Speechless

Part Seventeen

In an early morning phone call with Robert McNamara on January 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson commented about observing his defense secretary the day before. “I looked at you…I thought you were so damn tired, you better go home to your wife,” the president said.

The Tet offensive was underway across Vietnam. The seizure of the Pueblo had happened, and a potential crisis involving possible nuclear leakage from a damaged naval vessel had been resolved,

“The result is, Mr. President, I’m really not up to date on Southeast Asia, I can’t tell you anything,” McNamara contended.

To which LBJ said, “The closer you get to leaving, the more I miss you and I just…there’s not anybody in this government that can say as much in as little time as you can.”

 McNamara then went on to characterize what he thought of the Tet assaults:

“I think it shows two things, Mr. President. First, that they have more power than some credit them with. I don’t think it’s a last gasp action. I do think it represents a maximum effort in the sense of, they’ve poured on all of their assets, both in terms of personnel and materiel and this will set them back some, but after they absorb the losses, they will remain a substantial force…it probably relates to negotiations in some way. I would expect that they were successful here, then they’d move more forcefully on the negotiation front and that thinking that have a stronger position from which to bargain.”

The gist of the call was that McNamara was still clinging to the hope that negotiations to end the war in Vietnam might be started before he left office, and Johnson wanted McNamara to know how very much he thought and cared for him.

The cascade of events in Asia were leading to two significant dates: February 29, when McNamara would be formally replaced by Clark Clifford; and March 31, when LBJ would declare that he would no longer run for reelection. The emotional toll for both men had been profound, but unlike other political breaks based on policy failure, there was no acrimony or assignments of blame for what had gone wrong, at least to each other.

Reaching the end of In Retrospect, McNamara again seeks to justify why he had gone along with – or not gone publicly against – policies he strongly suspected would not succeed:

“Many friends, then and since, have told me I was wrong not to have resigned in protest over the president’s policy. Let me explain why I did not. The president (with the exception of the vice president) is the only elected official of the executive branch. He appoints each cabinet officer, who should have no constituency other than him…A cabinet officer’s authority and legitimacy derives from the president. It is also true, however, that, because of their frequent public exposure, some cabinet officers develop power independent of the president.

“To a degree, I held such power, and some said I should have used it by resigning, challenging the president’s Vietnam policy, and leading those who sought to force a change.

“I believe that would have been a violation of my responsibility to the president and my oath to uphold the Constitution…

“Simply put, despite my deep differences with Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, I was loyal to the presidency and loyal to him, and I sensed his equally strong feelings toward me. Moreover, until the day I left, I believed I could influence his decisions. I therefore felt I had a responsibility to stay at my post.”

Lyndon Baines Johnson was as political as a man could be. Every move had a purpose behind it. The sincerity of Johnson’s commitments to his domestic policies, and the progress he was able to make, have meant over time that his presidency is regularly reevaluated for its positives --- while always requiring that the Vietnam war offset any praise and render him in the end as broken.

Robert Strange McNamara was unsophisticated in his political judgments – which for LBJ meant that his word could be taken at face value rather than as a reflection of self-interest. McGeorge Bundy, by contrast, had just enough cynicism based on his years in and around the Kennedys and the Harvard elite culture to avoid the public aura of infallibility that was McNamara’s problem.

The Vietnam partnership destined to fail was a mismatch of personalities – earnestness to a fault for McNamara and a brew of insecurities and political calculations for Johnson.

On February 28, Johnson awarded McNamara the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House.

McNamara’s description of the occasion is poignant.

“For a person whose image is one of cool efficiency, I become very emotional at times, and so it was this day. When my turn came to speak, I looked at the president and began, ‘I cannot find words to express what lies in my heart today,’ then could say nothing more as I choked back conflicting feelings of pride, gratitude, frustration, sadness, and failure. Had I been able to speak, this is what I might have said:

“‘Today, I end 1,558 days of the most intimate association with the most complex individual I have ever known. Many in this room believe Lyndon Johnson is crude, mean, vindictive, scheming, untruthful. Perhaps at times he has shown each of these characteristics. But he is much, much more. I believe that in the decades ahead, history will judge him to have done more – for example, through such legislation as the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Great Society legislation – to alert us all to our responsibility toward the poor, the disadvantaged, and the victims of racial prejudice than any other political leader of our time. But for Vietnam, a war which he inherited – and which admittedly neither he nor we managed wisely – we would have been much further along in solving those problems.’”

