Posted on 07/08/2009 9:49:14 AM PDT by Kaslin
WASHINGTON -- The death of Robert McNamara at 93 was less a faint reverberation of a receding era than a reminder that mentalities are the defining attributes of eras, and certain American mentalities recur with, it sometimes seems, metronomic regularity. McNamara came to Washington from a robust Detroit -- he headed Ford when America's swaggering automobile manufacturers enjoyed 90 percent market share -- to be President John Kennedy's secretary of defense. Seemingly confident that managing the competition of nations could be as orderly as managing competition among the three participants in Detroit's oligopoly, McNamara entered government seven months before the birth of the current president, who is the owner and, he is serenely sure, fixer of General Motors.
Today, something unsettlingly similar to McNamara's eerie assuredness pervades the Washington in which he died. The spirit is: Have confidence, everybody, because we have, or soon will have, everything -- really everything -- under control.
The apogee of McNamara's professional life, in the first half of the 1960s, coincided, not coincidentally, with the apogee of the belief that behavioralism had finally made possible a science of politics. Behavioralism held -- holds; it is a hardy perennial -- that the social and natural sciences are not so different, both being devoted to the discovery of law-like regularities that govern the behavior of atoms, hamsters, humans, whatever.
Two of behavioralism's reinforcing assumptions were: Things that can be quantified can be controlled. And everything can be quantified. So, pick a problem, any problem. Military insurgency in Indochina? The answer is counterinsurgency. What can be, and hence must be, quantified? Body counts, surely. Bingo: A metric of success.
Not exactly. The behavior of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong did not respond as expected to America's finely calibrated stimuli, such as bombing this but not that, and bombing pauses. Behavioralists were disappointed, but not discouraged. They would give nation-building another try.
It was in reaction to the mentality that McNamara represented that "The Public Interest" quarterly was born. Its founders were intellectuals, many of whom were called "neoconservatives" when that designation was more relevant to domestic than foreign policy. The journal's mission was to insist that (as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a Harvard social scientist, said) the function of social science is not to tell us what to do but to tell us what does not work. What did not work in the 1960s, at home and abroad, was quite a lot.
McNamara died on a day when there was interesting news from Asia, the region of his torments: There was lethal ethnic rioting in China. That development refutes, redundantly, the prophecy of a 19th-century social scientist, Karl Marx. Believing that he had discerned the laws of social physics, he said that the coming of modernity -- the rise of science and the retreat of religion under the rationality of market societies -- would mean that preindustrial factors such as religion and ethnicity would lose their history-shaping saliency.
So far, the 21st century is vexed by nothing so much as those supposed residues of humanity's infancy. Nevertheless, Marx's anticipation morphed into what Moynihan called "the liberal expectancy." It is the hope -- liberals tend to treat hopes as probabilities -- that the fading of those atavisms and superstitions has put the world on a path to perpetual tranquility.
The world McNamara has departed could soon be convulsed by attempts to modify Iran's behavior. Since a variety of incentives have been unavailing, more muscular measures -- perhaps "surgical strikes," a phrase redolent of the McNamara mentality -- are contemplated.
Some persons fault the president for not having more ambitious plans to somehow prompt and guide Iranians toward regime change. That outcome is sometimes advocated, and its consequences confidently anticipated, by neoconservatives whose certitude about feasibility resembles that which, decades ago, neoconservatism was born to counter.
Well. Every four years we saturate New Hampshire -- that small, English-speaking, culturally homogenous, ethnically temperate sliver of tranquil New England -- with politicians, consultants, journalists and political scientists. And often we are surprised -- even dumbfounded -- by how unpredictably that state's people, with their native perversity, choose to behave in their presidential primary.
McNamara, like many who leave high office, never left the capital of this nation that believes people learn from history, and that therefore history is linear and progressive. But the capital, gripped once again by the audacious hope of mastering everything, would be wise to entertain a shadow of a doubt about that.
“McNamara’s mind” is oxymoronic ad infinitum.
Sorry son of a gun comes out and says the demoncRATS Kennedy, Johnson and him made a huge mistake by being in Vietnam. The spouses, parents, siblings & children just loved to hear how their relatives died for NOTHING. (Sheesh!)
This article demonstrates George Will’s meandering mind.
You stole my thunder. I was going to comment that I had read the article and my first question was "What'd he say?". I hadn't noticed that it was one of George Will's pieces.....I believe he likes the sound of his own voice.
the reason for the Vietnam war bad name, can be linked directly to MacNamara, micromanaging a war and not fighting it as a war. He and LBJ were despicable.....
