On Robert S. McNamara

It’s been a month since the death of Robert S. McNamara, that most significant of American Defense Secretaries and I’d like to add a few belated notes to the eulogies and obits. Widely know as one of the main architects of the Vietnam war, here are a couple of lesser known factoids: McNamara’s middle name was Strange and he is credited as the first Secretary to bring modern management efficiency to the vast corridors of the Pentagon.

I never met McNamara but came close in the early 1990s when I was writing a history thesis about US involvement in Vietnam during President Kennedy’s administration. I’d already interviewed a couple of interesting characters. Lou Conein was a CIA operative mixed up in the coup that brought about the demise of President Ngo Dinh Diem and with him any last vestige of chance that South Vietnam could survive. It’s quite weird to sit down with someone who mentions en passant, “Ho Chi Minh was a very personable fellow when you met him…I really had nothing personally against him at all.” Lou, you see, had been in the OSS during the Second World War and briefly worked with the nationalist leader. By 1963 the old friend was an old foe and let’s just say that Lou had a lot of dental appointments in the weeks before the coup in South Vietnam.

Then there was U. Alexis Johnson of the State Department. An old fellow who lived in a luxury apartment in Washington DC with a black maid who – wearing a classic old style uniform – served us coffee at the elegant table in the elegant dining room. It was like living inside Gone with the Wind or something. That aside, the man was a delight. A mantelpiece full of pictures of him shaking hands with about five Presidents. He had been one of around a dozen people holed up with Kennedy in the emergency committee deciding the fate of the world during the Cuban Missile crisis. Now he was sad about the death of his wife. She had fallen in the bathroom and a breath later he talked of how he met her in the 1920s and drove around the countryside. With charm he invoked the phrase “and one thing led to another” on more than one occasion when referring to the sexual turning points of his life. But I digress.

The point is that of course I would never be able to interview the man at the centre of it all - JFK. But McNamara was his right hand man when it came to Vietnam and he was the highest level interviewee left to muster. His office politely turned down my approach though saying he was busy finishing his book. No matter. I had already studied my topic in depth and felt I had a handle on the man.

McNamara was a decent human being. He was smart too. He had his failings of course, believing in the power of numbers just a little too much, but as failings go that isn’t too bad now is it. And he got it horribly wrong with Vietnam. By his own admission he incorrectly viewed the conflict through the pink-tinted spectacles of the cold war: as a struggle between capitalism and communism. This isn’t how the Vietnamese saw it of course. To them this was a war of national liberation against yet another bunch of foreign imperialists. First the Chinese, then the French, now the Americans. Charlie was used to it.

So the slicked-back former Ford exec misunderstood the war but he was not a bad man. Most certainly not an evil man. McNamara was a better and more impressive human being than most of us will ever be. And yet…and yet his decisions led to thousands, maybe millions, of his fellow humans being killed and maimed. Babies burned by napalm. Sons tortured. Daughters raped. McNamara had crafted that policy of war. This is what flowed from his policy.

And you’re telling me the guy wasn’t evil…or warped…or deranged…or degenerate in some way? Yes indeed. This is precisely what I’m saying. McNamara was a good man.

Conspiracy theories are fashionable nowadays, especially when it comes to JFK. Ultimately, they all say the same thing: the evil of this world is down to conspirators who lurk in the shadows and manipulate events for their own malevolent ends. They murder the good and the brave. But let me tell you this Mr Conspiracy Theory Man, in the middle ages peasants rarely blamed the king for their troubles. No. Instead they invariably blamed the ‘king’s evil advisors’. Of course in reality the situation they bemoaned had almost always been signed off by the king, it’s just that the peasants preferred not to believe it. So it is with modern day conspiracy theories. The most tragic events are simply not allowed to be explained by an unfortunate swirl of complexity, randomness and misapprehension. No. A sinister controlling force must be found. It has to be the king’s evil advisor wot done it. The problem couldn’t possibly be on our side of the table, but over there, way yonder, among the shadowy world of wicked conspirators. So convenient to think so and such total bollocks.

The really scary thing about the world is not that awful things happen because nasty, evil people conspire to create them. The really scary thing is that good people – good people with normal flaws who make understandable mistakes – can give rise to the most despicable situations. Now that is Strange.