them to be granted control of all Vietnam. Instead, their Soviet and Chinese comrades, whose priorities at that juncture were to improve their relations with the West, compelled them to acquiesce to a partition pending nationwide elections scheduled for 1956. They expected to win the elections, as did almost every other expert. But South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, with U.S. backing, reneged on the exercise and, frustrated, they embarked on the insurgency that eventually intensified into a full-scale war. Nor, in the future, would they trust diplomacy as the avenue to a peaceful settlement--an attitude that subsequently accounted for their repeated reluctance to enter into negotiations. Looking back on that pivotal period, Luu Doan Huynh, one of the Vietnamese at the meetings, bluntly said: “The Geneva Agreement was a disaster for us.”

The Vietnamese further revealed that in 1962, after the major powers hammered out an accord to create a neutral government in neighboring Laos, they considered it to be a possible model for an analogous regime in South Vietnam. They were prepared to include Diem, representatives of the Viet Cong and others in the Saigon coalition and to tolerate it for as long as 10 or 20 years. But it is highly doubtful that either Kennedy or Johnson would have endorsed such an arrangement, which they saw as merely the first step toward a communist takeover. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk remarked at the time: “This kind of neutralism . . . is tantamount to surrender.” Indeed, it was partly out of fear that Diem might strike a deal with the communists that Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, acting with Kennedy’s approval, conspired with a cabal of South Vietnamese army officers to oust him in November 1963.

An interesting detail to emerge from the colloquium was the extent to which Viet Cong units operated autonomously. One morning in February 1965, for instance, they raided an isolated garrison near Pleiku, in the rugged mountains of central Vietnam, killing eight Americans. Assuming that the communists were escalating the war, Johnson began the bombing campaign against North Vietnam that would go on for the next 2 1/2 years. But Gen. Dang Vu Hiep, who as a young officer had been engaged in the attack, disclosed to the seminar that it was ordered by his commander rather than from the leadership in Hanoi. Nor had the guerrillas been aware that there were Americans at the outpost or that their move might spark the reaction it did. Would that knowledge have deterred Johnson? Probably not. By then he and the communists were on an inexorable collision course.

Since the ultimate, agonizing debacle in April 1975, analysts have speculated on whether the outcome in Vietnam could have been different. But Col. Herbert Schandler, a historian present at the gathering, furnishes the simple answer in single sentence in the final chapter in the book: “The achievement of a military victory by U.S. forces was . . . a dangerous illusion.” Though equipped with the latest in technological weapons, the United States was confronted by intrepid, resilient adversaries inspired by an implacable nationalistic spirit born of centuries of resisting invaders and willing to accept horrendous casualties to fulfill their objective--a Vietnam reunified under their auspices. Thus the war was essentially unwinnable and its lesson, which McNamara unfortunately fails to articulate, can be summed up succinctly: “Never again.”