The death of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at age 93 has reopened the debate on his role, first as architect for the Vietnam War, and then later in apologizing for it with his 1995 book “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.” Since a hawk with a conscience is a rare commodity, McNamara deserves the attention he is getting.
One of his post-Vietnam “lessons” was the need to “empathize” with the alleged enemy — to realize that they are humans like we are with legitimate desires and hopes. It is a very worthy goal. But how do you do that once the shooting begins and bombs begin to to fall?
The hawks and their well-subsidized camp followers in the think tanks, universities and media take over, dragging public opinion behind them. The enemy is dehumanized. McNamara is said to have realized the futility of the Vietnam War as early as 1967 — before he moved to head the World Bank (April 1968). But that did not stop the war from continuing another eight years, with even more dreadful killing and bombing.
One of McNamara’s braver acts was visiting Hanoi after the war to meet with Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap and other Vietnamese military leaders and discuss the war that had obsessed him for decades. The filmed version, broadcast in 1998 and only in Japan, it seems, thanks to announcer Hideo Yamamuro and other NHK progressives, is even more powerful than the book. It shows a genuinely contrite McNamara exposed directly to the Vietnamese point of view, namely that it was purely a civil war, that it had no connection with China or falling dominoes (a Washington obsession earlier shared by McNamara) and that originally it had not even been anti-American. So why had they been subjected to a brutality rarely seen in human warfare?
One dramatic moment had McNamara pointing out how a key element in a U.S. decision seriously to escalate the war had been the 1965 Vietnamese attack on the U.S. Pleiku Air Base the day a senior U.S. official arrived in Saigon. The United States was determined it could not be humiliated in this way.
We then saw the amazed North Vietnamese commander responsible for the attack asking how, isolated in the jungle, he could even have known about the official’s visit. His decision was based purely on the weather and other local factors at the time. Meanwhile, back in Washington, it was being seen as yet another link in Hanoi’s dastardly plans.
And so it continued — a catalog of mistakes, lies, deceptions, foolishness and misunderstanding that makes even the U.S. war in Iraq look sane. I was somewhat involved as midlevel Australian diplomat based in Moscow in the early ’60s. The Australian government had decided, without the benefit of even a single Vietnamese speaker in its establishment, that in the April 1965 words of the then Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, “the takeover of South Vietnam must be seen as part of a thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.” At around the same time the Australian foreign minister, Paul Hasluck, told us that China was determined to establish hegemony in Southeast Asia “working in the first place through the agency of her North Vietnamese puppets.”
On this basis Canberra had quixotically decided that it was our job in Moscow to persuade the Soviets to join the West in restraining a belligerent China. I was sent to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs to pass on our regrets over Moscow’s failure to realize China’s evil role in promoting the Vietnam war. Hasluck himself came to Moscow to pass on the same message, only to be met by a puzzled Soviet premier, Alexei Kosygin, saying there was no way Moscow would want to cease its support for the brave Vietnamese people seeking national independence, and he hoped the Chinese would do a lot more too.
Even then the evidence of China’s weak support for Vietnam was obvious. Simply by talking to the many North Vietnamese students in Moscow at the time, one could confirm that Hanoi was pro-Moscow and China was distrusted. Beijing was to prove this by launching a grubby little border war against Vietnam a few years later. Yet in the West our best and brightest had convinced themselves the Vietnam war was a Chinese plot.
In 1965 I was to leave the diplomatic service and join the anti-Vietnam war debate, convinced it was only a matter of time before people would realize that China was not involved, that it was in fact a civil war in which our side was busily killing a lot of brave Vietnamese who simply wanted to reunify their nation (as had been promised by an international agreement) and to oppose a corrupt, cruel, artificial, U.S.-controlled government in Saigon. We should have saved our collective breath. If anything we prolonged the war, giving the people at the top an added incentive to try to prove us wrong.
Today the magic word is “terrorist.” In those days it was “communist.” The very words were able to conjure up images of evil men hiding out and preparing to kill our brave soldiers. Talk of emphasizing — realizing that these people had to hide out in order to survive, and that many were fighting in response to the brutality and killings by our side — has long been out of the question. Only when, as in Vietnam, our side is defeated despite its overwhelming military superiority do a few like McNamara have the moral responsibility to admit their mistake. We have yet to see any similar responsibility in Australia, despite its at times crucial role in encouraging the U.S. into Vietnam.
Gregory Clark is a longtime Japan resident. His book “In Fear of China” was published in 1968. A Japanese translation of this article will appear on www.gregoryclark.net.