The Fog of McNamara

One morning in November 1966, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara arrived at Harvard University for what he imagined would be a day of spirited but harmonious dialogue with students and a group of professors. Voluble discontent with the Vietnam War had been growing on college campuses over the previous months, and McNamara, a principal architect of the “Americanization” of the struggle in 1965, which saw the introduction of large-scale U.S. forces, was often the target of student protests. Still, he traveled to Harvard without a security detail.

As he stepped out of Quincy House after eating lunch with undergraduates, a mob of students surrounded McNamara, blocking his exit. As the crowd grew to several hundred, he managed to get to his car. He stepped onto the hood; someone handed him a microphone, and he agreed to answer questions. But he was overwhelmed by the jeering chorus of students. His temper rising, the defense secretary declared: “I spent four of the happiest years at the Berkeley campus doing some of the same things you are doing here. But there was one important difference: I was both tougher and more courteous. . . . I was tougher then, and I’m tougher now.” Protesters called him a “fascist” and a “murderer.”

Despite his defiant posture, McNamara was privately troubled by the state of the war, as he made clear in a closed-door session with professors later that day. “I don’t know of a single square mile of Vietnam that has been pacified,” he told them. “Many military men disagree with me on this, but no one has yet identified that square mile. When they try, I tell them that I’m going to get in a jeep—without a battalion escort—and ride through that area. Though some of them might like to see me try, none of them will let me. They wouldn’t ride through the area unescorted either.”

In the months thereafter, McNamara’s gloom deepened. His analysis of the situation convinced him that North Vietnam, a mostly rural society, could not be pummeled into submission by an air campaign. The ever-rising body counts, including mounting civilian deaths, distressed him. By the start of 1967, he felt sure that the enemy’s morale had not broken and that political stability remained far out of reach for the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam. Meanwhile, the war was undermining the United States’ domestic and international credibility, as allies and adversaries alike questioned Washington’s judgment.

“There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go,” McNamara wrote to President Lyndon Johnson in May 1967. “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”

Even then, McNamara kept the faith publicly, voicing confidence that victory could be achieved. But his days in the administration were numbered. In November, Johnson, fed up with McNamara’s disenchantment and his pleadings for a policy shift toward negotiations, announced that the defense secretary would depart the administration to lead the World Bank—in effect, firing him. By late February 1968, McNamara was gone. He was soon replaced by the Democratic Party insider Clark Clifford, who in short order reached the same grim perspective on the war’s prospects.

The drama of the Harvard visit and the developments in the months thereafter are deftly recounted in McNamara at War, Philip and William Taubman’s judicious and mostly convincing account of what is often called—understandably, if not altogether correctly—“McNamara’s War.” In the vast and growing literature on the war, in-depth studies of McNamara’s role in shaping the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam are surprisingly few despite McNamara’s dominance in the cabinet under Johnson and President John F. Kennedy and his seven-year tenure at the Pentagon. (He remains the nation’s longest-serving secretary of defense.) For years, historians have wondered when a big book on McNamara and Vietnam would arrive. Now it has.

It’s an extraordinary story in some ways—and in some ways deeply familiar. Other senior U.S. officials before McNamara and after him have felt pressure to stay on board, to keep quiet, to swallow their doubts in the hope that things will get better or that they can at least keep them from getting worse. To quit, meanwhile, would be to open themselves to charges of disloyalty or weakness or both. They could lose both their case and their honor. So they carry on, often to their later regret, not to mention the detriment of the country. If McNamara’s experience offers a core lesson, it is one that is simple to grasp but has too often gone unheeded: if more high-level officials were prepared to resign for their convictions, citizens would be assured that those who remain truly believe in what they’re doing.

BEST AND BRIGHTEST

The Taubmans are excellent on their subject’s formative years. Born in San Francisco in 1916 to a cold and aloof father and a striving, intense mother, McNamara demonstrated from an early age his intellectual prowess and his endless capacity for hard work. He excelled at every level of education, showing a keen analytical mind, a knack for numbers, and a singular talent for concision—classmates at Piedmont High marveled as he received A grades on papers far shorter than theirs. At the University of California, Berkeley, McNamara made Phi Beta Kappa in his sophomore year and became a member of the Order of the Golden Bear, a quasi-secret society dedicated to promoting leadership within the student body.

Following graduation in 1937, McNamara went on to Harvard Business School, blazing a path of such distinction that he was invited to join the faculty as an assistant professor of business administration soon after receiving his master’s degree. During World War II, he and several other management specialists were recruited by Robert Lovett, then assistant secretary of war for air, to bring precision and efficiency to the study of air force effectiveness in bombing operations. McNamara again stood out as indefatigable and disciplined, with superior analytical intelligence and a ravenous appetite for information.

After the war, McNamara joined the Ford Motor Company. Named company controller in 1949, he had risen to group vice president in charge of all car and truck divisions by 1957. On November 9, 1960, the same day Kennedy claimed victory in a closely contested presidential election, McNamara was named president of the company, becoming the first person from outside the Ford family to hold that position since 1906.