The irony of McNamara’s feelings about American social distress and Johnson’s compassion was that the Vietnamese people’s lives and livelihoods were always considered much less important than U.S. objectives to defeat a determined enemy, communists whose elimination was worth whatever the cost.

McNamara’s emotional behavior at the White House ceremony was interpreted as a measure of how close he had come to a collapse – the suicide of one of his predecessors as secretary of defense, James Forrestal, in 1949 was invariably cited as a precedent. In the years to come, McNamara’s displays of emotion when with friends and at the time his book was published were seen as self-pity for his policy failure rather than remorse for the losses and injuries for so many American GIs and millions of Vietnamese.

Having spent so much time with him as an interlocutor, editor, media counselor and now a biographer of sorts, I think McNamara’s regrets were deep and genuine – for the war’s pointless violence and his role in them, which undid his belief in his abilities as a person who could manage, lead, and dispassionately advise. And it had hurt his family, especially Marg.

To end his narrative in In Retrospect, McNamara quotes LBJ’s letter to Marg: “Though our lives will change…we will not. Lady Bird and I will never change our feelings for both of you. They are lasting in admiration and gratitude. With love.”

And so Clark Clifford was handed the chalice. As an adviser to Johnson without portfolio, he had traversed from arguing against escalation in 1965 to supporting the build-up and bombing of 1966 and 1967. He came to the Pentagon at the moment the Joint Chiefs and General Westmoreland were making a case for increasing the U.S. commitment rather than capping it – and accepting it would most likely never succeed, as McNamara had come to believe.

Within a week, Clifford was with Johnson. To Brian VanDeMark and his editors for Counsel to the President, he would recount how soon he realized the inevitable, that the goal had to be to bring “this to an end on the best terms we can get”:

It was after listening to the generals in his first days on the job that Clifford thought: “Oh my God, this is hopeless. It is absolute folly for us to go on…I felt so strongly about it that I was not sleeping very well at night.”

On March 4, Clifford made the argument to the president, very much the same one that McNamara had made in the months leading to his departure. Johnson had him make the presentation to a group of senior advisers the next day. As VanDeMark writes: “Johnson, tellingly, did not challenge any part of Clifford’s analysis, but instead let him make his case without interruption.”

On March 31, at the close of a speech about Vietnam, LBJ announced that under no circumstances would he continue to run for another term as president. Instead, he would devote himself to the cause of a negotiated peace. Yet the war went on.

McNamara wondered:         

“Why didn’t he, when he decided not to run, shift [policy]. Damned if I know. Except that he was the kind of a person that never wanted to say he was wrong. Maybe that was an explanation of it.

“But Jesus, I’d a hell of a lot rather than said I was wrong than go down in history as a guy that was totally wrong and refused to admit it. And if I had a few months left as president and I could shift course and I’d decided not to run and I was willing to pay the price of being charged with failures and having caused all these fatalities on this, at least I would begin to correct my error before I left…

“He and I had no conversation after I left. We had conversations after I left, but I never discussed that with him. So far as I know, he’s never discussed it with anyone.”

On January 16, 1981, the McNamaras returned to the White House, when President Jimmy Carter awarded Marg the Medal of Freedom for her work in founding the organization Reading Is Fundamental, a program to encourage disadvantaged youth to read. Marg was at the end of a long battle with cancer and died seventeen days later.

The Vietnam war was long over. Lyndon Johnson had died in 1973. On his first day as president in 1977, Carter had pardoned draft dodgers. Bob McNamara would carry on until he died in 2009, trying to explain himself and also serving causes to restrain the spread of nuclear weapons, deal with global poverty, and engage with his former Vietnamese enemies and U.S. colleagues to understand why the war had been such a disaster.

He traveled the world and arranged meetings in Hanoi and other locales with historians, journalists, former colleagues, and former enemies. He went to Cuba to revisit the Cuban missile crisis with Fidel Castro, among others. He attended conferences and wrote articles for magazines and journals like Foreign Affairs. The objective was always the same: to reconsider every strand in order to reckon how all that happened came to pass, convinced that if the history was rendered correctly – the collection of data in its way – better or safer outcomes could be managed. 

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.

I have now heard from a number of people who have listened to the audio that they find it extraordinary. To hear McNamara explaining in detail and under my questioning why he believed Kennedy would have withdrawn and LBJ used 1964 to stall on making decisions about the war among other matters is, the word all use, is “fascinating.” So below is a direct link to the audio. A click will connect you and a second click will download it.

https://gofile.me/6Psdh/u0tEooeA9