Posted on 08/05/2009 6:07:59 PM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
His lack of integrity was deeply troubling, but it was the world-class arrogance that did the real military damage.
It should be evident to all that Robert S. McNamara, to paraphrase a line from the 1940 book Guilty Men, was among the worst selections for high office since Caligula chose to make his horse a consul at Rome. He died July 6 at age 93. Today’s officials can profit from studying his career.
McNamara, the Pentagon chief in the Kennedy and Johnson years, showed sketchy character on many occasions, but nowhere did he do this more baldly than in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. My predecessor, John T. Correll, dissected it in an editorial, “The Confessions of Robert S. McNamara.” I cannot improve upon it. He wrote:
“Robert S. McNamara could give duplicity a bad name. In his new memoir, ... he says that the Vietnam War was a mistake and that he knew it all along. We should have gotten out in 1963, when fewer than 100 Americans had been killed. When he and other US policymakers took us to war, they ‘had not truly investigated what was essentially at stake.’
“McNamara was Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968 in the Kennedy Administration, which led the US into the Vietnam adventure, and in the Johnson Administration, which widened the involvement to a war in which 58,000 American troops died. He was not some star-crossed functionary who went passively along with a policy he opposed. He was so fiery an advocate that Vietnam became known as ‘McNamara’s War.’ His actions then and his statements now cannot be reconciled with honor.
“The duplicity has another dimension. News accounts bill In Retrospect as a stark admission of guilt, but an actual reading of it tells a different story. McNamara does, to be sure, acknowledge that he and his colleagues were ‘wrong, terribly wrong,’ but the admissions account for relatively little of the book’s substance. The bulk of it explains how these were honest mistakes and not altogether the fault of McNamara and his friends.”
Correll went on to point out a startling blind spot in the book:
“Somehow, it is not altogether surprising that McNamara comes close to ignoring the rank and file of the US armed forces. In the entire book, there are just four brief instances, one of them in a footnote, when the troops cross his mind. The best he can bring himself to say for those killed in action is that ‘the unwisdom of our intervention’ does not ‘nullify their effort and their loss.’ ”
Damning as these passages are, it is what comes next that most clearly spotlights McNamara’s biggest failing. Correll wrote:
“McNamara never learned the real lessons of the war. In Retrospect ticks off ‘11 major causes for our disaster in Vietnam,’ but they run mostly to philosophical mush like, ‘We misjudged then—as we have since—the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries,’ and, ‘We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions.’
“Incredibly, McNamara recalls—but regards it as insignificant—that the service Chiefs told him in 1964 that the US had not defined a ‘militarily valid objective for Vietnam.’ With similar arrogance, McNamara continues to believe that his strategic and tactical abilities were better than those of the military professionals and that his micromanagement of the war was a good idea.”
In short, his lack of integrity was deeply troubling, but it was the world-class arrogance that did the real military damage.
Many have testified to the pervasiveness of this arrogance. One who experienced it up close and personal was Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, USAF Chief of Staff in the years 1961-65. LeMay was the greatest combat commander the Air Force had ever produced, yet it counted for little in the lounges of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Warren Kozak, author of a new biography, LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay, notes that, “Robert McNamara had very clear ideas of what he wanted to do at the Pentagon. ... He was determined to take control.”
Faced with such brash confidence, LeMay and the Chiefs didn’t have much of a chance. McNamara killed key service programs. He halted the supersonic B-70 bomber that was LeMay’s top priority. The Pentagon chief forced on the Navy and the Air Force the dual-service TFX—later F-111. Most especially, LeMay quarreled with McNamara over the latter’s embrace of “gradualism” in Vietnam. LeMay was proved right.
The New Frontiersman saw little reason to consult with the Chiefs. They “sensed this and felt that Kennedy and the people under him simply ignored the military’s advice.” LeMay was “especially incensed” when McNamara brought in a group of young statisticians as a buffer between him and the military. LeMay referred to them with the dismissive term “whiz kids.”
“These young men, who seemed to have the President’s ear, ... exuded a sureness of their opinions that LeMay saw as arrogance,” writes Kozak. They made decisions with a startling self-assurance.
