It’s an old National Lampoon gag, originally concerning Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but it seems appropriate in this instance. Robert McNamara was the Donald Rumsfeld of his generation, a whiz kid who was too smart for his own good (and ours).
Daniel Schulman at Mother Jones notes that Salon.com founder David Talbot wrote a 1984 cover story for the magazine on “the transformation of McNamara, former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and ex-CIA chief William Colby from Vietnam-era hawks to advocates of a nuclear weapons freeze.”
Talbot, Schulman said, described McNamara as “the cost-control wizard who thought the war could be run like a Ford assembly line: body counts, kill ratios, bombing raids. And when he saw that it wasn’t adding up, that it did not compute, he repeatedly lied — to Congress, to the press, to the American public.”
What a shame Hunter S. Thompson isn’t around to piss a quart of filtered Wild Turkey on this warmonger’s grave, the way he did on a ceremony for the unveiling of former Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s portrait at the University of Georgia Law School (see “Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith,” from “The Great Shark Hunt”).
“They should have run the bloodthirsty bastard up a flagpole by his heels,” Thompson wrote.
In his absence, we have war correspondent Joe Galloway, author of “We Were Soldiers Once and Young,” who seems pleased that “the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell” and eulogizes him as a serial liar, a distorter of history and “the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.”
Here’s hoping Bob, Dick and LBJ save Don a seat by the fire — or better yet, in it, since it seems that unlike McNamara, Rumsfeld will never have any fleeting doubts about the countless graves he has filled, with our people and theirs.
Oh, yeah. There was a bike race today, too. Somebody won. Nobody died.
Mad Blog Media 
Yep. Danger, Will Robinson. That does not compute. The Bean/Death counter says “OOOOPS”. Nothing hurts America more over the years than our cruelty to other nations. Think I’ll just ride my bike.
It’s only a matter of time before McKinsey & Co. consultants occupy every chair in the Cabinet (except for the positions held by Goldman Sachs alums, of course).
The hair style “topped” his whole deal. I just missed his show in SE Asia but some of my friends did not. I check out their names when I visit DC.
I hope he used some of the last of his 93 years to think about how many he killed. WWII civilian carpet bombing, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, his list is long.
Honestly I think HST would say that McNamara should be in heaven…well not “in” heaven, but just outside the Gates, looking in on all the fun, happy, shiny people that frolic on the green, grassy fields. Floating this way and that. Except that St. Peter is asking him his sins. And with each admission of guilt, Bobby just starts getting gloomier and gloomier until he realizes that this is karma….and he’s not in heaven. He will never be “in” heaven. Just on the outside and never able to enter it no matter if he ever admits to all his sins.
Karma’s a bitch…and then you die, Bobby. Then you die.
Or to tie in with that bike race: a French roadie. Okay, but not the dying part. Just the karma part.
I’ll give Mac some credit–he came around and admitted his fuckups. Unlike some of the more recent players we have been plagued with.
Also, hindsight tends to be 20-20. Mac saw the world through the black vs. white eyes typical of the times and of his profession as a conehead. Since none of us armchair know-it-alls here ever had to walk a mile in his sorry shoes, perhaps we should show a little humility ourselves, least we commit the same error–hubris.
The only time I ever regret being an atheist is when somebody like McNamara (or Nixon, Chaney, Rumsfeld or either Bush) blows his porch light. I would just love to imagine him in a place like hell, too bad he lived a long life and then just watched the end credits roll. And I don’t give a damn about his last decade’s worth of mea culpas, that don’t bring the dead back to life. What sets McNamara apart, though, is that he admits that he knew at the time that the war was a waste of lives but he continued to pursue it anyway.
Good riddance. Too bad he didn’t die 60 years ago, might have saved the world a lot of grief.
After reading up a little on McNamara, I have to concur a little bit with everyone. Obviously he was a great driving force behind the gigantic loss of life in Vietnam, and that should not be forgotten, regardless of what he had to say in later years. However, it is quite interesting to note that he not only said that he was wrong and sorry, but that his actions spoke the same. As president of the World Bank, he tripled funding for underprivileged people in poor nations. Not only that, but he shifted that funding more and more towards small projects that had more direct benefit for the people on the receiving end. Apparently this good work stemmed from his late-in-life belief (learning from godawful mistakes) that increasing the quality of life in the poorest nations was a more effective path to peace than huge arms races. Nothing excuses his part in the war, or his bad decisions. But at the very least, credit should be given for his proactive attempts to redeem himself as a human being, helping others in the process. I like this sort of walk-the-talk action, which is completely missing from our current political and cultural scene.
Dog Bless Joe Galloway!
I know it’s not cool to dis our military, but there are a lot of generals who went along to get along when the boys in civvies gave them their orders. Some smart guy said like a thousand years ago, know yourself, know the enemy, and we didn’t know shit about the guys we were fighting. They were more than happy to fight it on the cheap, sending individual replacements instead of unit rotations, and happy to go for insignificant little wins here and there that had no hope of securing a strategic victory. No LTC or below ever lost a battle over there, and yet no flag officer ever won a campaign.
