McNamara’s Sorrow And Our Good Conscience by Norman Birnbaum

McNamara’s Sorrow And Our Good Conscience

Norman Birnbaum

Had John Kennedy lived, he would now be ninety-one. The death of his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, at ninety-three reminds us of the Kennedy years with their agitated contradictions. Not Kennedy but Eisenhower initiated the American involvement in Viet-Nam. Kennedy enlarged the engagement, then had second thoughts----and was murdered before he could change course, perhaps because he was planning to do so. Older statesmen like Eisenhower presided over the great expansion of American influence and power which is now ending, younger ones who had served in the Second World War like Kennedy and McNamara regarded themselves as heirs with a special responsibility to increase the family estate.

Lyndon Johnson, who McNamara served as faithfully as he had Kennedy, connected the generations. A protégé of Franklin Roosevelt, he was a New Dealer and an ambitious and successful domestic social reformer before first marching into adventure, then stumbling into disaster, in Asia. That disaster occurred as the nation was in a period of great domestic turmoil. The Afro-American Civil Rights movement, the revolt in schools and universities, the women’s movement, joined in the protest at the war. Paradoxically, it was a racially integrated army (if one riven by racial tensions) which was sent by a very prosperous nation (which had also begun what was called a war on its own poverty) to eradicate Viet-Nam’s revolutionary nationalism. When Johnson realized that it could not be stopped, he fell into the depression that impelled him to abandon the Presidency.He later said that had he withdrawn from Viet-Nam, he would have had to sacrifice his domestic program.

The bargain which led the social reformers to espouse American empire, long before Johnson’s agonies, was heartfelt. The reformers actually believed in an American mission to redeem the world---in which progress within our borders legitimated our efforts (sometimes, unfortunately, misunderstood) to liberate others from both revolutionary illusions and traditionalist backwardness. The foundations and universities from which Kennedy recruited his advisors, and which also supplied ideas and persons to his cabinet officials and to the Congress, had an American view of contemporary history. It was the great stage for the drama of “modernization,” in which any nation given the chance would choose to advance to the level of the United States. Amongst the attributes of “modernization” so congenial to the McNamara generation was an American version of Napoleon’s idea of a “carriere ouvert aux talents”----with the French Revolution and its successor regimes totally unmentioned.

McNamara grew up in the Great Depression in modest circumstances. He studied not at Harvard like the wealthy Kennedy but at the great public university in Berkeley, California---and acknowledged that his own ascent was made possible by the nineteenth century American ideas of social opportunity institutionalized in the public universities. His own turn to social reform came only after Johnson dismissed him as Secretary of Defense (for finally telling him to end an unwinnable war) and sent him as President to the World Bank. There, he conducted a vigorous campaign against global poverty, and espoused, before many others, environmental sanity. : McNamara’s early career as a professor at Harvard Business School and then at Ford Motor Company, where he became President, was brilliant but politically conventional. In the Air Force during the war, he had participated in the planning of the fire bombing of Japan. In fact, he identified himself with the technological rationality, the reliance on measurement, which was a major instrument of American progressivism. Progress consisted of the relentless reinvention of the world---which is why so many Americans seeking social improvement were attracted to the doctrine of a universal process of “modernization.”.When McNamara moved from the Pentagon to the World Bank, he long maintained the same intellectual schema.

Readers of Max Weber’s portrayal of the Calvinists can recognize in McNamara a latter day Puritan, a disciplined and relentless servant of the Lord’s will. He was for a while active in his church,. the major American Calvinist group, the Presbyterians. Like every American church, it was bitterly divided by the Vietnam war. For whatever reason, McNamara’s public attachment to his church diminished. McNamara in 1995, twenty years after the American expulsion from Vietnam and twenty-seven years after he left the Pentagon, published “In Retrospect: The Tragedy And Lessons of Vietnam.”

As a rare acknowledgement of responsibility for error and disaster by a major historical figure, it is exceptional. He exposed himself to the judgment of his contemporaries in an act of contrition in the traditions of Puritan moral doubt. Many responded harshly. What self-criticism by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are we to hear? Our harshness might be tempered. McNamara’s work at the World Bank, where he assigned Willy Brandt his famed report on global inequality, was itself a kind of reparation. Then McNamara appeared in the 2002 dcumentary film, “The Fog Of War”----and criticised the unilateralism of the Iraq War. Before that, on issues of arms control and nuclear weaponry, he had championed negotiations to avert the possibility of the use of nuclear arms. As Secretary of Defense, indeed, he was an indispensable ally of Kennedy in his determination to wrest control of nuclear weapons from our belligerent generals. During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 he helped Kennedy avert catastrophe.

The obituaries of McNamara, inevitably, are ambivalent. His early arrogance and blindness were not unique, they were shared by much of our elite. Arriving at the top of our society by talent and work, McNamara and his colleagues supposed that the experiences of others had few lessons for themselves. A new generation of careerists and idealists (sometimes, the same persons) is at the White House. They have not taken command of our dysfunctional system of government—but propose to solve, as in Afghanistan, the problems of other peoples. Our President has surely read McNamara and is able to locate his own place in the one history Americans find it most difficult to grasp, our own. McNamara’s anguish will be rewarded, posthumously, if Obama were to take it seriously.