Posted on 07/07/2009 1:17:55 PM PDT by Interesting Times
Rather than absolving him of his sins, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s pseudo-mea culpa, “In Retrospect: Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” is a self-indictment. His lesser crime is self-indulgence. His arrogance and duplicity during the Vietnam conflict is echoed throughout his book as he recounts his mismanagement of the war.
If as he admits, ignorance was his guiding light, then, it has grown to be a beacon today, proving that he has learned little about Vietnamese communism in the almost three decades that it took him to write his book. Besides the war, another tragedy is that McNamara seems to have lost his memory, and has difficulty distinguishing between facts and fantasy.
Nowhere in his book does McNamara mention his asinine idea of building a “technological” wall to keep the North Vietnamese out of the South in order to reduce the need to bomb North Vietnam. (Perhaps he was going to build the wall out of surplus Edsels, a car designed and built while he was CEO of Ford Motor Company that was a total failure.) McNamara didn’t succeed in keeping the North Vietnamese out of the South, but the wall was built; not on the 17th parallel as he planned; rather, it can be found just off Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC. It’s called the Vietnam Memorial; built with the names of 58,000 dead Americans.
McNamara is flat wrong in his claim that “Our government lacked experts for us to consult to compensate for our ignorance about Southeast Asia.” Rather than accepting advice, McNamara and the other “Whiz Kids” arrogantly and deliberately chose to ignore the experts. In fact, McNamara claims there were no experts.
The fact was there were several experts, including the well known French journalist and author Bernard Fall. It wasn’t that Fall had been “painted as a suspect communist sympathizer” as claimed in the book, it was because McNamara and his coterie were running the war and were to arrogant to consult with a damn “Frog.” They felt that the French couldn’t be trusted because the Vichy French had collaborated with the Axis during World War II, and their colonial administrators in Indochina had been treated as allies by the Japanese. And the US had never lost a war, and the French had already lost in Indochina; therefore, McNamara and his cohort wouldn’t be caught dead consulting with a bunch of colonials and losers.
And what memory lapse would cause McNamara to forget another expert for whom President John F. Kennedy had great respect for, General Edward Geary Lansdale? Lansdale had been a personal advisor and confident to Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay, and had been instrumental in the defeat of the communist movement there. Lansdale’s expertise wasn’t limited to the Philippines, for he was extremely knowledgeable about the entire situation across Southeast Asia.
Lansdale had been in North Vietnam during the two year grace period accorded by the Geneva agreements of 1954. He assisted the anti-communist Vietnamese to go south while Ho Chi Min solidified power in the North. He was also a personal advisor and close friend to South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem.
On January 28, 1961, President Kennedy read a report by General Lansdale about his recent trip to Vietnam. The following Saturday morning, Kennedy had his chief political advisor call Lansdale at his home and asked him to come immediately to the White House. When he arrived, President Kennedy interrupted a briefing on foreign policy and introduced Lansdale to the group as his next ambassador to Vietnam.
On March 1, 1961, a cable was sent to the American Embassy in Saigon from JFK’s staff ordering the desk-bound Embassy and its top field officers to read Lansdale’s January report, absorb its concepts, and apply them as a new priority in reaching the people in the provinces and villages of Vietnam. However, Lansdale’s counterinsurgency and pacification efforts were undermined by ambitious people in the State Department and the over-achievers in the Pentagon, who knew that the only way to gain promotion, get their “stars” and win medals was to expand the Vietnam conflict militarily in the conventional way.
In his book, McNamara belittles General Lansdale by stating, “I knew of only one Pentagon officer with counterinsurgency experience in the region, ...but Lansdale was a relative junior officer who lacked broad geopolitical expertise.” Geo-political thinking from 18th Century Europe wasn't needed in Vietnam, rather Lansdale’s ideo-and ethno-political expertise is what would have carried the day. McNamara didn’t even know that General Lansdale was on his staff until President Kennedy pointed him out. And when did a General become a junior officer?
McNamara also wrongly compares Ho Chi Minh, as a Vietnamese nationalist, to Yugoslavia’s Marshall Tito. Ho was as much of a nationalist as McNamara is a historian.
