Robert McNamara Was Never Really in Touch with His Role in Causing Atrocity in Vietnam

By Andrew Lam, New America Media. Posted July 9, 2009.

McNamara kept sending American troops to Vietnam while knowing deep in his heart that the war was not winnable, and encouraged the South to continue fighting. It is no wonder that South Vietnamese tell the story of their relationship with America as one of spectacular betrayal. The United States abandoned the South Vietnamese government in the middle of a war. Many South Vietnamese officials died in communist gulags after the war's end, and more than 2 million Vietnamese fled overseas as boat people, many ending up at the bottom of the sea. McNamara never made references to the suffering of the South Vietnamese people as a direct cause of his administration of the war, as if somehow an entire people have conveniently ceased to exist. In later years, he made peace with his enemies but not with the allies that the US abandoned.

McNamara left the Johnson administration in 1967. Despite what he knew about the war, he refused to speak out against it, and watched in silence as more body bags came home. Foggy or not, someone as smart as McNamara should know right from wrong. If the secretary of defense knew it was wrong to continue the war, why did he keep his silence until now, more than three decades later? If he knew he was killing innocent people unnecessarily, where was the man who should, in the aftermath of terrible bloodshed and in acknowledging the mistakes, beg from the deepest part of his humanity for forgiveness?

Morris asked him precisely that. "Why," he inquires near the end of the film, "did you fail to speak out against the war after you left the Johnson administration?"

"I'm not going to say any more than I have," McNamara responded. "These are the kinds of questions that get me in trouble. You don't know what I know about how inflammatory my words can appear."

The documentary has a subtitle: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara. One of them is, "Believing and seeing are both often wrong." What that means to McNamara is that doing the right thing turned out to be an enormous error.

What it means to me is that when a man confesses yet cannot connect the horror he helped unleash with his own humanity, he is not to be trusted. Alas, if I and others who want to hear a heartfelt apology, we no longer can. The old fog of war had permanently thickened with his passing.

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Andrew Lam is editor of New America Media and the author of "Perfume Dreams; Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora."

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