E-mail Story
Print Friendly
Send E-mail
Reprint story
Speakup and View Comments
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
McNamara and the War Still Fought
By Winthrop Quigley
Journal Staff Writer
Robert McNamara is dead.
It is impossible for people who are not of a certain age and political inclination to appreciate how thoroughly some of us despised Robert McNamara during and following his tenure as defense secretary from 1961 to 1968.
In 1964, a senator described the Vietnam War as "McNamara's war." McNamara said, "I am pleased to be identified with it." By 1966, McNamara decided the war could not be won militarily, and in 1995, he wrote in his memoir that he was "terribly wrong" about Vietnam. Upon learning of McNamara's change of heart, I asked myself: If high school and college kids at the time knew it was a bad idea, why did it take so long for McNamara to get the memo?
Despite his 1966 epiphany, and despite the public's almost universal revulsion for the war by 1968, thousands of Americans and Vietnamese continued to die well into the 1970s.
We still fight the Vietnam War. A theme of the 2004 presidential election was whether John Kerry's Vietnam-era medals were deserved and whether by opposing the war when he left the Navy he was a traitor. In the language of the time, some of us think of George W. Bush as a "fortunate one" — the son of a wealthy and powerful man who used his dad's connections to get out of harm's way in the Texas Air National Guard.
Vietnam is a scar that never healed properly. Years after the war ended, and before our first Iraq war, I found myself talking about my opposition to the war with a much younger friend. How could you not have served your country? she asked. I know Vietnam veterans who believe that anti-war activists like me stabbed them in the back by showing the North Vietnamese that all they had to do was wait for American domestic opposition to end the war before our troops could secure military victory.
People who actually knew something about the country knew this wasn't true. Vietnam was a Confucian society that thought in terms of generations, not years. To the Vietnamese, the American war was just another chapter in a fight for political control that was already generations old when we showed up. Another generation or two of fighting until the proper (in the Confucian sense) ruler appeared was, in that society's view, just how the universe works sometimes.
A little late, McNamara figured out that, "We didn't understand the Vietnamese, particularly the North Vietnamese. So the first lesson is know your opponents."
For younger readers I should explain that unlike our all-volunteer military of today, men were conscripted (or drafted) into the Army starting at age 18. You could get a deferment that excused you from military service if you were a full-time undergraduate student, for medical reasons and on a few other grounds. Starting in 1969, the order in which people were drafted was determined by randomly drawing birth dates. My birthday was chosen No. 1.
People opposed the war for all kinds of reasons. Mine was simply this: The war in Vietnam did not serve American interests. I loved my country too much to sit silently while it made a terrible, self-destructive mistake. My friends who entered the military did their duty, and I did mine.
I joined some demonstrations, but I was appalled by the disrespect some demonstrators showed people in uniform, and I was sickened by the violence of the radical left. I spent most of my anti-war time working to get other young men out of the draft. I kept dropping in and out of college in those days, so I never managed to get a student deferment. Instead, I learned everything I could about draft law. There were so many ways to tie a draft board up in legal knots, I pretty quickly managed to guarantee I would never be drafted. I started advising other guys about ways to use the draft law to their own advantage. I reasoned that if we denied the military its soldiers, the war would have to end sooner rather than later.
Of course, it didn't. The last American was killed in Vietnam in 1975, seven years after McNamara left office. When my draft board discovered I was going to be too much trouble to draft, it just took the next kid on the list.
I don't know when I stopped despising Robert McNamara. Maybe it was when I began to think about who the next kid on the list might have been. Did he believe in the war? Did he have a family who worried about him? Did he make it home? When I think about that kid, I realize that while I was right about the war, I wasn't striking a blow for the moral order. I was merely being clever.
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Win Quigley at 823-3896 or wquigley@ abqjournal.com
| We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. |
|
|
