LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail is the result of more than fifty years of engagement with the subject of conflicts in Indochina, particularly the one that came to be captioned the “American war” in Vietnam from the early 1960s until 1975.
As an assistant to I. F. Stone at his weekly newsletter when escalation began in 1965, as a correspondent based in Saigon for The Washington Post between 1970 and 1973, and then through decades of publishing books on the topic, by journalists, veterans, scholars, and most significantly, Robert McNamara’s explanatory memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, I was immersed in the history, the reality as I witnessed it, and the consequences of this twentieth-century war – a ground, air, and propaganda battle that differed from the global conflicts of World Wars I and II.
As an editor at Random House and its imprint Times Books, I also published the memoirs of Clark Clifford, Counsel to the President, and Anatoly Dobrynin’s In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents. Those books and my experience working with the authors are also reflected in the narrative. The historian Brian VanDeMark worked closely with both McNamara and Clifford as well as with me on their respective memoirs; his own book Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent into Vietnam was invaluable as a resource.
Robert Brigham, the Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College and the author of several highly regarded books on the Vietnam war and its aftermath, shared documentary material from his extraordinary archive of research and fact-checked this narrative. Brigham also worked with McNamara on other Vietnam-related projects and provided essential perspective on how the policy debates evolved and how the personalities of those involved had an impact.
Although I was the editor and publisher of McNamara, Clifford, and Dobrynin, my role was also as a journalist, eliciting their detailed account of events and where possible their personal and emotional responses on how they felt the impact.
It was McNamara for whom a memoir carried the greatest burden. He was so closely identified with the war and subject to so much criticism that he recognized his book would receive intense scrutiny and public judgment of its contents.
In the course of drafting the manuscript, McNamara sat down for a series of recorded discussions to elicit deeper responses to the central questions of his time as Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense. Also participating in these conversations were my editorial colleague Geoff Shandler and McNamara’s coauthor, Brian VanDeMark.
Quotations from those sessions appear in the text in italics, and audio from these discussions is available at www.platformbooksllc.net.
In one of these first extended sessions in 1993, McNamara said to me:
“I want you to know this – you don’t have to act on it – but I have said if, when I finish this, I don’t think it’s going to be what I call constructive – which means non-self-serving, non-whitewashed, contributing to – I’ll call it healing the wounds – I’m going to tear up the contract. I’ll pay back the advance and I won’t publish. But that’s exactly…”
To which I replied: “I respect that. I don’t think that will happen.”
The book’s publication in the spring of 1995 was a major national news story, and the coverage of McNamara’s reflections was harsh. A New York Times editorial on April 12, was scathing:
“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….[McNamara’s] regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books for our dead soldiers…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.”
It was of course too late to change or amend McNamara’s book with further justifications. Despite the reception, it became a number-one national bestseller. I never heard from McNamara then or ever that he was sorry he had written the book.
As I have reread the reviews after so many years, I see that they all concentrated on what McNamara might have said or done decades earlier, rather than his explanations, a missed opportunity for drawing historical lessons. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were replete with blunders that were recognizable..
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As the United States approached the fiftieth anniversary of the withdrawal of the last American combat forces from Vietnam, I began to focus on what I have come to believe was a decisive factor in what was, ultimately, an American defeat: the relationship, personalities, and characters of the two men most closely identified with the misbegotten policies, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Robert Strange McNamara.
My work with McNamara, beginning in 1993 and culminating in the publication of In Retrospect in 1995 involved scores of conversations that enabled him to confront what went so badly wrong. The hundreds of pages of transcripts, I now realized, were more candid and therefore revealing than what McNamara would allow himself to say in the book.
The release of hundreds of hours of audio recordings from Johnson’s presidency, many dealing with Vietnam; the assessment of LBJ prior to the height of the Vietnam war in Robert Caro’s monumental biography; and a library of relevant books by others have provided me with the narrative to make the point that the Johnson-McNamara partnership, so crucial to the war, was from the outset destined to end in failure.
And based on their own words, the two men knew that they would certainly not prevail, almost from the moment they began working together on November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
This series describes what happened in the years between 1963 and McNamara’s last day as secretary of defense in February 1968, only weeks before Johnson himself would announce that he would not run for reelection that fall. Johnson returned to Texas by any measure a broken man, and McNamara spent the rest of his life, privately and eventually publicly, coming to terms with the debacle.
This series is an account of how this happened and, to the extent possible, why.
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History is based on events interpreted by chroniclers, scholars, journalists, novelists, poets, and participants. But as Robert McNamara told his editors at an early discussion session, commentators tend to oversimplify history. “History isn’t that simple,” he said. “It’s messy.”
