Epilogue

Part Eighteen

The war in Vietnam ended formally for the United States with the signing of what was called the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam, signed in Paris on January 27, 1973. In April with the last prisoners of war released, the remaining American troops left, leaving behind only a contingent of Marines at the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

The wars in Indochina did not actually end until the spring of 1975, with victories in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos for exactly the forces and ideologies that the United States had been there to defeat.

Whatever power and influence the USSR and the People’s Republic of China would have in Indochina thereafter, the countries of the region largely evolved according to historical patterns set long before the U.S. military was deployed to the region.

 A united Vietnam is authoritarian, nationalist, and generally pragmatic when it comes to its economic development and alliances.

Cambodia’s royal family is powerless. But it has a ruler in Hun Sen who came to power in 1985 and has now turned over the role of prime minister to his son Hun Manet. The population exceeds sixteen million – which means that it has recovered from the massacres of two million or more in the Khmer Rouge era, after the U.S.-supported regime was ousted in 1975.

And Laos is a one-party state on the margins of global awareness, notable for the mist-covered mountains where the CIA flew in support of the tribal people in the losing side of the conflict, many of whom have found a home in, among other places, Minnesota, where frigid winters must be a challenge.

As for the United States, the impact of our decade in Vietnam was profound and lasting. The United States had lost a war in which the country’s vaunted eminence had failed, for all the expended effort it was able to make – and notable afterward that the men responsible for it never expressed regret until Robert McNamara did. “Vietnam” is now a synonym for the limitations of American power and the rise of meaningful citizen advocacy for political and social change.

Lyndon Johnson went home to the Pedernales and to the chagrin of Lady Bird and his daughters resumed unhealthy habits for a man with heart problems that doubtless contributed to his death at the age of sixty-four in the same week that the Peace Accords in Paris were signed.

Bob McNamara was a vigorous fifty-one years old when he left the Pentagon. He spent thirteen years at the World Bank. It was in the early 1990s that we started to work together first on his memoirs and then on two other books, Argument Without End and Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing and Catastrophe in the 21st Century, a peroration on conflict that summarized McNamara’s considered beliefs on war.

It was around that time that McNamara called me to say that the filmmaker Errol Morris wanted to make a film with him to explore his views on war. My reaction was to warn my friend Bob (as he was to me) that Morris’s film would probably put him once again in the limelight of vituperation, just as the publication of In Retrospect had in 1995.

But that was not what happened.

In The New York Times, Stephen Holden’s review said:

“If there’s one movie that ought to be studied by military and civilian leaders around the world at this treacherous historical moment, it is ‘The Fog of War,’ Errol Morris’s sober, beautifully edited documentary portrait of the former United States defense secretary Robert S. McNamara…

“Stocky and slick haired, with rimless glasses and a grand corporate manner, Mr. McNamara appears to be an exceptionally articulate, self-confident man who came to this project prepared to deflect embarrassing questions about his personal responsibility for the debacle. While he readily confesses to having made serious mistakes of judgment, he will not admit to any grave moral failures.”

The film posters presented McNamara in his raincoat, a solitary figure -- an image that I very much recalled myself.

In his 1995 national book tour for In Retrospect, McNamara appeared at a packed event in the atrium of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He was holding his own until near the end, when a Vietnam vet began to harangue him, and the audience seemed to approve of the protest. With cameras clicking and rolling, McNamara blurted, “Shut up!” There was a gasp in the room, including from me.

The next morning, at about 7 AM, McNamara knocked on my hotel room door and wearing that tan raincoat he so often wore and gray New Balance running shoes, and he told me he was going to hike (his word) along the Charles River. “I know what makes people so angry,” he said, “But I have to do this. I need to talk about the war and its lessons so we can prevent anything like it from happening again.”

He continued on his book tour, traveling alone, lugging a small suitcase and wearing that raincoat. We offered him security, but he declined.

Another notable moment took place at Time magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration at Radio City Music Hall in March 1998. Certain guests were asked to pay tribute to someone they greatly admired. John F. Kennedy Jr. chose McNamara and made this remarkable statement:

“After leaving public life and keeping his own counsel for many years, Robert McNamara did what few others have done. He took full responsibility for his decisions and admitted he was wrong. Judging from the reception he got, I doubt many public servants would be brave enough to follow his example. So tonight, I would like to toast someone I’ve known my whole life not as a symbol of pain we can’t forget, but as a man. And I would like to thank him for teaching me something about bearing great adversity with great dignity.”

McNamara was not present. In July the following year, Kennedy and his wife were killed in a crash of a small plane he was piloting.

On July 6, 2009, McNamara died. He was ninety-three. His family sent a note to those who had offered condolences, saying that in accordance with McNamara’s wishes, “there will be no funeral or memorial service and his ashes will be placed in Snowmass, Colorado, and Martha’s Vineyard.” McNamara’s widow from his second marriage, Diana Masieri McNamara, eventually interred a portion of the ashes under a large headstone in Arlington National Cemetery.

I wrote at the time, “I can hear McNamara’s gravelly voice and picture him waving his hand to lend emphasis to his determination not to be extolled – or denounced by a protestor – at a posthumous event. In different circumstances he might have been persuaded otherwise…But it would be inconceivable, I suppose, for his survivors to overrule McNamara’s fiat that the scattering of his remains be the only ceremonial recognition of his very full, very long, and very controversial life.”

Reconsidering McNamara all these years later, in the transcripts of his sessions with his editors, and all the other material in histories, memoirs, and tapes, especially Johnson’s, the judgment remains as McNamara himself recognized, that he could never be forgiven for what happened in the Vietnam war, but by facing it so personally and ultimately so openly, he could make a contribution toward preventing it from happening again. Even so, in Afghanistan and Iraq in the twenty-first century, the United States again waged wars with endings that resembled those in Indochina, especially in Afghanistan, and today confronts in China and Russia two great nations that each in its own way are dangerously determined adversaries.

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This is the final installment of the series. Thanks to all who read it — numbering by Substack count in the thousands. A book version is in preparation with details on where and how to order it coming soon.

Here's the link for the website page where people can watch the C-SPAN interview online : www.c-span.org/video/?536661-1/author-peter-osnos-lbj-robert-mcnamara-vietnam-war.