Ho Chi Minh was an international communist, who co-founded the French communist party in 1920. He was trained at the Lenin Institute in Moscow in 1925; he was a nationalized Soviet citizen; and he took a Russian name, Linov. He was assigned as a Russian citizen in the Soviet Consulate in Canton, China, under the renowned Machiavellian Russian Consul, Bordin, when fighting broke out between Chiang Kai Shek and Mao Tse Tung. Joseph Stalin supported Chiang and Mao never forgave, nor trusted, Moscow after that.
Ho was then sent to Thailand in 1928 under Moscow’s orders, where he shaved his head and become a Buddhist monk and awaited further orders. They came in 1930, when he was sent by Moscow to Hong Kong to found a new communist party, which Ho named “The Indochina Communist party.” Only a French communist would use that term, for a true Vietnamese nationalist would never have used the colonialist term Indochina. Ho was more of a Stalin than a Tito, and arranged the betrayal and annihilation of all opposition including: nationalists, such as Phan Boi Chau (1926); the murder of South Vietnamese Trotskyite communists (1945), who had been an enemy of Stalin’s policies since the 1920s; and the selective elimination of the non-communist Viet Minh leaders (1954-56), who had greatly contributed to the defeat of the French.
McNamara is even rebuked today by Hanoi’s communist party theoretical journal, which stated that Ho was not a nationalist but was an “internationalist,” loyal to Moscow’s Comintern policies to the end of his days. Robert McNamara, please call your publisher.
The Vietnam conflict was neither a “peoples' war” nor a civil war, as McNamara claims. Rather, it was a proxy war between superpowers – the Soviet Union and the United States, and the wannabee superpower, China. Vietnam was never one country, but had always been divided into there distinct political entities, North, Central, and South Vietnam, and each region had its own distinct political faction and dialect. Both the Central and Southern Vietnamese disliked the arrogant and aggressive North Vietnamese, and the communists fighting in the South were primarily directed by the North.
In turn, the North Vietnamese communists distrusted the Central and Southern communists, and in 1954 and again in 1968, the North Vietnamese communists used their comrades as cannon fodder in order to purge the party ranks of untrustworthy Central and Southern communist brethren, as well as to gain total control of the communist movement in Vietnam. The North’s invasion of the South is comparable to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
McNamara is also dead wrong in saying that our goal of stopping the communist take over of Indochina was unworthy. This is an insult to the 58,000 Americans and the hundreds of thousands of people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia whom he sent to be killed in an attempt to stop the dominos from falling and to help win freedom for the people of the region. Because of McNamara, and in spite of those deaths, some of the dominos fell when the US pulled out.
And McNamara has the gall to say that it was unworthy to try to prevent the slaughter of the almost two million Cambodians who were murdered by the Vietnamese-inspired, trained, and armed Khmer Rouge (who were supported by Vietnamese artillery and troops). And unworthy to try to prevent the pain and hardship suffered by the tens of thousands of people thrown into the concentration camps (“re-education camps”) in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
McNamara’s statement that President Eisenhower’s domino theory was wrong reflects his total ignorance of Ho Chi Minh’s Southeast Asian “time bombs” of the 1930s when Ho, as a Moscow agent, organized the communist parties of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (Indochinese Communist Party), as well as those in Thailand, Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia. It is highly unlikely that the Generals in Indonesia would have stood up to and defeated the communist movement there without the demonstration of American resolve in Vietnam in 1965. Furthermore, without the hundreds of millions of dollars and large amounts of military hardware pumped into the Thai economy, Thailand would have become the fourth domino to fall, after Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Without America’s resolve and commitment, the Vietnamese communists would have continued to fuel the insurrection in Thailand until it too fell, invading it as they did Cambodia.
It isn’t that the Vietnam conflict was unwinnable as he claims, rather McNamara ensured its loss by dictating “rules of engagement” and limited bombing. McNamara arrogantly micro-managed the war by remote, as if playing a board game and possessed by Dr. Strangelove, sending daily encoded messages to the Generals and Admirals in Vietnam on the specific targets he chose to bomb that day. He ordered planes to make multiple bombing runs on the same target on the same day because it was more cost-effective, but it provided a “duck shoot” for the North Vietnamese.
From the onset of the American involvement, the North Vietnamese communists had openly professed they would fight a protracted war and defeat the Americans, not on the battlefield, but politically at home as they had the French. When he voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, an “expert” on international law, warned the White House and the Pentagon that the US must either declare and fight an all-out war against North Vietnam, or the war would be lost politically.
