
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 19, 1995                   TAG: 9504200042
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CYNICISM

AS A GENRE, political memoirs tend to make fascinating reading on a level with junk mail and telephone directories. This is particularly so of those that eschew juicy anecdotes and salacious gossip in favor of revisiting policy issues.

But the memoir of Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense in the 1960s and an architect of the war in Vietnam, is proving an exception. Twenty years after the fall of Saigon, it turns out, public emotions still run high. And why not? The conflict changed the course of history. It also ended the lives of tens of thousands of young Americans, and disrupted to varying degrees the lives of many more. The toll of Vietnamese dead, North and South, numbers in the millions.

Of interest is McNamara's belief that John Kennedy would have avoided Lyndon Johnson's commitment of U.S. ground troops to Vietnam. McNamara, who served under both presidents, is in as good a position as anyone to say, though it's the sort of thing nobody can know with absolute certainty.

Also of interest is McNamara's enumeration of the misinformation, misjudgments and erroneous assumptions on which the failed policy was based. McNamara's title is "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam." Certainly, in retrospect, the policy that fueled escalation of the U.S. stake in (and consequent costliness of) the war was a blunder.

Yet what's chilling about all this is McNamara's acknowledgment that the folly of Vietnam policy became evident not only in retrospect but also while the war was being fought - and not only to the war's avowed opponents, but also to policy-makers like himself. Mistakes are inevitable. Refusing to try hard enough to correct a blunder when recognized as such is harder to forgive. Had he publicly dissented during the war, it might have made a difference.

In some ways, McNamara continues to miss the point. As a Cabinet officer, his love of business-management charts and statistics was obsessive to the point of tragicomic. Even now, as one observer has noted, McNamara writes as if Vietnam were an intellectual problem rather than a real place.

The book, McNamara writes, is mainly a product of his having "grown sick at heart witnessing the cynicism and even contempt with which so many people view our political institutions and leaders." That's worth worrying about. The irony is that McNamara, in coming clean, is vividly reminding Americans of a big part of why the cynicism took root.

by CNB