The McNamara Mentality - George F. Will, Washington Post opinion.
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 members of 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...
More at The Washington Post.
A McNamara Lesson: When to Walk Out - Jeffrey H. Smith, Washington Post opinion.
Beginning with "In Retrospect" in 1995, Robert S. McNamara began publicly to explain his doubts about the Vietnam War and his break with President Lyndon Johnson. It's not clear when he first had these doubts, but he expressed them to Johnson, in memos, in May and November of 1967. In the May memo, he referred to the war as "a major national disaster." But the public knew little of his dissent.
Why did it take him so long to recognize something so obvious? If he had questioned the war even sooner, as he later asserted, why didn't he speak out?
To most Americans, Vietnam is "McNamara's war." McNamara was haunted by the war long after he left office in 1968 and repeatedly tried to explain what went wrong. He wrote several books spelling out the "lessons" (his word) we should learn from the tragedy of Vietnam. Many Americans brushed them aside because of the deep anger they felt toward McNamara and the war...
More at The Washington Post.
McNamara in Context - Errol Morris, New York Times opinion.
... His refusal to come out against the Vietnam War, particularly as it continued after he left the Defense Department, has angered many. There's ample evidence that he felt the war was wrong. Why did he remain silent until the 1990s, when "In Retrospect" was published? That is something that people will probably never forgive him for. But he had an implacable sense of rectitude about what was permissible and what was not. In his mind, he probably remained secretary of defense until the day he died.
One angry person once said to me: "Loyalty to the president? What about his loyalty to the American people?" Fair enough. But our government isn't set up that way. He was not an elected official, he said repeatedly. He served at the pleasure of the president.
This brings us to the question of what, if any, were Mr. McNamara's lasting contributions as secretary of defense? Mr. McNamara saw his central role as preventing nuclear war. During his tenure as secretary of defense, there were conflicts that could have escalated into nuclear war - the confrontation over Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis. All of this must be seen against the backdrop of the prevailing ideas of the time, the domino theory and the cold war...
More at The New York Times.
McNamara and the Liberals' War - Wall Street Journal editorial.
Robert McNamara died on Monday at age 93 like he lived most of the latter half of his life, scorned and derided by his former liberal allies for refusing to turn against the Vietnam War as early as they did. As the New York Times put it in a page-one obituary headline, McNamara was the "Architect of Futile War."
In historical fact, Vietnam was the liberals' war, begun by JFK, escalated by LBJ, and cheered on for years by giants of the American left before they turned against it. In his 1995 memoir, McNamara apologized for the war. But he probably sealed his reputation on the left by also quoting the New York Times and liberal antiwar reporter David Halberstam for having opposed U.S. withdrawal as late as 1965. "To be fair to Halberstam," McNamara wrote dryly, "the hawkish views he was expressing reflected the opinion of the majority of journalists at the time."
Like JFK and Averell Harriman, Halberstam also supported the 1963 coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, a misguided foray into Vietnamese politics that led to deeper US involvement. Only later as the war dragged on did these liberals lose their nerve, and they never forgave McNamara for fighting on - even years later after he finally agreed they were right...
More at The Wall Street Journal.