It wasn’t a lack of experts to consult with, as he professes; the problem was that McNamara chose to ignore expert advice. McNamara’s failed policies of the 1960s turned the American people totally against even a minor involvement in Vietnam, thus ensuring the fulfillment of Hanoi’s prophesy and guaranteeing the communist victory.
If “we were wrong; terribly wrong,” as McNamara claims, and he realized it in the mid-sixties and never resigned, then he’s ultimately responsible for sending thousands of America’s “best and brightest” to their deaths. McNamara’s cop-out is, “You shouldn’t use your power that you’ve accumulated in a sense as the President’s appointee… to attack and subvert the policies of the elected representative of the people.” However, the standards set at Nuremberg defeat McNamara’s logic.
Some draft evaders say that McNamara’s book vindicates them for their actions, but when do two wrongs make a right? Rather than donating his book earnings to help heal the Vietnam veterans he helped wound, McNamara plans to use them to increase communications with the draconian dictatorship in Hanoi; the second time he has handed the Hanoi communists a victory.
Vietnam War ping.
Frankly, nothing this arrogant, egotistical incompetent can say or do can ever erase my contempt for him. Too bad he lived so much longer than the thousands who were condemned under his stewardship of the War.
Good riddance.
Wow! Everyone can’t stand this guy. I never heard a negative word about him until he died. Of course I wasn’t alive when he was SECDEF or I was an infant. Fox News is giving some props to the guy though saying that he stopped a nuclear war and was a Republican. The problem is that Fox News has gone so liberal lately that you just don’t know what to believe. I do trust Free Republic as my truthful resource so the guy must have been pretty bad.
"I like that, kinda has a nice ring to it!"
...psssssssssssssss
McNamara for his all-knowing arrogance, and LBJ for his micro-management costed over 58,000 dead including my best friend!
May they roast in Hell forever!
“Nuclear weapons serve no military purpose whatsoever. They are totally useless - except to deter one's opponent from using them.”
Our nuclear superiority, coupled with the Soviets’ belief that we could build an effective missile shield, ended the Cold War and hastened the demise of the Soviet Union. This is worth keeping in mind, while we witness Obama capitulating to the Russians on nuclear stockpiles and missile defense.
Ditto!!x3
What a waste, then and now.
Goodby.
If it wouldn’t dishonor the men on the wall so much, I think it would be fitting for this SOB to have to wake up on judgment day, looking right into that wall, with the name of every casualty he was responsible for.
There are casualties in all wars. If plans are sound and execution is good, then the SecDef is not responsible for the deaths that will occur. He will have saved lives by implementing a sound plan.
If the policies are not sound, the plans are not sound, and more people die as a result, the SecDef deserves to be skewered for it.
McNamera, I personally believe you are more responsible than any other human being for the millions of people who died in the region.
Jane Fonda and the leftist ilk of the 60s & 70s come in second.
The liberals in our Congress, come in a very strong third.
This A$$hole was a bean counting, amoral robot who came from a laboratory that turned these people out with regularity - Harvard with assistance form the Ford Motor Co. of the 60’s.
BTTT
Great article. Thanks for posting.
Coming from a FREEPER, I believe every word.
That's not your call.
I never had much respect for him - even when I was over there. As time went on I learned not to have much respect for any bean counters I met.
Fox had leaned left for at least a few years now. I do not trust them any more than the rest of the propaganda media machines.
A devastating and unfortunately very accurate account. Though the author touched on it, it is frightening how McNamara and the rest of LBJ’s inner circle were every day ignoring the advice of those on the ground and ordering worthless hits on civilian targets of no strategic importance, while ceasing operations showing signs of success - all on whims, all in a detached “let’s play Risk!” mindset. The war in Vietnam, like in Iraq, should have been over very quickly. Too bad we are universally led by people educated far beyond their intelligence and promoted far above their competence.
It is a miracle WWII was not a bigger bloodbath for the allies, given the inept political intervention by American politicians in the work of the generals then too. I guess the Germans had their own incompetent leaders to foist policies of failure upon their warriors.
You're welcome. Mike sent it around to some of his friends shortly after McNamara died, and I thought it deserved a wider audience.
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