My encounter with the master of deceit and deception epitomizes the true legacy of Robert Strange McNamara.
Just before 9 on the night of January 6, 2004, I was waiting in the lobby of a Washington, D.C., movie theater for what had been billed as a question and answer session with Errol Morris, the director of the just-released documentary, The Fog of War.
I had seen his astonishing film—basically a 90-minute interview with former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara—earlier that evening and was looking forward to the opportunity to ask questions of Morris. Then came a startling, completely unexpected, announcement: McNamara himself would join Morris in the Q&A.
I was totally astounded. McNamara had been famous—infamous to many—for refusing to talk about the war. Now Robert Strange Mc Namara was in the building and seemingly ready to face the music about his pivotal role in waging the Vietnam War.
After he resigned as defense secretary in 1968, McNamara refused to discuss the war publicly for nearly three decades. Then, with his 1995 book, In Retrospect, McNamara suddenly became a media celeb, taking nearly every available radio, television, newspaper and magazine opportunity to give his version of how he guided the war effort. With at least one exception. He refused repeated requests to give me an interview for The VVA Veteran, the magazine published by Vietnam Veterans of America.
There were moments during his 1995 book tour when angry Vietnam veterans—and in one case the still-grieving wife of an American pilot killed—confronted McNamara about his culpability in the war effort. In every case he sidestepped the questions.
In Morris’ film, McNamara also sidestepped big questions—questions we were ready to put to him in 1995. Such as how he could live with himself after sending 2.8 million Americans into a shooting war that he came to believe could not—and would not—be won. And what possessed him to visit Hanoi in 1995, when he hadn’t yet visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, where he lived?
In the theater lobby, I introduced myself to the moderator. I explained that Vietnam veterans had been waiting more than 30 years for an opportunity to confront the man who did the lion’s share of the planning and running of what became known as “McNamara’s war.”
The moderator agreed to call on me, but only if I could ask my questions courteously and without rancor. I reined in my emotions.
The first question came from a youngish man who brought up one of McNamara’s 1995 public appearances, at Harvard, when he was confronted by a woman whose husband had been killed in the war—a woman who asked McNamara to say he was sorry for what he did in Vietnam. “You didn’t answer her then, will you do so now? Are you sorry?” he asked.
“That is not the right question,” McNamara replied. He then went on and on about lessons from the war. While he was filibustering, the moderator told me it was time to ask McNamara my question.
“Mr. McNamara, is it true you haven’t visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial?” I asked.
He cut me off: “No, it’s not true. I have.”
“Fine,” I said, “I have another question.” I asked the $64,000 one:
“In the film it shows you telling President Kennedy that we should pull out our troops in 1963. You go on to say that you realized during the Johnson administration that military force wouldn’t win the war in Vietnam. How do you explain to the nation’s 2.8 million Vietnam veterans, most of whom you sent over there, that you sent us to a war you knew was doomed from the start?”
He said he never thought the war couldn’t be won. He said that no one else was telling LBJ the war was hopeless.
I shouted out, “What about George Ball?!”— the Johnson administration official who was well known for his dovish advice on the war to the president. McNamara said, unbelievably, that Ball wasn’t in the government at the time.
“He was an undersecretary of state!” I yelled.
McNamara: “Well, no one took him seriously.”
To all the other questions that evening, McNamara evaded, obfuscated and filibustered.
The final question looped back to my first: “How did you feel when you went to The Wall?”
“It’s obvious how I felt,” McNamara responded tersely.
The questioner pressed him: “I don’t know if it is obvious. What were your feelings?”
“One can’t feel anything but tragedy,” McNamara said, before again launching in on the “lessons” of the war.
In the film, McNamara revealingly explains to Morris how he handled questions in public. “You don’t answer the questions that are asked. You answer the ones you wish you were asked. I did that.”
McNamara did it again that night in 2004. And he did it in an arrogant, condescending, self-aggrandizing manner. His performance amounted to a big insult heaped upon the unending injury he inflicted on those of us who served in the Vietnam War—and to the American people whom he repeatedly deceived.
That, to me, is Robert S. McNamara’s lasting legacy.
Journalist, historian and author Marc Leepson served as a draftee in the United States Army in Vietnam in 1967-68.
Originally published in the December 2009 issue of Vietnam Magazine. To subscribe, click here.
