Review of a Book and a Social Conscience

In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam
by Robert McNamara with Brian VanDe Mark, Random House, New York, 1995.

Review by
William Krehm

McNamara opens with an explanation why he should retell his story once more, an ancient mariner who with each retelling reveals a bit more of what weighs heavily on his conscience. “My associates in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were an exceptional group: young, vigorous, intelligent, well-meaning, patriotic servants of the United States. How did this group – ‘the best and the brightest,’ as we eventually came to be known in an ironically pejorative phrase – get it so wrong on Vietnam?

“The story has not yet been told.

“But why now? Why after all these years of silence am I convinced I should speak? The main [reason} is that I have grown sick at heart witnessing the cynicism with which many people view our political institutions and leaders.

“Many factors helped lead to this. Vietnam, Watergate, scandals, corruption. But I do not believe, on balance that America’s political leaders have been incompetent or insensitive to the welfare of the people who elected them. Nor do I believe they have been any worse than their foreign counterparts or their colleagues in the private sector.”

Such comparison standards, of course, in this day of manipulated memory suppression, severely limits McNamara’s soul-searching. For in this era of Globalization and Deregulation foreign governments and above all the private sector, are no acceptable yardstick for decency or responsibility. On matters that count our history is the main tool in humanity’s survival kit. Not only for what did work, but from the evidence, what can’t. It is from society’s disasters quite as much as from its successes, that humanity can learn what makes survival possible or rules it out. History, a key resource, has, however, been twisted and even – as in economic theory – completely ruled out.

“The US commanders in Vietnam – as did I – viewed the conflict as primarily a military operation, when in fact it was a highly complex nationalistic and internecine struggle.”

Yet all those other key aspects, had simply been declared “externalities” an atrocious habit that spread to government from the degenerate discipline that passes for economic theory. In an ever more complex world, the concerns of a privileged class was mistaken for a guide, and other problems were declared self-balancing – i.e., automatically balancing themselves so that they can safely be ignored.

What has Happened to the Absent South East Asian Experts of the US Government

Since the writing of this book – and more recently a film done based largely on this book – the age of Globalization and Deregulation has made devastating progress. The outpouring of scandals involving the largest corporations of the private sector, and the number of big and little Vietnams across the globe have multiplied. Our review of what is still the latest Vietnam soul-searchings of the Secretary of War when US intervention in Vietnam was initiated is still incomplete. What is still unaddressed is almost as revealing as what is brought forward.

“Many political leaders and scholars in the US and abroad argue that the Vietnam war actually helped contain the spread of Communism in South and East Asia. Some argue that it hastened the end of the Cold War. But I know that the war caused terrible damage to America.”

Much of the book – in contrast to the far better edited film produced in the light of the Iraqi experience during the subsequent decade, is confined to judgments based largely on criteria within the US hierarchy. Yet there are telling passages.

Example: “Our government lacked experts to consult to compensate for our ignorance. When the Berlin crisis occurred in 1961, President Kennedy was able to turn to senior people...who knew the Soviets intimately. There were no senior officials in the Pentagon or the State Department with comparable knowledge of South East Asia. The irony of this gap was that it existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the State Department had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we – certainly I – badly misread China’s objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive towards regional hegemony. We also totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement. We saw him only as a Communist and only secondly as a Vietnamese nationalist.” Why did we fail to consider China and Vietnam in the same light as we did Yugoslavia – a Communist nation independent of Moscow: Tito seemed unique, because he and Stalin had openly fallen out. And Cuba’s recent tilt toward the Soviet Union seemed illustrative of how ostensibly independent Third World movements placed themselves within the Communist orbit. Thus, we equated Ho Chi Minh not with Tito but with Fidel Castro.”

The “domino theory” that had already dunked a good part of Latin America in blood, was in a sense a premonition of “Globalization and Deregulation.” It held that the world was an indivisible prize contested between the Soviet Union and the US, and signified that any challenge to American overlordship wherever, unless checked with full military might would inexorably work its way to American home territory. No room was left for other interpretations, or alternatives to scotching any movement that didn’t conform to the “Washington Consensus.” The US at its most aggressive, was always cast as being concerned only with the defence of its homeland and the all the nobler virtues that reigned there. Amongst the more bizarre consequences of such a doctrine was the complete disregard of the alienation of the rest of the world’s respect for the country that invented modern advertising and public relations.