Reporter's notebook: McNamara and me
Robert McNamara in 1992 and Globe reporter Bryan Bender
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff
WASHINGTON -- To a reporter fresh out of college hired to cover the Pentagon for a little-known newsletter, Robert S. McNamara was nearly a mythical figure.
He was the vilified architect of the Vietnam War that had so shaped my parents' generation. The symbol of all the promise -- and hubris -- of the "whiz kids" of the Kennedy years, with his wire-rimmed glasses and slicked-backed hair peering out from those black-and-white photos. Also the man who helped bring us back from the brink during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when my mother was kept home from school fearing a nuclear holocaust.
But to my surprise after I arrived in Washington 15 years ago with virtually no experience, I found him a willing, if sometimes blunt, tutor in international affairs -- one who was generous with his time even for someone like me.
In a number of face-to-face discussions and many more lengthy phone conversations that grew warmer and more jocular over the years, his appetite for analyzing some of the nation's most pressing national security challenges was never satisfied. He also never lost his desire for information, often pumping me on what I was hearing from officials still on the inside.
At first he requested that nothing he said be quoted -- he was already too much of a lightning rod, he would say -- but after a while he agreed that I could use his name if I thought his perspective on a particular issue such as nuclear weapons or the pitfalls of managing the Pentagon bureaucracy were relevant to a story I was writing.
Of course, he didn't look anything like the buttoned-down former businessman that I had first expected. That was partly due to his age -- he was already near 80 when I first called him -- but also because of the disheveled, absent-minded professor look about him, his shirt untucked, his thinning hair unkempt.
A few times I ran into him near his office -- a stack of papers tucked under his arm -- as he was shuffling past the White House. Moving at a pretty good clip, his stooped, rumpled frame would wind through the throngs of tourists who paid him no mind. I would think: If only these people knew the imprint this little old man had on their national identity?
We had lengthy conversations about nuclear arms and what he saw as the folly of the continued reliance by the United States and Russia after the Cold War on a similar defense structure -- with thousands of missiles pointed at each other -- that he said was a recipe for an accidental nuclear war and only emboldened other countries to seek nuclear arms.
He was less forthcoming about Vietnam, which he knew was his undoing in the public eye, so I rarely pressed him on it. I soon learned that Vietnam was only the best-known chapter of his career anyway.
But he did sometimes open up -- like when I called him for a story during the 2004 presidential race about John F. Kerry's claims that atrocities were committed by US forces in Southeast Asia.
On that score, he was the direct ex-Ford Motor Co. chief who I had read about in high school, expressing surprise that people were actually still debating the issue.
"There were atrocities, without any question," he told me. "We had photographs of officers shooting innocent Vietnamese."
He was also animated when talking about the challenges facing the United States immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He voiced deep concerns about sending large numbers of conventional military forces to Afghanistan for any extended duration, citing the rout of the mighty Soviet army there during the 1980s. Like on other topics, he spoke from experience on that, too, having spent time in Afghanistan as head of the World Bank.
Sometimes he just relished the opportunity to tell old stories, such as how he became secretary of defense in the first place. President John F. Kennedy, he recalled, first offered the job of secretary of the treasury, but McNamara said he didn't think he had enough experience.
So then the president-elect asked him about the Pentagon job. When McNamara again demurred based on his lack of qualifications, Kennedy got frustrated. "Come on, Bob, there's no school for presidents, either." That's how it began, he would chuckle.
He also loved to tell the yarn about when he had to close either the Boston or Brooklyn Navy Yard in a Pentagon downsizing effort in the mid-1960s. So he called in the senators from those states, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Robert F. Kennedy of New York, and told the brothers to work it out.
The younger Kennedy, who had been in the Senate two years longer, pulled rank and the Brooklyn Navy Yard was no more.
The self-interest was certainly detectable when McNamara's unmistakably gruff voice would be on the other end of the phone. After all I was a reporter and McNamara was selling books, seeking consulting fees, and looking to burnish his statesmanship credentials to help balance out his villainous reputation.
But I saw another side: a man whose lifelong obsession was searching for the right solutions.
When I heard he passed away this morning at the age of 93 I couldn't help but think it was fitting that at the moment he died a US president was in Moscow seeking historic cuts in nuclear arms. Mac would have had a lot to say about that.
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His arrogance cost Thousand of American lives, and many thousands of Vietnamese lives.
He Insisted in interfering in a civil war By bombing Vietnam and supporting corrupt regimes.
USA's decline in the war started with this unjust war
How saddddd
Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
I look forwad to the Globe waxing poetic with such sentimental syrup about Don Rumsfeld when he passes away. I may be waiting quite a while...
And to think, people blame Nixon more for Vietnam than his intellectually arrogant autocrat...
He admitted he was wrong for what he created in Vietnam. However, he refused to take the public stands at the crucial moments which might have redeemed him. Saying your sorry is not the appropriate response when you know you created the war machine that killed two million impoverished people for nothing. He never found the bravery to reject his "insider" status. He'd been there right inside the belly of the beast from the beginning. He had a chance to step outside and speak truth to power. He didn't.
