[Peace-discuss] Old Campaigners

[C. G. Estabrook]

[De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est -- nothing should be said of the dead 
but what is good -- but that's a bit overdone in this article by former CIA man 
Pincus in the Washington Post, about the architect of the SE Asian war that 
killed perhaps four million people.  As I remember, the Washington Post 
published an article about the (unexpected) death of Hermann Goering under the 
title "Remembering Goering's Hope for Peace."  --CGE]


	Remembering McNamara's Hope for Peace
	By Walter Pincus
	Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Robert S. McNamara's last message to his wife, Diana, was typical, no nonsense. 
"No funeral/memorial service" was the way it began.

But he continued, "I leave this earth believing that I have been blessed with a 
wife, children and friends who have brought me love and happiness beyond 
compare." To this not-very-religious man, "Heaven ... will be to remain in their 
hearts and memories as warm and close as we were in life."

My wife and I were among those lucky enough to be among those friends. Over 20 
years, we had many dinners together, often followed by Kennedy Center symphonic 
concerts for music we all loved. A little over three months ago, at one of his 
last public outings, we had lunch together at the Cosmos Club with our wives. He 
was lucid but frail. Hopeful about initial steps taken by President Obama on 
nuclear weapons, but fearful about the nation's growing involvement in 
Afghanistan -- a situation so much like Vietnam.

Nuclear weapons and Vietnam were the way he and I first met, but back in the 
1960s, it was in a totally different context. During an 18-month sabbatical from 
journalism, I worked for Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), then chairman of 
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Over those months, then-Defense 
Secretary McNamara was first an architect of the successful U.S. response to the 
1962 Cuban missile crisis and, the next year, a proponent of the 1963 Limited 
Test Ban Treaty. In the fall of 1963, McNamara and Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor 
recommended a reduction of U.S. troops acting as trainers in Vietnam because 
they thought the war was going well and that -- another belief that turned out 
to be wrong -- they could use the reduction to force the leaders of South 
Vietnam to reform their government.

Later, however, McNamara presided over not just the buildup of the U.S. nuclear 
arsenal but also the enormous enlargement and public justification of the 
Vietnam War, actions that were destructive abroad and here at home. Those 
decisions in the 1960s haunted him until the day he died.

Initially, with his move from the Pentagon to the World Bank, he appeared to 
want to make up for a destructive past with a creative future. But those 13 
years of trying to do good for the less fortunate around the world did not shake 
the demons still within him. Neither did the books he wrote or co-wrote about 
the war. Introspection took hold in the 1990s, as he tried to understand others' 
sharp criticism of his books, in which he initially disclosed his privately 
voiced opposition to the war while still at the Pentagon.

But it was in his interviews with filmmaker Errol Morris, which became the 
Oscar-winning 2004 documentary "The Fog of War," and during the many 
conversations he had with students who had seen the film, that he began to find 
peace with himself.

In the film, McNamara said, "At my age, 85, I'm at an age where I can look back 
and derive some conclusions about my actions. My rule has been try to learn, try 
to understand what happened. Develop the lessons and pass them on."

"Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning" was one lesson headlined in the Morris 
film that has direct application to today. "What makes us omniscient?" asked 
McNamara, referring to Vietnam but also looking at the world then around him. 
"Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world 
today. I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political and 
military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we 
wouldn't have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not 
Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable 
values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning."

In November 1967, McNamara presented President Lyndon B. Johnson with a memo 
that said: "The course we're on is totally wrong. We've got to change it. Cut 
back at what we're doing in Vietnam. We've got to reduce the casualties."

McNamara, in the film, said he told Johnson, "I know that it may contain 
recommendations and statements that you do not agree with and do not support," 
and added: "I never heard from him."

Thereafter, among rumors in Washington that McNamara was facing a nervous 
breakdown, the announcement came that he was leaving to go to the World Bank.

In another move that has echoes in recent years, McNamara said of his time with 
Johnson: "That's the way it ended. Except for one thing: He awarded me the Medal 
of Freedom in a very beautiful ceremony at the White House. And he was very, 
very warm in his comments. And I became so emotional, I could not respond."

In his last major article, titled "Apocalypse Soon" and published in Foreign 
Policy magazine in 2005, McNamara expressed his concerns about the immorality 
and danger of placing reliance on nuclear weapons as foreign policy tools. He 
particularly focused on the United States and Russia having the weapons on 
alert. Those arms "are potent signs that the United States is not seriously 
working toward the elimination of its arsenal and raises troubling questions as 
to why any other state should restrain its nuclear ambitions," he wrote.

In that final message to his wife, he summed up his hope of the future: for 
"others continuing to pursue the objectives which I have sought (very 
imperfectly at times) to move the world toward peace among people and nations 
and to accelerate economic and social progress for the least advantaged among us."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070603771.html?hpid=sec-politics