People forget that Vietnam was once called “French-Indo-China” and that the Vietnam war was basically us cleaning up the French’s mess.
Of course Had Truman not stopped MacArthur in a purely politically motivated move after WWII. We might have gone into China, kicked some Commie butt, prevented the Korean War, and possibly even prevented the Vietnam war as well.
I Blame the French and Harry Truman for Vietnam.
Blame the French and Harry Truman for Vietnam.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Ike (and Nixon) were of the opinion we wouldn’t do any better than the French in Vietnam and were opposed to sending anything more than a token amount of troops there as advisors.
Kennedy/Johnson ignored that advise and sent large numbers of American troops into Vietnam (something Nixon would not have done had he been elected in 1960.) By the time Nixon was elected in 1968 it was a full fledged war.
Ask people today who was to blame for Vietnam, most would blame it on Nixon (not Kennedy/Johnson.) The irony is if Nixon had been elected in 1960 (instead of the election being stolen by Kennedy) Nixon would not have sent troops into Vietnam, and THERE WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN AN AMERICAN VIETNAME WAR!
Poor Nixon has gotten all the blame for other Kennedy’s/Johnson’s bad decisions.
Nixon was a bit of an irascible Bas—rd but he gets blamed for far far too much stuff.
Johnson really gets free pass on a lot of crap that went on in the 60’s.
Kennedy was smart but naive (sp?)
Nixon was smart but evil.
Johnson was the evil village idiot.
The one big mistake Nixon made was not ending the Vietnam war after he took office in 1969. Nixon NEVER thought Vietnam was winnable, and his gut instinct was to just withdraw the troops (a direct Kissinger quote), but he new he would never get reelected if he did that. Consequently he let the war drag on for 4 more years. Notice how quickly after Nixon was reelected he withdrew the troops? Almost immediatly.
You can blame Nixon for not doing in 1969 what he did in 1973.
“...Poor Nixon has gotten all the blame for other Kennedy’s/Johnson’s bad decisions...”
Yes that’s true, but isn’t that the Democratic way? Make a mess then blame it on the Republican who follows them into office?
George Will in his dotage.
I read that twice and still don’t have a clue as to what he is saying or who he is talking about. It’s certainly not McNamara.
Time for George to go into quiet retirement.
Shortly after the release of “We Were Soldiers,” I had the following email exchange with co-writer Joe Galloway.
Dear Joe,
Thank you and Gen. Moore for allowing the film to be made and for working with Gibson
- one of the few people in Hollywood I trust - to keep the story as close to events as
was possible. How Hollywood COULD embellish la Drang is beyond me.
I spent nearly 4 years training young troopers to be Combat Engineers at Fort Belvoir
between ‘62 and ‘66. Some of THEIR names grace that black monolith on the Mall.
There must NEVER be another Viet Nam (or Somalia! - thank you, Bill Clinton) -
EVERI
God bless you and General Moore for helping those of us who have never seen combat
to better understand the horror and sacrifice of war and the love between the men who
are consigned to them by politicians who send them off to misadventures like Nam with one
arm tied behind their backs.
McNamara popped up on the book tour circuit a while back promoting his mea culpa on
Viet Nam. Through clenched teeth, I watched him weep during one TV interview as he
declared that he KNEW the entire exercise was wrong as it unfolded - but did
NOTHING to try to stop it.
They are excavating a new, lower level of Hell for McNamara as you read this. It is just
above LBJ’s.
With a silent prayer for ALL those who fight and die for this country, I extend warmest
personal regards to you and General Moore. May you both enjoy the remainder of what
I pray will long and peaceful lives.
Unlike most of us, you have earned them.
Reply from Joe Galloway of 10-21 -02
Dick:
Nope, They are putting McNamara right in the same level with LBJ, and boy is LBJ pissed at him for all this whining around he’s been doing. He can bend his ear for all eternity, while they fan each other......
Thanks for your kind words about the book and the movie, I will share them with Gen Moore.
Joe
Will has been writing in this "style" ever since I started reading him more than twenty years ago. It's always been a chore to decipher one of his columns, and I think he probably likes that. I had one lib co-worker complain about understanding one of Will's columns one time, but I couldn't say different. I didn't understand what Will was talking about either.
Will has been writing in this "style" ever since I started reading him more than twenty years ago. It's always been a chore to decipher one of his columns, and I think he probably likes that. I had one lib co-worker complain about understanding one of Will's columns one time, but I couldn't say different. I didn't understand what Will was talking about either.
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