Today, some call such obvious decisions “no-brainers.”
This grated on LeMay, writes Kozak. “As LeMay approached almost everything in his life with a feeling of self-doubt,” he says, “he was actually surprised when things worked out well. Here, he saw the opposite—inexperienced people coming in absolutely sure of themselves and ultimately making the wrong decisions with terrible consequences.”
Syndicated columnist Richard Reeves, in a July 11 dispatch, called McNamara “possibly the smartest fool ever to serve at the highest level of government in the United States.” Part of that “unwisdom,” to use McNamara’s term, flowed from his arrogance—his firm belief that he already knew all the answers. As we said, today’s officials can profit from studying McNamara’s career.
There are entire schools breeding each entire classes of mini McNamars. Harvard and Yale to name two.
Basically, the more educated into stupidity a youth is, the more he/she needs a tour as a infantry grunt, or some other esteem,,,’testing’...education, rather than the little mono cultured hot houses of academia.
This may not be very collaborative but I tend to think the rabid contempt for McNamara is the beginning of the Left’s departure from global reality.
It is at this point that the Left begins to generically employ a traiterous rhetoric of ‘American war fighter’ is the worst person the Earth has ever known.
I think McNamara might have been weak but it seems so obvious that he was not the worst person ever. The hyperbole so regularly directed at him and now all associated with the Iraq war seems to be a function of efforts to insulate ourselves from how bad the world is.
The ugly reality is that Communists and various iterations of radical statism are profoundly evil and malicious to the general human condition. These radical statists are determined and difficult to overcome but the confrontation with them is inevitable.
The psychological retreat into a world where re-considering our domestic choices causes the enemy to vaporize as a fiction created by our own flawed internal characters remains a steady feature of the left.
It also seems that this radical neo isolationist world did permeate McNamara in the end of it all and lead him to reconfigure himself as someone who “knew” the war was always lost. He had to because — nothing is worse than War according to the neo isolationist Left.
Its plainly ridiculous, but it seems to be where we are.
Another reason I so deeply admire Bush. He stared right into the pathological derangement of this Movement and said, I will not withdraw but instead choose to escalate the war. That so infuriated this ridiculous movement and yet proved thus far— to be brilliant.
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I can only add: our neighborhood nice guy, carted off to fight in “McNamara’s War” woke up in a rice paddy with both his boots (and legs) lying next to him, his body made useless, his brain and hearing destroyed and when he came home the demonstrators mocked his disabling injuries and spat on him. He died in a great deal of agony after drinking what remained of himself to death.
I hope McNamara gets to play General for an eternity of unwisdom.
This happened because the F-111 was built in LBJ's backyard, Fort Worth, Texas. The B-70, made by a company based in California, didn't stand a chance.
McNamara was first and foremost a bean counter, and I mean that in a very derogatory way. It was he and his whiz kids who were responsible for the early problems with the M-16 and resulting deaths. It was he who dictated the same B-52 bombing tactics day in and day out. Every raid was flown the same pattern every time, and North Vietnamese missiles were stationed accordingly. He’s dead and not a great loss either.
He was arrogant, and he thought he was smarter than he actually was - a very dangerous combination - just like our current president.
Yes, I’m thinking of a Dante’s Inferno scenario where he has to fight in a hopeless battle, be horribly wounded, come back to people who spit on him at the airport, and take a week to die painfully in a hospital bed...over and over again.
This is exactly the type of people who are running our government today. There’s a few brilliant people sprinkled among layer upon layer of stunning incompetence. They might be somewhat OK if they knew they have no business running everything, but their egos won’t let them think it for a second.
I remember in 1968 going to Chu Lai (after the Tet Offensive) to conduct a raid in the DMZ to establish that the North Vietnamese were occupying it in force. Of course we on the ground perhaps 500 meters away did not notice this, but a few fat fellows with various devices came and assured us that they had electronic documentation that this was so, and the orders to violate the DMZ to prove it came down from on high. Three Arc Lights (B-52 strikes) were delivered as the initial prep. Considerable artillery and five dozen tanks followed that up with further prep fire. A reinforced battalion of Marines was helilifted into the area where the hostiles were supposed to be. The subsequent sweep found nothing at all. The fat fellows went away. This was about what you’d expect any time McNamara or the DC political crowd intruded on operations. May McNamara rest in peace wherever he should repose for eternity. I suspect, however, that he will merit no more respect in the hereafter than he would ever get from me. Smart asses are not worth much, sez I. So burn, baby, burn as you and your sort were so fond of saying back then.
