Here. I didn’t find a thread on this, but my search-fu is not the best. The architect of the Vietnam War lived until 93, which seems somehow wrong, given the wasted lives that were a result of his grand scheme. I feel a bit of closure with his passing, but little sympathy for his late life regrets.
I try hard not to take joy in the death and suffering of others, but for McNamara I just might make an exception.
I been Norman Mailered, Maxwell Taylored.
I been John O’Hara’d, McNamara’d…
– A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission)
Robert McNamara is the embodiment of Failign Upward.
As head of Ford Motors, he produced the Edsel. He should have been a laughingstock, but instead, JFK looked at him and thought, “THAT’S the kind of man who should run the Defense Department.”
As Defense Secretary, he was architect of the Vietnam War. He SHOULD have been unemployable forever, but the World Bank looked at him and said, “THAT’S the man to finance the development of the Third World.”
Aa head of the World Bank, he put billions into dictators’ Swiss bank accounts, while impverishing their countries.
I’m just happy there are no other big promotions he could have been up for.
While McNamara certainly deserves some blame for Vietnam, after seeing The Fog of War, I have a great deal of sympathy for him. The Bush Administration should have required this of all its members.
McNamara opposed the Edsel during his time at Ford. His big project was the Ford Falcon, which sold like gangbusters. And, for what it’s worth, he didn’t become President of Ford until 1960. The Edsel was produced in '58, '59, and '60.
As far as his career as SecDef, he (along with the rest of the RAND people) deserves credit for his development of systems analysis, and the attempt to bring cost analysis and rationality into the operation of the government. He also deserves a lot of credit for developing our limited war capabilities.
Agreed. I give him a lot of credit for admitting that US carpet bombing in WW2 was a war crime, pure and simple. And McNamara bears only a small part of the blame for Vietnam. Ultimately the buck stopped with LBJ. At a larger level the blame for Vietnam lies with an ideological climate where any moderation was attacked as a repeat of the Munich appeasement and where military force alone, divorced from political context, was considered a highly effective instrument of statecraft. Pretty similar of course to the ideology that produced the Iraq fiasco.
And the Falcon was the basis of Iococca’s Mustang. McNamara was a war criminal, but as a mitigating factor, he admitted it and tried to help people learn from it.
What was the line that he said? Something like “Doing the right thing is easy. It’s knowing what the right thing is that isn’t easy.”
Yeah, same here. That was a great documentary.
If blithe ignorance were York Peppermint Patties we’d be in the middle of another ice age after this post. First of all, McNamara did pretty much everything he could to quash Edsel, or at least make it just a clone of standard Ford chassis. He wanted to fold the marquee brands into a single brand for economy-of-scale commonality. McNamara’s biggest claim to fame at Ford was the promotion of the Ford Falcon, a car that was sneered upon by the automotive engineers as bland and uninteresting but was actually a remarkable success from both a profit and sales perspective, and that also implemented a number of safety features that had yet to be adopted by the automotive manufacturers. McNamara was certainly not responsible for or supportive of the disastrous styling that was the Edsel’s biggest hangnail. Next you’ll want to complain about how McNamara promoted the T-Bird.
The record clearly shows that while Robert McNamara publicly supported planning for the Vietnam war effort in line with Lyndon Johnson’s executive direction, he repeatedly expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the war effort to the President and the JCS, particularly the cost of the war effort and the very limited insight that the United States had in regard to Vietnam. While some of his statements in The Fog of War were disingenuous (he knew full well that Kennedy had offered at least tacit approval for the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem) there is no question that he was at worst ambivalent about widening the war in Vietnam. The war was hardly McNamara’s grand scheme; Johnson was empathetic about pursuing what he viewed as the threat of encroaching Communism in Southeast Asia (even though it lacked any strategic significance beyond the availability of cinnamon) both while McNamara was SecDef and after his resignation, and it is worth noting that the predecessors to both McNamara and Johnson widened the war even further.
Surely this is some kind of parody of baiting trollism, non? During McNamara’s tenure he shifted the World Bank from absentee funding of misguided large infrastructure projects (which did funnel money into fraudulent schemes) and toward public health, education, and poverty abatement. He increased funding manyfold (albeit by issuing bonds on the global market that ultimately increased the debt load of the Third World) and instituted systems that provided a high degree of transparency and accountability without ideological emphasis. His successors, Alden Clausen and Barber Conable, undid much of this, focusing on debt servicing, ideological support, and ‘streamlining’ the internal economies of debtor nations to provide raw materials at below market value in order to pay their debts at the expense of maintenance of education and public health efforts.
There is plenty you can criticize McNamara for, but the above statements are so far beyond mere ignorance that they venture into desperate clinging aspersion with no basis in fact.
Stranger
So, Macnamara was a real standup guy? He knew that the USA was moving into a massive war, which would consume enormous resources and thousands of lives. Instead of doing the honorable thing (resigning and denouncing this absurd policy) he went along with it and served all of Johnson’s insane whims.
Sounds like the actions of a “good Nazi”.
Myself, I would urge people who view McNamara negatively without having seen The Fog of War to watch The Fog of War. Errol Morris does an impressive job. You may still view McNamara negatively but possibly a little more sympathetically.
I’d debate you on this topic, but honest debate presumes informed argumentation on both sides. I don’t believe that exists here.
Stranger
Stranger, I can’t claim to be widely read on McNamara, although I have read numerous articles about him over the years, Barbara Tuchman’s book The March of Folly, and a half-dozen retrospective articles and reminisences by his peers and critics so far this week. It’s my imression that McN did indeed harbor the doubts you describe, but not at first – that he came to his ambivalence about the war late, and reluctantly, after dismissing and belittling the opinions of many others, including Asia experts. If that’s indeed the case, I can understand that people are unwilling to give him much credit for the eventual conversion.
Heh. “I’ve been Phil Spectored, resurrected…” certainly takes on different overtones nowadays, doesn’t it? 