The facts of America’s engagement with Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 1960s and ’70s are well known. By 1975 the United States had withdrawn support for its allies in the region, leaving Indochina in the hands of regimes that called themselves communist but were actually an amalgam of autocratic identities.
The American experience in Vietnam, known there always as the “American war,” ended in 1973 when the last U.S. combat troops left the country. The war has been portrayed in scores of studies like the Pentagon Papers, as well as in innumerable books, documentaries, and movies. The net is always the same: Whatever good intentions led to the U.S. involvement in the civil war between North and South Vietnam, the end was a failure, defeat, a debacle, or a tragedy, depending on who is describing the outcome.
There are many explanations for what happened, a result that has shaped the nation’s political, cultural, and social norms. When we now say “Vietnam,” we are going beyond a war to summarize the consequences of that effort in lives, treasure and our national sense of pride and patriotism.
David Halberstam framed forever those responsible as “the best and the brightest,” the title of his epic 1972 book and his ironic shorthand for the men of public stature who collectively devised and drove a policy that was to prove untenable. They were unable to preserve one-half of Vietnam from the spread of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in Asia in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and in the aftermath of the Chinese Revolution, all with the possibility of nuclear war hanging overhead.
This series is not meant to reconsider what is already known about Vietnam. It has a different objective: to describe as nearly as possible why the personalities and character of two men in particular were the central factors in the decision to escalate a commitment of fewer than 20,000 advisers in 1963 to a force of more than 536,000 American troops in 1968, when it was already clear to both of them that victory in the conventional sense was an impossible goal.
These men were President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his secretary of defense, Robert Strange McNamara.
Once Johnson and McNamara were gone from office, the conflict went on for another four years, with a casualty rate among U.S. forces climbing to 58,000 dead, hundreds of thousands of wounded, and colossal Vietnamese devastation. Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, and his chief adviser, Henry Kissinger, redefined the U.S. objective as – in the parlance of realpolitik -- “the decent interval” between the end of American involvement in the war and the now-presumed North Vietnamese triumph.
But it was Johnson and McNamara whose names and reputations were to be most closely connected to so profound a failure. They did not connive to produce policies. They were collaborators with others in devising them. But the depth, detail, and frequency of their contacts inevitably became a partnership of choices and, up to the point of their break, judgments.
Many others had important roles during the Vietnam era, including President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert; McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, and a cadre of White House and State Department officials; the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General William Westmoreland, and other military commanders; Ambassadors Henry Cabot Lodge, Maxwell Taylor, and Ellsworth Bunker; and Clark Clifford, a counselor to presidents from Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson and McNamara’s successor as secretary of defense as peace negotiations began in Paris.
There were no women among the policy makers to be held accountable, but there were two women who were part of the saga in their own way. The first was Jacqueline Kennedy, not as first lady but for her influence as a widow on Johnson, McNamara, and her brother-in-law Robert. And second was Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, who more than anyone else monitored her husband’s descent into despair over a battle he waged with public determination and private anguish. She watched how his extraordinary efforts on behalf of civil rights and social reform were upended emotionally by recognition of his confusion and frustration over Vietnam.
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For more than ten years I worked with Robert McNamara on three books: his war memoir, In Retrospect: The Lessons and Tragedy of Vietnam; Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy; and Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century. I came to know him as an interlocutor, an editor, a publisher, and a person he could trust as he went through the process of coming to terms with what Vietnam had wrought to the country, his family, and the way so many Americans held him in contempt for his responsibility in what happened.
I did not know Lyndon Johnson personally, but because of the hundreds of hours of secret tapes made by him and now released, the extraordinary depth of Robert Caro’s biographical portrait so far, and Lady Bird’s amazing perceptiveness of his torment as recorded in her diaries, Johnson is revealed in a way that it is fair to conclude no other American president has been.
From all the available material in the library of biographies, histories and analyses of the period, the decades of my own involvement in the subject as a reporter and later as an editor, as well as access to the torrent of words in transcripts of my time with McNamara and the Johnson tapes, a picture of the men emerges that I intend to examine in the installments that follow, with this conclusion:
If John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated on November 22, 1963, and if Robert McNamara had been a man who was as politically astute as he was believed to be accomplished as a manager, and if Lyndon Johnson had been less a captive of insecurities eroding his judgment and spirit, then the misbegotten escalation in Vietnam might well have been avoided.
The United States of America was a superpower in those years in so many ways that the saga of Vietnam would seem to be inconceivable, except that it happened.
Next Week Part Two: The Overview
Sources and Acknowedgements and the audio of McNamara working with his editors can be found at www.platformbooksllc.net.
I, for one, cannot wait.