In the waning days of World War II, a good
number of Nazi war criminals and sympathizers
traded their uniforms for civilian
wear and slid into anonymity in disparate
regions worldwide. Jewish Nazi hunters
tracked many down as did the Soviets. Even
into the past decade, it wasn’t unusual to
flip on the news and find a Nazi war criminal
had been discovered in South America,
captured and turned over to authorities for
trial. It was always a sad spectacle. They
were old men by then.
In their new lives, they had made friends
who often testified to the good qualities of
the old, feeble men. Let bygones be bygones,
they often would say. You must be mistaken,
came their chorus. Families caught up
in the profound mess usually trod the same
line of denial: Let him die in peace, here,
now; he’s suffered enough. And of course,
with each discovery, a battery of surviving
victims of the Nazi regime took the screen
to scold their former tormentors and to
remind all of us how inhumane mankind
can be. The victims’ faces were witness to
Nazi genocide; their arms, tattooed with
identifying numbers and symbols, spoke
to the authenticity that they gained their
authoritative perspectives on mass extermination
at Buchenwald or Auschwitz.
That Nazi death parade is nearly over.
With each war criminal’s passing, we gain
some measure of justice, but we lose something,
too: the “obvious sinister.” In my
youth, when the word Nazi was spoken, you
knew it meant evil—and, if you doubted it,
somebody’s dad would raise his shirt and
point to the 10-inch scar across his stomach
and say, “then that Nazi S.O.B. shot me right
here,” to which kids would recoil in fear.
If you say “Nazi” today, you think of Tom
Cruise. Yeah, he’s doing the right thing in
the movie Valkyrie, but the bad guys could
be any bad guys. World War II is basically
just a string of movies now, and the most
sinister roles in today’s movies are played
by farting dogs.
So it is that—lacking perspective on real
evil, on real “sinisters”—many Americans are
heaping piles of hateful good-riddance upon
Robert McNamara, who died this week at the
old age of 93. McNamara is regarded as the
architect of the Vietnam War—a misplaced
distinction, considering the Vietnam War had
been fought for decades before the United
States entered it. McNamara may be the guy
who painted a mustache on the work of Ho
Chi Minh, who was fighting for Vietnamese
independence, or who tangled the plans of
General Giap, but he was
hardly the architect. Nor
was he sinister. Saying
or seeing the name
“McNamara” did not
send the same chill down
your spine as “Nazi.”
If anything,
McNamara was delusional.
He thought
we were superior to
the Vietnamese, because, after all, we are
Americans and, well, they are Vietnamese.
He thought we could mop them up into a tidy
corner in a few months. He thought our technology
would beat their wit, guile and nationalism.
He thought we could win in Vietnam
by killing them faster than they could kill us.
He thought about war, like building a car—
McNamara was once president of Ford Motor
Company—that if you just put all the nuts and
bolts and chrome in the right places, it would
work and Americans would buy it. And they
did. He never once thought he could be wrong
in either strategy or mission.
Americans bought all the war chrome
McNamara could sell, and our boys were
off to war. Actually, Americans had been
dying in Vietnam long before the 1965 Gulf
of Tonkin resolution that allowed President
Lyndon Johnson’s administration to greatly
expand the war. The Marines landed, my
brother among them, in March 1965. They
were told—and America was sold the idea—that they’d be home for Christmas. It would
be nine more Christmases until all American
troops were back from Vietnam. More than
58,000 American men and woman would
die waiting for their holiday pound cake.
So much for McNamara always being right,
being truly among the “best and brightest,”
as proclaimed by author David Halberstam.
Our war dead was a palpable war expense
and a scalable number to McNamara, since
we were indeed killing them faster than they
could kill us. A war of attrition is no way to
win a war, yet that’s the only way McNamara
knew how to win. His own war experience
during World War II came as an analyst
measuring efficiencies of the B-29 bomber—which were indeed efficient against an
enemy surrounded and
on the run, not the case
in Vietnam. He became
more “efficient” at Ford
Motor Company after
World War II. He was so
efficient, President John
F. Kennedy named him
as Secretary of Defense
in his Camelot administration.
His should have
been an honorable obituary. It will not be.
I cannot and will not defend Robert
McNamara. As with the passing of Nixon
and Johnson before him, I will not shed a
tear. I will not miss him. But I don’t regard
him as an ogre, as an inherently evil man.
The scorn many people possess is not
because of what happened in Vietnam, it’s
due to what happened because of Vietnam.
What America gained in good music pales
to its national mourning, a humanitarian
debt, a society torn and a nation still
unable to right its own moral compass.
Blame McNamara all day long. Scorn him
till the cows come home, if it makes you feel
good. But he is not the obvious sinister, just
the obvious scapegoat—a dead scapegoat at
that. McNamara lived a long, efficient life.
That others would not because of his decisions
is an irony that wouldn’t matter much
in his analytical mind. His death doesn’t
even square the score. Spare the histrionic
trial. Bury him and be done with it.