The two million people slaughtered in Vietnam happened AFTER U.S. forces left. We were there to stop that from happening. Just a bit of perspective.
What about the Presidents he served under, do they take the blame at all for Vietnam?
He prevented the mining of the the harbors...bombing the dykes...dstruction of the rail system, bridges, highways, etc. The war should have never lasted as long as it did. It should have lasted no longer than a month...anyone remember how Bush 41 bombed Bagdhad for 100 straight hours? The war was one in a week.
To the surviving Viet Nam vets, Welcome home. You never deserved to fight under that coward's command.
Typical Globe reporter -- taken in by one of the biggest egotistical monsters who ever lived. But trhe Globe likes him, ofcourse, because---that's right, he was a Kennedy man.
Whether for complicated reasons or moronic ones, sophistry and failed policies, like airplane crashes, are what they are, disasters.
During the Vietnam War, during which I served, wrongheadedness was raised to a high order of magnitude by McNamara and Systems Analysis at the Pentagon. Following McNamara's departure as SECDEF, the folly shifted to the White House.
Today, we are bogged down in another foreign policy disaster, Iraq. Only i this case it was right wing Republican zealotry, not thoughtful consideration of the facgts, that led us into the abyss.
Either way, the planes have crashed. To the dead, the reasons are unimportant. They are dead.
Somewhere in the depths of hell, there is a special place set aside for the likes of McNamara. Keep the place cozy, Bob! Rumsfled will be there soon enough!
Easy to play Monday morning quarterback forty plus years later dont ya think?
Heavy weighs the crown
There is lots of things we dont know
We probably sleep better not knowing
Was Mac perfect? No.
Can't wait to see what delightful situation our current administration gets us into... Of course you will say he was cleaning up 43's mess.
When in reality 43 was stuck with 42's unfinished mess.
If you dont know 43 + 42 mean you are probably reading the wrong section.
good night
Look at this! The late masters of the Universe, the Baby Boomers dancing on McNamara's grave. Let them. History will be harder on them than it will be to McNamara.
In the end, at least McNamara tried to fix his mistake, because he was a proud American, and that was what his duty demanded of him. He had the courage to call a spade a spade and admit Vietnam was wrong. The Boomers - unlike McNamara - never questioned their own ideological constructs - never were proud of America - and because they had no sense of sense of pride, no sense of decency, no sense of idealism, they had no will to do the right thing when it was both of transcending importance to do the right thing and it was overwhelmingly hard to do the right thing. So they took the easy way out - and followed their ideologies all the way to where they ended - in the grave of Iraq, Katrina, Torture, and the Financial Collapse of 2008.
McNamara was unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Rummy, and Wolfie - who were all too willing to trade liberty for security, gained neither, and lost both. McNamara was unlike the thousands of draft-dodgers in Vietnam who didn't take Thoreau's advice and promptly fled to Canada, or purposefully extended their stays in a university - rather than putting their money where their mouth was - and doing their duty to their country, but in a different way - by daring the government to throw them in prison, and willingly going, if that was what their ideals demanded of them.
Robert McNamara might have bumbled and stumbled the US into Vietnam. But he would never be caught dead with a water-board - or as a draft-dodger (rather than a conscientious objector) - simply because he was an American, and as an American, he knew such things WERE NOT DONE.
This guy was a Kennedy "scumbag" through and through. Thanks for killing all of our brothers, friends, and neighbors. The Globe must really be on the ropes, Ol' Joe Kennedy (made Madoff look like a choir boy) never would have allowed this to be printed in the 60's. The Boston Globe created the Three Stooges and now the Globe is going to die with Shemp
I recommend to all that you watch "The Fog of War" a documentary of Robert McNamara based on 20 hours of interviews in 2003. I think that McNamara is sometimes still hiding things, like the news about the "attack" on the U.S.S. Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson used that news to escalate US involvement in Vietnam, in the "Fog of War", you get to hear tapes of Johnson's desire to escalate the war when Kennedy was going to end it (according to McNamara, and even tapes from Kennedy's Cabinet meetings). Still, McNamara did generate sympathy from me: A war is meant to be won. I will say that stepping down in protest is appropriate if you see the whole picture, and it is corrupt.
So, this happens to affirm what Oliver Stone asserted in "JFK", that Kennedy was assasinated because the Military Industrial Complex was looking for war in Vietnam. Ever wonder why? Well, I just heard from a Vietnam veteran through another veteran that this Vietnam vet. had a choice assignment; guarding political and military convoys. This soldier and others like him were warned "never to fire upon anyone working at the Rubber Plantations". That's right, apparently Oil, Tungsten, Diamonds and Uranium are not the only resources worth sending good soldiers to die. Blame Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger (bad man), McNamara, and blame the Military Industrial Complex. The U.S. is Empire, watch it crumble like the Empires before it.
Find the truth watching Oliver Stone's hollywood conspiracy movie? Right
thanks for your story - a good read - puts a human face of the media character
Hey Bob, when you get out of purgatory, they're 58,000 of my buddies that want a word with you. Jarhead
Mac was wrong on Vietnam but he admitted it and and asked for forgiveness. I don't think he acted out of self interest or prejudice and so, as Catholic, I forgive him.