What is amazing is that 34 years after the end of that debacle, there are still Americans who complain that we “lost” the Vietnam war and want to go refight it. What the fuck was there to lose? Vietnam was a formerly independent nation trying to extract itself from colonial occupation by the French. We went in as Cold Warriors, wearing anti-Communist blinders, in order to keep the Vietnamese neck under the boot of the Frenchman. Not much changed over the course of the war. We just replaced Frog masters with indigenous chumps.
Sure, McNamara fucked up royally. So did LBJ, who should have known better but was worried about footsteps from the Right. Let’s not forget Gen. Westmoreland, the brilliant mind behind the body count.
Well, I’m not trying to be too much of an apologist for McNamara. He rightfully wore his guilt just as Jacob Marley wore the chains he forged in life. Unlike some of Mac’s contemporaries though (and unlike virtually all of Bush and company’s stooges), he owned his mistakes. They were still mistakes.
Sad part, as far as I can tell, is that few Americans, Craig being an exception, are willing to tar Mac (or anyone else) with the same brush for his actions during WW II. Those firebombing raids (e.g., Among the Dead Cities, by A.C. Grayling) would have earned a few of our relatives from The Greatest Generation a trip to the gallows for war crimes, had the other side won.
Americans by and large have selective memories. Do the ends justify the means?
No doubt that McN is deserving of much that is being written. But, before you, me, or anyone pronounces judgement, I’d suggest watching “The Fog of War”, the 2004 Oscar-winning documentary about him. Google Video has it. BitTorrent trackers, too.
Say one thing; takes a ton of introspection and balls to say that a war you engineered was wrong-headed. Not sure I’d have the guts. Would y’all?
“Robert” McNamara? Shee-it. I always thought his first name was “That Goddam” McNamara.
My dad was a career Air Force intelligence officer who went to Vietnam as an “adviser” in 1961, before most of us could point it out on a map. He never thought we had any business being there, though he never talked about it at the time. From ’66-’68 he worked at the Pentagon, and every night, after fighting traffic back home to the Virginia suburbs, he’d goddam the Shirley Highway and the SecDef — not necessarily in that order — while he drank his martinis.
He wanted to make general, and he wanted to put in 30 years, but in 1969 he pulled the plug, convinced “that goddam Ford salesman” had sullied his profession.
McNamara was sorry all right. A sorry sack o’ shit.
Hindsight may be 20-20, but intelligence is knowing beforehand that you may actually make things worse.
To compare the “Vietnam era” with that of today is the same sheit. Dudes, that was nearly 50 years ago!! If we as a country haven’t learned anything, than McNamara feeling pathos for his fuck-ups is not going to make it any better! He can plead that he feels remorse, but as long as he contributed to the death toll of people (VC, innocents and GIs), he should not get any praise. That is for whomever allows him to the life hereafter, and last I checked that ain’t us humans (if you believe in that stuff).
By saying that we should feel sad for his passing misses the point: he didn’t do anything to stop the suffering of millions, why should millions pray for his soul? His actions seem to indicate he didn’t have one, so why waste the tears, pleas, and assorted ‘pity on his soul?’
The history books have shown that the whole LBJ/Nixon era was a military clusterfuck in SE Asia. Let it go. We can’t change that.
I’ve seen “The Fog of War.” You could print the script in 120-point type on Bounty towels and it wouldn’t come close to mopping up the blood spilled via remote control by McNamara and his bean-counting comrades.
Anybody know the statute of limitations on mass murder? Pop up 20 years after a single homicide and cop to it, you might find yourself in the shit; concede that your “wrongheadedness” may have sent millions to their deaths and you make the front page of The New York Times when you croak.
Wholesale slaughter would seem to be moral if you win, but amoral if you lose (see the Nuremberg trials, or summon Saddam Hussein’s shade, if you have a Ouija board handy). Happily for Mac, the winners write the histories. And anyway, he’s dead, so he’s beyond the reach of such as us.
Or not. I suspect McNamara’s grave will smell like urine for the better part of quite some time. Some of it will be mine.
44 years too late.
Yup, it’s a sure pity that we all aren’t running the country. No doubt all of us experts would have done things different and better–especially if we were doing the bidding of the Prez. My suggestion it that y’all run for office, and tell us how it sits, once y’all are there.
BTW, read the “Pentigon Papers”….
Rico,
I have run for office (alderman) and I have served in government as an appointed citizen rep on city committees. I now manage a tax-payer supported institution and report to 7 elected trustees. So maybe I have some personal experience functioning in the area between politics and management/delivery of a visible service.
But that’s neither here nor there.
Just because each and everyone of us does not (can not) play a direct role in the day to day operations of our government does not relieve us from expecting those we elect and the people our representative hire to assist them manage their responsibilities with honesty, intelligence, ethics and as much transparency as possible for the best common good.
McNamara failed on many of those qualities, especially the last one by focusing too much on the intelligence one.
The NYT’s has a piece that talks about McNamara’s rectitude as an explanation for his not expressing his opinion that the war was lost much earlier, perhaps as early as 1968. Well if that’s the case then he failed the moral test and the common good test as well, by not providing his employers (us) with his best judgment when it could have had an impact. So I guess he failed the honesty test too.
And when he did finally tell LBJ the war was a lost cause, he was fired.
Go figure.
Followed by his boss.
“If nominated I will not run. If elected I will not serve.”