April 2005 Newsletter
The Fog of Self Delusion
Allen Millett
Critics of former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara still stress his middle
name– Strange–when they curse his conduct of the war in Vietnam.
His detractors argue that by allowing the North Vietnamese to establish sanctuaries
in Laos and Cambodia and by restricting Rolling Thunder air strikes to narrowly
defined military targets, he doomed the American war effort. Another variant
of this criticism stresses his failure to reform the South Vietnamese armed
forces, to expand the pacification campaign, to push for economic development,
and to introduce grass-roots democracy into Vietnamese rural society. It is
not certain that McNamara understood all these non-quantifiable factors in 1961-67,
and The Fog of War does not establish that he understands these issues
now. The “we could have won” school of Vietnam obsessives will find
more evidence in The Fog of War that Secretary McNamara knew very little
about Southeast Asia and nothing about the nature of warfare.
The anti-war school of Vietnam obsessives will find plenty of evidence in the
movie to confirm their view that McNamara was either a duplicitous knave or
a sycophantic courtier who allowed himself to be charmed by John F. Kennedy
and bullied by Lyndon Johnson. According to this school of thought, McNamara
was a capitalist technocrat whose manic lust for mathematical expressions of
reality blinded him to the insurmountable odds the United States was facing
when it tried to stop a powerful, legitimate, revolutionary movement in postcolonial
Vietnam. McNamara could have mustered enough experts to advance this view in
the White House and persuade Lyndon Johnson that killing Vietnamese did nothing
to contain the Chinese.
The real Robert S. McNamara remains elusive, a confessant who never quite confesses,
an apostate convert to the anti-war school who remains loyal to an American
commitment gone wrong. He still cannot explain why the American intervention
failed. And no wonder: his background was in systems analyses, and win or lose,
the United States could not justify the Vietnam War by analyzing its cost-effectiveness.
The producer-director of The Fog of War, Errol Morris, is a newcomer
to documentaries on foreign and military affairs. His questions for McNamara
and his selection of film footage reveal a low level of preparation; he needs
some lessons from Ted Koppel and Charlie Rose. Nevertheless, he makes a brave
attempt to study McNamara’s pre-public life (1916-1961), his struggle
with the cold war crises of the Kennedy administration and the specter of nuclear
war, and his role in Vietnam decision-making. However, he beats the obvious
points to death and ignores the more promising clues to McNamara’s Vietnam
War experience.
Morris is fixated on isolated events that cast the armed forces senior commanders
as villains and McNamara as a victim. He concentrates, for example, on the Gulf
of Tonkin incident, only one of many alarming events in 1964. He also allows
McNamara to focus on the air campaign against North Vietnam. With some contextual
legerdemain that impresses Morris, whose light grasp of World War II history
is obvious, McNamara compares the bombing of North Vietnam to the strategic
bombing of Japan and makes it clear that he sees himself as having been tasked
with curbing a bombing-happy Air Force. He hardly discusses the conduct of ground
operations within Vietnam or the risks of a search and destroy campaign controlled
by the Communists' willingness to stand and fight or to fade away to their sanctuaries
in the mountains, jungles, and tunnels. In 1994 I crawled in the Cu Chi tunnels,
built under an American division's base camp in Tay Ninh Province. I wish Secretary
McNamara could have the same experience.
Morris wonders how someone as highly intelligent and deeply moral as McNamara
could go so wrong on Vietnam. The Fog of War provides some answers
that border on psychobiography. McNamara grew up poor enough to have class anxiety.
He insists that he grew up in San Francisco when his home was really in Oakland.
His striving at Berkeley led him to the Harvard Business School, where he taught
from 1940-43. Interestingly, both before and after World War II, McNamara preferred
being a HBS faculty member to being an industrial mogul. In the wartime U.S.
Army Air Forces, he excelled in the operational analysis of strategic bombing,
especially the bombing of Japan by Curtis E. LeMay’s Twentieth Air Force.
McNamara is obviously bothered by an operation he now regards as “criminal.”
He both praises and condemns LeMay, but he is clearly intimidated by LeMay’s
force of character.
Morris allows McNamara to make the case that his major challenge as secretary
of defense was preventing LeMay from starting World War III during the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962. LeMay had left the JCS by the time the great negative
decisions of 1965 and 1966 were made, but McNamara still asserts that dealing
with the pressure for escalations of violence from the JCS, whose members simply
parroted LeMay's advice to bomb the Vietnamese "back into the stone age,"
was his greatest problem. H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty (1997)
is hard on the service chiefs, but he acknowledges that the JCS contingency
plans of 1965 envisioned more than just a crushing air campaign. As in many
similar cases, McNamara's recollections, unexamined by Morris, are selective
and self-serving.
McNamara’s years with the Ford Motor Company did little to transform him
from a great staff officer of exceptional analytic skill to a national security
leader. He had been president of Ford for five whole weeks before he switched
masters from Henry Ford III to JFK. His deep interest in international and defense
affairs before 1961 is part of the Camelot myth. What did McNamara bring to
the Office of the Secretary of Defense? He provided a method-driven approach
(systems analysis) to defense problems that provided "cost-effective"
solutions. However, he brought absolutely no interest or prior knowledge about
wars of national liberation to his office, and he ignored expert advice on the
subject from people like Edward G. Lansdale, John Mecklin, Sir Robert Thompson,
and George Carver. What did he achieve? His pseudoscientific solutions of budget
problems confused Congress, cowed the military departments, and corralled the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. Defense spending during his tenure increased by a higher
percentage than it did in the 1980s. He brought some order to strategic nuclear
planning and weapons procurement, and he advanced the careers of a generation
of “whiz kids,” OSD civilians, two of whom later became the secretary
of defense (Harold Brown and Les Aspin).
Around 1967 McNamara developed serious doubts about the war, largely because
of his study of the bombing results of Operation Rolling Thunder. By that time
it was too late to get LBJ to surrender or win because of the perceived international
and domestic costs. Could something have been done earlier? McNamara believes
JFK had an exit strategy, but we will never know for sure. McNamara likes to
draw lessons from history, but he knew nothing of Charles de Gaulle's honorable
retreat from Algeria and says nothing now about the United States exiting El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, and Lebanon. Even when McNamara started the study
that would come to be known as the Pentagon Papers, he was unaware that Secretary
of State Dean Acheson had conducted a similar review of the Korean War in 1953-54.
Spare us from political appointees (for McNamara was neither politician nor
bureaucrat) who define history in terms of their personal experience.
The Fog of War should be retitled The Fog of Robert McNamara,
since it deals with McNamara more than the Vietnam War. The war is a complex
subject, and because Morris does not know enough about it to ask the right questions,
the movie will do little to help unprepared students understand it. Yet even
Morris’s portrait of McNamara is not quite convincing. Obviously, McNamara’s
very selective memory is an obstacle to comprehension. The author-journalist
David Halberstam, who has covered American politics and wars for forty-plus
years, recently told me that McNamara had more trouble with the truth than any
official he had ever met, and that is quite a universe from which to draw comparisons.
Morris does his best to give us the essential Robert S. McNamara, but his subject
has become an expert in making himself seem more complex than he really is.
In reality McNamara is a simple technocrat seduced by the chance for historical
immortality through public office. He will certainly be remembered, but the
McNamara he would like us to remember–the victimized man of good intentions
led astray by hubris, misplaced loyalty, and bad advice–is not the one
that will go down in history.
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