Taki Magazine

Robert S. McNamara, in retrospect

by Grant Havers on July 06, 2009

Robert Strange McNamara (1916-2009) is not exactly the first name that comes to mind as an individual that conservatives should readily praise.  As Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson (1961-1968), he presided over the most disastrous war in American history.  His statistical approach to fighting the Vietnam War—recall the gruesome “body count” that calculated the number of Vietcong killed each week as a measurable sign of victory—dramatically revealed the flaws of quantitative technique when applied to immeasurable realities like the tenacious will and historical memory of the North Vietnamese communist cadres.  It also didn’t win him many friends when, later in life, McNamara admitted that he, JFK, and LBJ were “terribly wrong” about the Vietnam War, particularly in their collective failure to understand that it was a civil war among the Vietnamese rather than a cosmic struggle between good and evil during the Cold War (with the North Vietnamese mistakenly seen as mere pawns of the Russians and Chinese).  This contrition, which comes through dramatically in Errol Morris’s fascinating documentary The Fog of War (2004), has struck most of McNamara’s critics on the Right and Left as a classic case of too little, too late. 

I must admit, however, to having a certain respect for one of McNamara’s retrospective lessons about peace and war.  In his book Wilson’s Ghost, which he co-authored with James Blight, McNamara explained how American policy-makers need to learn the fine art of empathy, or the willingness to put oneself in the skin of one’s enemies.  This feat JFK and his cabinet accomplished during those perilous 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), according to McNamara, when they managed to understand at that crucial time what motivated the Russians and Cubans to view the Americans the way they did.  Kennedy could hardly back down, given the threat the missiles posed to America.  Khrushchev also couldn’t just back down, since he had promised to protect Cuba from another Bay of Pigs invasion.  By promising Khrushchev that the US would not invade Cuba if the missiles were removed, Kennedy built what Confucians call a “golden bridge” for his enemy, or an opportunity to allow the Soviet premier to go back to the Russian people and claim that he had stopped an “imperialist” American invasion.  Empathy here was not the same as sympathy with the ideological aims of one’s enemy.  Rather, it was an honest and thoughtful attempt to understand the limitations and circumstances under which the enemy labored.  In theological terms, it was an astute application of Christian charity to politics (perhaps reflective of the influence which the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had on McNamara and Kennedy). 

In retrospect, this diplomacy averted a nuclear Armageddon that was even more probable than anyone knew at the time.  During the missile crisis, the CIA erroneously believed that no warheads had been delivered to Cuba.  Only in 1992 did McNamara find out that Cuba already had at least 90 fully armed nukes on the island, and that Khrushchev had approved their use in the event of an American attack! 

It is a safe bet that the former secretary did not believe that the Bush administration went through the same exercise of empathy with respect to the Iraq war, which McNamara to his credit vigorously opposed as absolutely wrong in political, moral, and economic terms.  We probably will not have to wait for the full declassification of the official documents of the Bush era to discover that this administration knew next to nothing about the complexities of Iraqi history and politics, especially its relentless tribal and sectarian strife which stretch as far back as its medieval period; the failure of reconstruction that sharply contrasts with the early optimistic neocon predictions of a brief and successful occupation is proof enough of that.  In retrospect, McNamara admitted that the empathy which JFK and his cabinet had felt for the Russians was never extended to the Vietnamese in the LBJ era.  We can only hope that the Obama administration, which has recently escalated the war in Afghanistan to new heights, has learned McNamara’s hard lesson of empathy. 

• Print Article
• Email Article
• Email the Editor