My personal wish is that McNamara is burning in hell and I will be glad when Ted Kennedy joins him.
The thought of McNamara writing that self-deceiving memoir makes me want to scream. His passive memories only contribute to the disgust I feel for his moral blindness and disregard for the Americans he immolated on the altar of his power.
There was a competition to replace the M-38A1 Jeep. Willis won the competition, hands-down, but Ford, MacNamara's old employer, got a sweetheart deal to provide the vehicles dirt cheap as long as they were never resold, but torched.
The 4-wheel, independent suspension was designed without thought to what would happen when too sharp a turn occurred. The M-38 and M-38A1 would give the operator a warning, but the M-151 just folded the inside wheels under and executed a snap roll, killing the occupants instantly.
But, all that mattered was that MacNamara took care of his old employer!
There's always McNamara's Project 100,000, aka the New Standards Program, requiring the branches to accept a defined number of recruits and draftees who wouldn't normally meet physical or mental standards. So as not to deprive them of serving. Some good sites out there with extensive details of the program and results, none significant, but I can't find them in a quick search.
*ping*
nathanbedford wrote: “In contemplating McNamara’s arrogance, indeed the arrogance of the whole of the Kennedy administration which so seduced the media, the parallels to the Obama administration fairly leap off the page at us.”
..... Oh, indeed they do.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. "Mac" and his "Whiz Kids" over-rode Eugene Stoner's design requirements, eliminating the chrome lined chambers and bolts, and since there was LOTS of surplus powder available, changed the ammunition powder standard as well. What we wound up with was a weapon designed to very close tolerances, firing cartridges with dirty powder, guaranteed to foul the bolt and chamber, yet the weapon had no way to force the bolt into battery... And they actually shipped the weapons into the war zone WITHOUT cleaning kits! And it wasn't like you could just "borrow" the cleaning kit from an M-14 (7.62mm) to clean your M-16 (5.56mm) - the cleaning rod and brushes simple wouldn't fit in the bore!
I wonder how many American deaths were the direct result of Mac's arrogance?
Mark
We borrowed heavy from the Germans for the M-60 GP machine gun and the M-39 20mm cannon, plus?
I really have been impressed with the original German assault rifle, Sgwt/MP 44.?*
*Knowing someone will be along to correctly ID with correct name for it - FR rocks!
Lots of lessons here, but Hayek’s book comes to mind: THE Fatal Conceit. LeMay had the right attitude.
Thanks for this post.
I lived in the WDC area when McMnamara was still alive.
Every time I was in the downtown area, I kept a sharp eye out for him — I was hoping to see that a$$hole walking down the street.
Had I laid eyes on him, I was going to punch his lights out, old man or not. One shot — all I wanted was one shot — to express my rage and fury for all of his major screw-ups while SECDEF. And to partially avenge the Vietnam WIAs, KIAs and MIAs.
58,000 good Americans died because that miserable sonofabitch made one bad decision after another, and no one successfully called him on it.
I could go on and on, but I won’t, except to say that if I ever come across his grave, I’m gonna pi$$ on it! It will be real soggy, but I’m gonna pi$$ on it anyway!
My water will not put out the fires of Hell that surely are tormenting him for eternity, but I will feel much better for doing it!
58,000 +
and turning it into this
I see Macnamara spending his time in purgatory detailed to cleaning latrines.
Don’t blame it all on MacNamara. He was the typ who sucked up to his superiors, so a lot was simply staying in good with LBJ.
As the wife of an Air Force pilot,who was killed in SE Asia in the mid 60's I followed politics carefully. We lived in Texas when Kennedy was assassinated and there was no lack of information in that state. Before I go any further I would like to know how old you were when he was killed. I suspect you are under 65,am I correct?
