Ghosts walk the streets of the nation’s capital.
I thought I saw one the other day among the homeless in a park near the White House–moving swiftly in rubber-soled shoes, head down, shoulders slumped, carrying a cheap tote bag.
I stared bemusedly. Could it be, I wondered? Yes, it was.
Robert S. McNamara.
If that name rings not a bell, you may well be too young to remember the 1960s. McNamara was the secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968, the Kennedy and Johnson years. As principal maestro of the American effort in Vietnam, his name haunted my days and nights through four years of college and, after I was drafted, two years in the Army.
Now, at age 83, the ghost walks near the place where I work. He was, for me, an eerie sight. I wondered how many of the homeless men in the park were, like me, Vietnam-era veterans? People sometimes do strange things when they spot Bob McNamara. One deranged individual, before he was subdued, almost threw McNamara off the deck of a moving ferry.
I just looked, quietly wondering how many of the discarded men lounging about the park with their musty clothing and bulging shopping bags might have been Vietnam veterans.
I filed the encounter away as one more Washington memory until I began reading a new book by Michael Lind, “Vietnam: The Necessary War.”
Lind, the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, has written a book I figured McNamara would appreciate. Lind defends the war as a noble cause, a crucial campaign that had to be fought in the larger Cold War, not the doomed mistake from its very start that today’s conventional wisdom calls it.
But, after embracing that traditionally conservative view, Lind goes on to argue that Richard Nixon made a mistake by staying in too long after 1968.
“It was necessary for the United States to forfeit the war after 1968 in order to preserve the American domestic political consensus in favor of the Cold War on other fronts,” Lind writes.
Instead, America stayed in for several more years and thousands more names on the Vietnam War Memorial, a meat grinder that left Americans too gun-shy to stop Soviet-inspired communist aggression on other fronts, particularly in Africa and Asia throughout the 1970s, Lind argues.
Only when Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterand and other Western democratic leaders waged a “Second Cold War,” in Lind’s view, from 1979 to 1989, up against heavy criticism from their left, was the communist advance stopped and the Soviet Union driven into bankruptcy.
Vietnam, then, was a military defeat, he writes, not a mistake, “nor a betrayal nor a crime.”
Curious as to whether the former banker and automobile executive might feel in some way vindicated by Lind’s book, despite its criticisms of the way he handled the war, I reached McNamara by telephone in the office he keeps in downtown Washington.
He seemed eager to talk but not on the record. He didn’t want to get into a public argument with Lind. Instead, he referred me to his own books, particularly his latest, “Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy.”
Like his 1995 confessional, “In Retrospect,” McNamara’s latest book reveals that he believes the war was far less “necessary” and much more a series of American mistakes, including his own, than Lind does. In both of his books, McNamara lists at least six “missed opportunities” between 1945 and 1968 when the United States could legitimately have cooperated with Ho Chi Minh’s regime and withdrawn. Lind dismisses the notion of “missed opportunities.” Ho Chi Minh was too focused on takeover, in Lind’s view.
So, whom are we to believe? The war leader who now says his war was avoidable? Or the non-veteran who says it was not?
Both sides have some validity to their thoroughly researched, heavily documented arguments. Lind’s unorthodox view has Washington buzzing, mainly because it tries to help us feel good about something Americans have spend three decades feeling very badly about.
But, I remain hard to convince. The only thing certain about Vietnam arguments is that McNamara picked the right title for his latest book, “Argument Without End.”
That’s Vietnam. It is only through Lind’s long-range view that the Vietnam War looks anything like a victory. In Vietnam, we were the loser, even though we won the Cold War. So it is tempting to view Vietnam as merely a tragic episode in a larger story of history. Because history is written by the winners, Lind’s view may even become the new conventional wisdom.
But in the short view, the way most of us who lived through the Vietnam era see it, it looks like a series of big mistakes–mistakes that, like ghosts, will haunt us for the rest of our days.
