The McNamaras to Come
Like many my age, I took home my most vivid memory of Robert McNamara from The Fog of War, the astoundingly good 2003 Errol Morris documentary. (Lots of the movie is available on YouTube, including Italian versions, but it’s really worth sitting down and seeing the whole thing.) I was completely unprepared for McNamara’s moral seriousness, and I remember that even my dad, who was watching with me, came away impressed by this man whom he had spend so many decades despising.
And yet what I remember even more than McNamara’s performance (and despite my admiration I’d like to think that I never forgot it was also always that, a performance) was this thought: how long will it be before we have to sit through a similar rite of self-flagellation by one of the architects of the War on Terror? (My guess is that when it comes, it will be Condoleeza Rice who performs it.)
When that time does come, I hope we’ll have someone who will say what Howell Raines said about McNamara in 1995,* in an unsigned New York Times editorial about McNamara’s confessional memoir “In Retrospect”:
Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen.…
Perhaps the only value of “In Retrospect” is to remind us never to forget that these were men who in the full hubristic glow of their power would not listen to logical warning or ethical appeal. When senior figures talked sense to Mr. Johnson and Mr. McNamara, they were ignored or dismissed from government. When young people in the ranks brought that message, they were court-martialed. When young people in the streets shouted it, they were hounded from the country.
It is important to remember how fate dispensed rewards and punishment for Mr. McNamara’s thousands of days of error. Three million Vietnamese died. Fifty-eight thousand Americans got to come home in body bags. Mr. McNamara, while tormented by his role in the war, got a sinecure at the World Bank and summers at the Vineyard.
…
His regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books for our dead soldiers. The ghosts of those unlived lives circle close around Mr. McNamara. Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.
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*(Of course, by that time, we’ll probably need such a reminder for Raines himself, who led the Times, as executive editor, through one of its most disgraceful patches in recent history, the 2002-2003 Judy Miller powered rush to the Iraq war. “So much has changed since those horrendous times,” Raines wrote elsewhere in the piece. That’s true enough, I suppose—smaller cars, a black president, more iPhones—but what never changes, apparently, is the inability of “men in the full hubristic glow of their power” to listen to logical and ethical appeals or common sense from the kids on the streets. So it goes and so it goes.)
I’d thought to write a similar post when I came across this—except that mine would reach exactly the opposite conclusion about McNamara. Nobody could have been less morally serious than he, explaining that all the protesters just really didn’t understand the nature of the communist menace, wrestling with how bad he feels about directly causing the slaughter of two to three million people. The only morally serious response adequate to his crimes would have been suicide.
“Nobody could have been less morally serious than he”
Really, nobody? I could fill a ring of Dante’s hell with ex-cabinet members who fit the bill, and still clog a whole ‘nother ring with Kissinger alone.
But okay, if my endorsement of Raines’s piece wasn’t enough for you, I’ll spell it out: I didn’t mean to suggest that McNamara had reached any kind of enlightenment, only that the extent and relative frankness of the moral reflection he displayed in The Fog of War far, far exceeded anything I expected to hear. Of course it was incomplete, of course it was insufficient, of course it was, as I said, at some level an act. But it’s not every decade you get to hear a former defense secretary questioning the U.S.’s decisions to firebomb Tokyo or drop nuclear bombs. McNamara did, and that impressed me.
I has hyperbole & I receives Dante?
It’s clear that you do not suggest anything about “enlightenment” or endorse McNamara’s act. But “morally serious” is a claim I can’t understand in this case. I don’t see why we should be “impressed” when war criminals express a portion of the regret we don’t expect them to feel. I thought The Fog of War was, on one level, a dishonest, ugly piece of theater. It is repugnant that McNamara supposed that anything mattered about his life except his role in mass death—like his books about that role, or his apologies for it. Three million people. You don’t get to talk after something like that; you’ve resigned your right to moral consideration, & the only morally decent thing to do is to withdraw from public life entirely. Not star in movies.
I’ve got no desire or plans to defend to the death—or even to the next round of comments—the morality of one Robert Strange McNamara. And to the extent that In Retrospect and Fog of War were attempts to keep himself in the news, yes, of course they’re morally repugnant. But to the extent that they’re attempts to reckon (and reckon with) the damage he did, I think they are morally serious. I’m not saying that anyone should pay attention to him on that account, or that you’re necessarily wrong to say that “the only morally decent thing to do is to withdraw from public life entirely,” only that you don’t have to be Dante to believe that McNamara’s late and partial repentance matters in some small and feeble way. How and to whom it matters is a question I’m not really prepared to answer, except to say that I can’t agree with you that moral consideration is an alienable right. And on that unsatisfying note, I’m going to bed.