THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, April 13, 1995 TAG: 9504130002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
Now he tells us.
Nearly 32 years too late, former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara has written in a memoir to be published soon that we should have withdrawn from South Vietnam in late 1963, after the assassination of that country's president, or a year or so later.
The American death count would have remained under 100, instead of soaring past 58,000; we would have avoided the moral stain of killing 1,000 noncombatants a week in the protracted war.
But McNamara pushed so hard for the war's escalation in the key years 1964 and 1965 that it became known as ``McNamara's War.''
It was a war that brilliant, tough, can-do civilians like McNamara thrust on the military, which then was forced to fight with one arm tied behind its back and with no clear definition of victory. Although it was a ``limited-objectives'' war, the dead were just as dead, and loved ones mourned as deeply, as if it had been all-out. The war turned parents against their children and citizens against their government. The damage to this nation and Southeast Asia is beyond calculation.
McNamara stole away from government in 1968 to head the World Bank, privately convinced the war was unwinnable, but too much the moral coward and ambitious climber to tell the public the truth straight out. So Nixon and Kissinger continued the bloody war several years more.
McNamara was a top executive at Ford Motor Co. before John F. Kennedy lured him to be secretary of defense. At Ford, McNamara was known as the ``human robot,'' according to his famous understudy, Lee Iacocca.
In The Reckoning, a book by David Halberstam about the Ford and Nissan car companies, McNamara is presented as a person who loved numbers but not cars, and who used statistics to impress and bully others. ``There were, it was believed, few honest answers given at Ford during McNamara's years,'' Halberstam wrote, ``because there were few honest questions.''
That was the story of Vietnam. The government refused to ask honest questions, and further, it labeled all those who did as unpatriotic. Dissenters were told they didn't have all the facts.
McNamara, 78, wrote in his memoir, titled In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, ``I deeply regret that I 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.'' That debate was conducted, but he ignored it at first, while asking the questions that would elicit answers showing everything was swell.
Now he writes, ``We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.''
He's still wrong. The explanation is owed to present generations, to the parents whose children were killed, to wives whose husbands were killed, to the millions whose lives were disrupted for years by the draft, and especially to those still physically and mentally wounded by the war that McNamara now says was a mistake and to the millions of citizens whose faith in the wisdom and integrity of Washington was betrayed.
We trust that Mr. McNamara will donate all proceeds from his book to Vietnam-veterans groups. It's the least he should do. by CNB