Within weeks of his win, Kennedy tapped McNamara to head the Department of Defense. In short order, McNamara became first among equals in Kennedy’s cabinet, winning plaudits for his use of systems analysis to make the Pentagon function more economically by reducing weapons redundancies among the services and better allocating resources. Appearing before congressional committees, he dazzled lawmakers with his intellect, his command of detail, and his crisp, authoritative style of presentation. Among aides, he inspired admiration and devotion, not least for his work ethic: subordinates who made a point of getting to work early would invariably find McNamara’s car already in the Pentagon garage.

As early as 1962, McNamara had begun to doubt South Vietnam’s prospects.

Senior military officers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were less enthused. To them, the hard-hitting style of McNamara and his “whiz kid” civilian aides, many of them plucked from the Rand Corporation or Ivy League schools, smacked of arrogance, as they presumed to lecture the services on how the Pentagon should operate. “He’s one of the most egotistical persons I know,” a top general complained to Time. The result, predictably, was frequent altercations with the chiefs, who clamored for more of everything and had grown accustomed to allying with lawmakers eager to procure defense contracts for their districts or states.

Yet McNamara triumphed in many of these power struggles, and in doing so put his stamp on the office to a greater extent than any secretary of defense before him or since. In addition to his efforts to reorganize the Pentagon, he was deeply involved in high-level national security and foreign policy matters. Alongside Kennedy, McNamara determined soon after taking office that nuclear weapons were essentially useless, and he expressed horror at the apocalyptic overkill of the new Single Integrated Operational Plan for waging nuclear war, which called for the president to launch thousands of nuclear weapons in the event of an armed conflict with the Soviet Union. He pressed for a more flexible doctrine, including the adoption of a “counterforce” strategy that would target Soviet missile sites rather than cities.

At the outset of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, McNamara shocked colleagues by asserting that the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba did not appreciably shift the nuclear balance. During the harrowing days that followed, he was not always consistent in his advocacy, but he remained a reasoned and prudent voice and an early proponent of the blockade that would ultimately defuse the crisis.

MILITARY CHARADE

It was Vietnam, however, that would forever define McNamara’s legacy in government. From the administration’s first days in 1961, he took a leading role in shaping U.S. support for South Vietnam. That fall, with the insurgency against the Saigon government gaining strength, General Maxwell Taylor and Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow returned from a fact-finding mission to Saigon to recommend sending more U.S. military advisers and a limited number of combat troops. McNamara initially endorsed the recommendation, but when Kennedy ruled out sending ground forces, the secretary quickly adopted that position as his own—not the last time, the Taubmans tartly note, that “he seemed to tailor his views about Vietnam to align them with his president’s.”

This would indeed become McNamara’s pattern in the years to come. And it raises a key question: How did McNamara perceive the conflict in the lead-up to the Americanization of the war in 1965? The authors depict McNamara and his fellow planners as true believers for the most part, “practically prisoners of a Cold War ideology that they felt required them to ‘defend freedom’ as well as American security in Vietnam.” McNamara at War refers to policymakers’ “misplaced confidence” through mid-1965 and their endorsement of the domino theory, the belief that the fall of even one Southeast Asian country to communism would cause neighboring states to follow suit. At home in the United States, meanwhile, the so-called Cold War consensus dictated that any leader deemed insufficiently vigilant regarding the global Soviet threat would pay a steep political price.

It’s a common enough interpretation of official thinking from 1961 to 1965, and it is in its way exculpatory: however problematic American officials’ assessment of the stakes in Vietnam might appear in hindsight, it was fully understandable, indeed overdetermined, in the context of the time. McNamara pushed back against the idea later in his life, but only to a degree. He wrote in 1999 that “leaders are supposed to lead, to resist pressures or ‘forces’ of this sort, to understand more fully than others the range of options and the implications of choosing such options.” He and his senior colleagues, beholden to their ideology, their hubris, and their ignorance of the motivations of both North and South Vietnam, failed to do this, he lamented.

What to make of this? McNamara at War, which draws on a rather limited selection of secondary and documentary sources, never fully interrogates high-level thinking in the key period of decision-making from the late summer of 1963 to March 1965, which I have elsewhere called “the long 1964.” (Like many authors, the Taubmans make much of the administration’s high-level discussions in July 1965; by then, however, the Americanization train had already left the station. By July, when Johnson gave the appearance of agonizing over whether to escalate, the decision to launch an air war and a surge in ground troops had already been made.)

Decades later, McNamara himself singled out the importance of this 18-month stretch. In his 1995 memoir In Retrospect, he wrote: “We could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam either in late 1963 . . . or in late 1964 or early 1965.”