Actually, I was trying to say that it was the Kennedy administration which seduced the media, not necessarily the arrogance of the administration which did the seduction. There were many things that we did not know about the administration when I was in college. We did not know that John F. Kennedy was clearly addicted to narcotics administered by his own Michael Jackson like Doctor was even called, "Doctor FeelGood." We did not know about his serial philandering which can only be described as compulsive in nature and which clearly left America open to blackmail by the Soviets. We did not fully know to what degree of the election fraud committed in Chicago and along the Texas border propelled him and Johnson into office. We did not know of the attempts to assassinate Castro or the eavesdropping of Martin Luther King Jr. We did not know of the level of Kennedy' s incompetence in the Vienna summit with Premier Khrushchev. But the media did know much more of these things than they reported and much of what they did not know, they did not want to know. One need only parade the name, Ben Bradlee, to support that proposition.
It is not necessary to draw the parallels to the media's reaction to the Obama administration.
Kennedy was sold to us as near genius who could speed read, in fact he could not speed read. He was sold to us as an intellectual who wrote a Pulitzer prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage. In fact it was no doubt ghostwritten. He was given credit for speeches which he read but did not write. That is not unusual, but that media told us that this was his work product, the product of a superior human being. In his inaugural address, he told us that there was a new generation taking over, implying that this new generation was somehow superior to the one it superseded. They called it the "New Frontier" implying some sort of robustness and vigor possessed exclusively by the intellectuals and brilliant young minds being imported into the new administration.
While your husband served in Southeast Asia, Kennedy dithered over the role of America in fighting communism, especially in Vietnam. As a result of his lack of clarity of vision, the war was permitted to escalate and grow out of control. He greenlighted the coup against Diem and might even have authorized his murder. That resulted in a rapid disintegration of the situation.
Today, those trying to uphold the bogus myth of "Camelot" are trying to airbrush Kennedy's actions in Vietnam, in Vienna, against Castro, and the quid pro quo which Kennedy gave the Soviets to end the Cuban missile crisis.
My thesis on the Kennedy administration is that it differs from Obama's in that Kennedy's faith was in his own brilliance, "election", and typical liberal feelings of general superiority. Republicans were either greedy capitalists or unwashed rednecks. Obama's faith is it not just in his own brilliance but in the moral superiority and the historical inevitability of his Marxist worldview. Kennedy was able to learn something from the debacle of the Bay of Pigs because, although he was a seducer and an opportunist, he was also a pragmatist when it came to his own survival. It is not clear that Obama's epistemology will permit them to learn anything repugnant to his Marxism.
Most of the damage done by the likes of Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy was done by them in the Johnson administration but the sense of superiority and "election" is endemic to the left and found flower in the Kennedy administration.
I remember vividly the Cuban missile crisis and the Kennedy assassination which occurred while I was in college. I never believed the myth of Camelot but I never was concerned that it meant the end of the Republic or the and of my constitutional liberties or the end of the liberties of my child who was to be born only a few months after the assassination. The Obama administration combines all of the bad elements of the Kennedy/Johnson administration and puts them on steroids.
What most older people (well, older conservatives) know is that more education does not necessarily equal wisdom. Applies greatly to the current White House inhabitant and his cronies.
I’ve heard the phrase that, “ Some things are so stupid, that you have to be educated to believe them”.
I think a majority of youths who pursue only academic, ticket punching, grade gaming get a bad education.
Academics is not reality.
LBJ was dead by the time I got to WDC — McNamara was “available!”
For the record, I had a lower opinion of LBJ than I did of McNamara, and I didn’t much like him, as you already know!
A most excellent post! Thank you.
As you noted, our real enemy probably in the media, for, putting it kindly, presenting Democrat administrations in a better light than Republicans.
Recent history is rife with examples of this bias, and I need not elaborate.
The government run media certainly is not telling the truth about this Obamanation, and their loss of readership/listenership and revenues is testimony to that reality.
The difference this time around is the Internet, which I liken to being the modern day equivalent of the handbills and Paine’s “Common Sense” of the Revolutionary War era.
The Internet will provide We the People the means and motivation to mobilize against Obozo and his Fascist thugs.
