McNamara's 'other' crimes: the stories you haven't heard

Washington Monthly ^ | June, 1995 | Myra MacPherson

[Waco]

Ignored the simple solution in the interest of $$$. All they needed to do was tell N Viet to settle down or we’ll bomb ya flat and turn you over to whoever wants ya. Instead they put up a phoney front about ‘’worrying’’ about China getting involved.

[wally_bert]

Me either. Vietnam was before me but as someone who is fascinated by military history, the more I learned about the whiz kid, the more I came to detest him and types like him. All I can is goodbye and good riddance.

[Rannug]

Rumor back then had it that lady tird johnson owned a great deal of conoco stock. Part of the reason.

[eleni121]

Just a truly awful breed of human...how do these ivy league privileged types turn to the dark side?

[Luke21]

Lies don’t die with the dead.

[sport]

Good riddence as far as I am concerned.

Same thing with Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter.

[eleni121]

I should add that the person most responsible for our failed policies of that era was JFK who himself was a by-product of the grand poobah FDR.

JFK was the one who brought the obedient whizzers/viziers like McNamara to Washington.

[smokingfrog]

bump

[Ipberg]

Why was the North off limits?

Perhaps to avoid killing Chinese advisors there and triggering WWIII with a Chinese-Russian alliance?

[Ipberg]

McNamara held back as part of his freakish and utterly immoral “communication by bombing” strategy, a mistaken effort to intimidate the North Vietnamese with the threat that these targets would be hit if the NVN didn’t start negotiating in earnest.

This is dramatized in a scene from THIRTEEN DAYS (2000) where the bespectacled accountant McNamara lectures a square-jawed Naval officer about how modern wars are fought. Micromanaging the US military in the Cuban Missile Crisis was deemed "successful" by the Kennedy Administration and therefore the way they planned to "win" in Vietnam.

[matthew fuller]

For later.

[angcat]

I appreciate the information. I was a kid during that time.

[Covenantor]

Keep a look out for thyroid cancer symptoms as well. A close friend of mine, Vietnam Vet of your era came down with that 5 years ago. He had a hell of a time getting it diagnosed. Fortunately it was treatable. But the resultant and deep mood swings caused by the thyroid storms (?) almost destroyed his 30 year marriage.

[doolish]

Uh, I think we need to look back a little further, to the Eisenhower administration, for “who got us into Vietnam” (in the 1953-54 period in support of the French against the Viet Minh). Then installed Diem as Our Man in Saigon, had him create the faux independent nation of South Vietnam (RVN), so the legitimate government in Hanoi (who had represented Viet Nam in the Geneva Conference of 1954) could be considered to be “invading” a sovereign state. The ROE were consistent with a limited war, which it always was.
Nixon did not create US involvement in Indochina, nor did he create Project 100,000; it was well underway when he took office as POTUS. But, he did let it run its course until 1971 when manpower requirements for Viet Nam were being dialed down.

[x]

Recruiters swept through urban ghettos and southern hill country, taking some youths with I.Q.s below what is considered legally retarded.

Microagression?

[x]

Myra is showing her own ignorance in comparing Southern Hill country people to Ghetto residents. Some of them are probably not particularly well educated but their IQ scores would be right up there with the best.

Could be said of some ghetto residents as well.