What a close analysis of the vast internal record for the period reveals is that senior American planners were reasonably aware of the dynamics of the conflict and the obstacles to U.S. military success. They were, for the most part, somber realists. Late in life, McNamara would come to adopt the mantra “If only we had known,” but at the start of 1965, he in fact already had a solid grasp of the strength of the insurgency, of the chronic political instability in South Vietnam, and of the shallow support for the war at home and abroad. He and his colleagues knew that Democratic leaders in the U.S. Senate opposed expanding the American military commitment and that key allied powers such as Canada, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom questioned the conflict’s importance to Western security. Senior American officials themselves expressed private doubts on this score, suggesting that the domino theory had lost much of its grip, at least behind closed doors. Overall, the documentation gives little evidence of the hubris so often attributed to these men, first by David Halberstam in his classic work, The Best and the Brightest.

As early as 1962, McNamara had begun to doubt South Vietnam’s prospects in combating the insurgency, even with U.S. aid. Recordings of top-level meetings from October 1963 capture him telling colleagues, “We need a way to get out of Vietnam.” In early 1964, following Kennedy’s assassination, he voiced broad concerns to a recalcitrant Johnson. By 1965, he was more direct. In late June, as more American ground troops arrived in South Vietnam, McNamara confessed to a senior British official that “none of us at the center of things talk about winning a victory.”

Yet this same McNamara fully backed the U.S. ground-force commitment and was an architect of Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing campaign aimed at breaking Hanoi’s resolve—and bucking up Saigon’s—that began in March 1965 and would run for more than three years. To lawmakers and journalists that spring, he expressed full faith that the new measures were necessary and would yield success.

RESIGNED TO CONTINUE

The authors understand that one of their principal tasks is explaining the disconnect between McNamara’s private skepticism and his “baldly deceptive public reports on the conflict.” Looking back in his memoir, he wondered why he “did not force a probing debate about whether it would ever be possible to forge a winning military effort on a foundation of political quicksand.” Why indeed? Failing that, why did he not resign? Sheer personal ambition was surely part of it—McNamara treasured his position at the pinnacle of power, and keeping it required unstinting fealty to his boss, who vowed from his first days in office that he would not lose Vietnam. This was loyalty, but of a particular and misplaced kind, the Taubmans make clear: to the commander in chief rather than to principle or to the Constitution. McNamara’s rejoinder, that presidents deserve faithfulness from their aides, who are unelected and serve at the pleasure of the chief executive, was not so much wrong as it was insufficient.

Beyond loyalty, McNamara convinced himself that he could do more to restrain the Joint Chiefs and Johnson from within government than from without. As the war escalated, he pushed successfully for pauses in American bombing and for limits on the aerial assault on North Vietnam. His analysis of the data, together with his findings on his trips to the war zone, led him to a conclusion that many in the military disliked but today seems irrefutable: heavier bombing of the North would not result in anything approximating true “victory.”

Harder to credit is McNamara’s belief that the window for a political settlement remained open even as the U.S. military campaign escalated. He never fully acknowledged that from Hanoi’s viewpoint, any negotiated agreement would require an American withdrawal, leading in all probability to a takeover of the South by Hanoi. Nor did he reconcile his desire for compromise with Johnson’s lack of interest in exploring imaginative diplomatic ways out of the war. Undersecretary of State George Ball told colleagues that the White House was “following the traditional pattern for negotiating with a mule; just keep hitting him on the head with a two-by-four until he does what you want him to do.’’

MCNAMARA’S GHOST

As the Taubmans suggest, McNamara’s fundamental problem was that he could never absolve himself of his role in getting the United States mired in a large-scale, stalemated war of questionable merits. More than anyone other than Johnson, he was responsible. The result was that McNamara “could never honestly establish that he had, from the beginning, doubted the chances for victory,” Ball later observed. “Thus, to resign and go public could leave him with the sense that he had deceived the President and those colleagues with whom he had been working in an atmosphere of high confidence.” Moreover, he would be betraying the American soldiers risking life and limb in the jungle. So he hung on, month after bloody month, in the face of his own despondency and the disenchantment among those dear to him, including his teenage son, Craig, and Jacqueline Kennedy, with whom McNamara had developed a close friendship.

Ultimately, the final judgment of Robert McNamara’s role in the Vietnam War must be severe, less because he oversaw the early phases of American military intervention than because he didn’t act more forthrightly on his subsequent misgivings. Quite the contrary: in the crucial months spanning 1964 and 1965, he presented to the public and Congress the image of a man resolutely confident in the mission and the likelihood of victory.

In old age, McNamara despaired that his successors seemed disinclined to heed his hard-earned advice—about the need to empathize with one’s opponent and to question one’s assumptions; about the limits of military technology and U.S. geopolitical power; about the dangers of nuclear escalation. The Taubmans, too, feel this regret. “The lessons he derived from Vietnam,” they write sympathetically, “produced insights that, had they been taken into account by his successors, could have helped the United States avoid disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. The danger that unwavering loyalty to presidents on national security matters can lead to calamity should prove instructive to current and future commanders in chief.”

No doubt McNamara was, as the authors put it, a “fatally flawed figure” to deliver this message. But it matters that he delivered it. However belatedly and imperfectly, he did something that few public figures ever bring themselves to do: grapple with their misdeeds and try to atone for them. McNamara made the effort, reaching, ultimately, the only judgment he could: “We were wrong, terribly wrong.”