We are in a place in America today in which virtually every institution has been co-opted by the left. The infiltration is broad and deep and not one major institution has escaped. Our great universities, our teaching methods down through kindergarten, our great charitable foundations, our courts and the guilds such as the American Bar Association associated with the courts, the establishment churches, like the United Church of Christ, the Girl Scouts, the League of Women Voters, Hollywood, the publishing industry, the advertising industry. This list is by no means complete and it is growing daily under the predacious appetite of the Obama administration which has swallowed whole our industries such as automobile, insurance, banking.
If the problem were just the media we could hope for a solution coming of new technology. But I think the problem goes back to even before the Alinsky school to The Frankfurt School which was the precursor to the cultural subversion which has come to America and which found expression in the Alinsky school and political consummation in the election of Barack Obama. It is not by accident that all these institutions have fallen into the hands of the left. The left has generated a new eschatology, a whole new way of thinking, which rejects the logic and and culture that was the common experience in America at least through the Eisenhower administration.
The Frankfurt school was explicitly created to undermine those institutions which tended to hinder the sought after triumph of communism. These included the nation state, the church, the family, and the "liberal" tradition in education. So they devised means to undermine patriotism and combine that with wholesale immigration as just a couple of methods of undermining the nation state. They assaulted the churches and made expressions of Christianity in the public square illegal. To undermine the family, they belittled the father labeled him "authoritarian," derided paternalism, and encouraged abortion. They have had unimagined success in undermining our school system from kindergarten to postgraduate work. But the instances are merely the symptoms and the venues of the dirty work.
The main problem that comes out of The Frankfurt School is that it changes the way we think. If one legitimatizes relativism then one begins to talk about George Bush is the moral equivalent of Hitler. If one says that there is no such thing as historical reality, one has destroyed the underpinnings of civilization. If one espouses and sells a "critical theory" one has made all other forms of analysis except downright cynicism look naïve and unworthy. The examples of how the The Frankfurt School "deconstructed" our epistemology are truly frightening.
So the media behaves the way it does because that's the way it thinks and it thinks that way because that is the way it has been brought up. And all of this goes back To the Frankfurt School.
We are at a crisis in the moment because of the person of Barack Obama. We must bend every effort to prevent him from achieving the ultimate victory sought by The Frankfurt School and its disciples, Saul Alinsky, William Ayers, and the rest. But if we survive this crisis we must then as patriotic conservatives undertake the restoration of "liberal" common sense and biblical morality to our culture. That means we have to change the way people think, the way they see the world, their whole value system. That is what has been done to us and if we do not undo it we will always be one election away from the next Barack Obama.
It COULD be argued that the B-70 was a bit of an over-reach based on the technology of the time.
But, boy it was cool looking...
Well, so was the F-111. It got positively murdered in its Vietnam debut. The F-111 actually turned out to be a decent jet, but it took several major (and expensive) modification and upgrade programs to do it.
In 1968 the USAF lost three of six F-111s sent to Vietnam for combat evaluation. The cause turned out to be the terrain-following radar. By 1972, however, the F-111 turning out a pretty good performance with 3 combat losses for 4000 missions.
IMHO, while it did have some teething troubles, the airframe and performance were not beyond the technology of the time. I don’t think the B-70 could have ever been brought to the same state of readyness.
The idea of trying to use the F-111 as a naval aircraft WAS ludicrous, though. It was too big, too heavy, and had too low of a power to weight ratio.
Also, the F-11 served our post-Cold War needs quite well. What would we have done with B-70s?
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I spent quite some time responding to your comment only to have it wiped out between spell check and posting.
I guess in a nut shell,I have no memory of the press adulating John Kennedy and in fact recall many nasty stories especially about his Addison's disease and debilitating back injuries. There were other things too. Only when the liberals realized they couldn't pin his assassination on crazy lunatic fringe right wingers did they create Camelot. What better way to disguise the real perpetrators than by making the dead man a member of the group that were responsible for his death.
I'm going to send this off just so you know that I did have a reason for asking you about your age.
I think Kennedy compromised many of his beliefs and core values to get into a position where he could combat the real enemies of America.
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