Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

McNamara Recalls, and Regrets, Vietnam

McNamara Recalls, and Regrets, Vietnam
Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
April 9, 1995, Section 1, Page 1Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

Robert S. McNamara, once a champion of the escalation of the Vietnam War, says in a memoir to be published in the coming week that he has now concluded that the United States "could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam" in late 1963 after the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem or a year or so later.

In November 1963, 78 Americans had died in the war in Vietnam. In late 1964, the total stood at 225. By the war's end in 1975, it had passed 58,000.

Mr. McNamara served as Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968 and pushed so hard for deeper American military involvement in 1964 and 1965 that the conflict in Southeast Asia became known as "McNamara's War." Later, he broke with President Lyndon B. Johnson and urged that a diplomatic solution be sought. Convinced that the war was unwinnable, he left the Pentagon in 1968 to head the World Bank.

Identified in the public mind as a cold, calculating "numbers cruncher," Mr. McNamara seems deeply stirred by his literary journey back to the 1960's. He broke down in tears while talking to Diane Sawyer of ABC News for a program that is to be broadcast next week. That profoundly embarrassed him, he said in an interview today, "but the sense of grief and failure is strong."

The interviews and memoir represent Mr. McNamara's first substantive public comment on the war after almost three decades in which he declined to discuss it. In the book, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," (Times Books, $27.50), he is unsparing in blaming himself and his Government colleagues, including President Johnson, for a series of blunders that led to tragedy.

"I want to put Vietnam in context," he writes, because he believes that Vietnam helped make the American people cynical about their Government and because "it is cynicism that makes Americans reluctant to support their leaders in the actions necessary to confront and solve our problems at home and abroad."

Still highly active at 78, climbing mountains and striding through downtown Washington in a pair of battered running shoes, Mr. McNamara offers a limited defense of American policies, arguing that the errors he made were errors "not of values and intentions but of judgment and capabilities." But he adds: "We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."

He lists "11 major causes for our disaster in Vietnam," including misjudging the capacity of North Vietnam, underrating nationalism as a force in the world, failing to recognize the limitations of high-tech equipment, failing to level with Congress and the American public and, crucially, poor organization. Like Winston Churchill in World War II, he says, Johnson needed a war cabinet.

Asked in the interview today whether the same mistakes could be repeated now, he responded, "Absolutely, not only can be but are being repeated." American difficulties in Bosnia and Somalia, he said, involved some similar errors.

In his book, Mr. McNamara says the ultimate cause of failure in Asia lay with the South Vietnamese. Echoing what both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Johnson said, Mr. McNamara states that it was the Asians' war, ultimately, to win or lose.

After President Diem's death, a series of coups convinced American officials that the South Vietnamese were incapable of putting together a stable government.

By the mid-1960's, Mr. McNamara says, it was clear that "political stability did not exist and was unlikely ever to be achieved" and "the South Vietnamese, even with our training assistance and logistical support, were incapable of defending themselves."

Drawing on his own papers and other Government documents, some of them just declassified, Mr. McNamara insists that American bombing never seriously threatened Hanoi's capacity to wage war and that American ground operations never established any real, lasting security in the South Vietnamese countryside.

Nor did the pacification program win many "hearts and minds," he writes.

But he and others, Mr. McNamara says, failed again and again to question flawed assumptions and to face basic geopolitical questions as they escalated the war again and again.

Looking back, he writes: "I deeply regret that I did not force a probing debate about whether it would ever be possible to forge a winning military effort on a foundation of political quicksand. It became clear then, and I believe it is clear today, that military force -- especially when wielded by an outside power -- cannot bring order in a country that cannot govern itself."

He identifies repeated occasions on which portents of trouble or opportunities for disengagement were ignored: a dissent on the use of airpower from Gen. H. K. Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff, in September 1964; a cable from Ambassador Maxwell Taylor in December 1964; a warning against escalation from President Johnson's old senatorial mentor, Richard B. Russell of Georgia, in June 1965.

When diplomatic initiatives were undertaken, Mr. McNamara says, they were often spoiled by what he terms a "miserable failure to integrate and coordinate our military and diplomatic actions." Several times, he says, just when Hanoi had been told to watch for signs of good faith, it was subjected to stepped-up bombing.

Finally, Mr. McNamara says, he despaired of changing things. In a memo he sent President Johnson on May 19, 1967, as his doubts crystallized, he warned:

"There may be limits beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one. It could conceivably produce a costly distortion in the American national consciousness and in the world image of the United States."

Mr. McNamara says he belatedly concluded that the domino theory enunciated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and subscribed to by his three successors was wrong: The loss of South Vietnam never threatened to undermine the entire American position in Asia or to undercut United States credibility elsewhere.

"On the contrary," he writes, "it is possible we would have improved our credibility by withdrawing from Vietnam and saving our strength for more defensible stands elsewhere."

Others in Government reached similar conclusions but did not share them widely. Mr. McNamara discloses that Richard Helms, at that time the Director of Central Intelligence, sent President Johnson an eyes-only memo in September 1967 that the President showed to no one and that Mr. McNamara only recently read. Based on a detailed agency study, it said that, contrary to what was then established American doctrine, the effects of "an unfavorable outcome in Vietnam" -- a United States defeat or withdrawal -- "would not be permanently damaging to this country's capacity to play its part as a world power working for order and security in many areas."

Mr. McNamara writes that he believes President Kennedy would have eventually decided to withdraw from Vietnam, had he lived, but he offers no details to support the assertion.

The book contains other revelations, among them President Johnson's tentative offer of the 1964 Democratic vice presidential nomination to Mr. McNamara.

But it sheds little light on the circumstances of Mr. McNamara's departure from the Pentagon. As the Defense Secretary's relations with the President soured, he indicates, George Woods, then the World Bank president, approached him about the job, and he indicated interest. Mr. Johnson approved the idea, and the deal was done. But Mr. McNamara says it is not clear whether the President was involved from the start.

"I do not know to this day whether I quit or was fired," he writes. "Maybe it was both."

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 1, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: McNamara Recalls, and Regrets, Vietnam. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT