Mcnamara Vietnam Quotes

Among those dazzled by the Administration team was Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next, and that the smartest of them all was that fellow with the Stacomb on his hair from the Ford Motor Company, McNamara. “Well, Lyndon,” Mister Sam answered, “you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal fluency which the team exuded, and the true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.

McNamara’s electronic fence, which the Jasons called an “anti-infiltration barrier,” was constructed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at a cost of $1.8 billion, roughly $12 billion in 2015. It had very little effect on the outcome of the Vietnam War and did not help the United States achieve its aim of cutting off enemy supplies.

If the Chiefs had successfully pressed with the president their position that the United States needed to act forcefully to defeat the North, they might have forced a difficult choice between war and withdrawal from South Vietnam. Through their own actions as well as through the manipulation of Taylor and McNamara, the Chiefs missed their opportunity to influence the formulation of a strategic concept for Vietnam, and thereafter always found themselves in the difficult position of questioning a policy that the president had already approved. The intellectual foundation for deepening American involvement in Vietnam had been laid without the participation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 5

The ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote, “The reward of suffering is experience.” Let this be the lasting legacy of Vietnam.

logical, reasonable regime, such as Johnson and McNamara dreamed they were dealing with, would certainly have considered negotiating an end to the war and the horrific burden on its people. But the Communists were neither reasonable nor logical, which is why a strategy of attrition and graduated escalations to encourage negotiations was utterly misbegotten. The Communists were fanatic believers in the justness of their cause and the inevitability of their triumph—and the anti-war movement in the West encouraged their sense of inevitable victory.

Under the direction of General Westmoreland, significantly himself a graduate of the Harvard Business School in which McNamara had at one time taught, the computers zestfully went to work. Fed on forms that had to be filled in by the troops, they digested data on everything from the amount of rice brought to local markets to the number of incidents that had taken place in a given region in a given period of time. They then spewed forth a mighty stream of tables and graphs which purported to measure “progress” week by week and day by day. So long as the tables looked neat, few people bothered to question the accuracy, let alone the relevance, of the data on which they were based. So long as they looked neat, too, the illusion of having a grip on the war helped prevent people from attempting to gain a real understanding of its nature. This is not to say that the Vietnam War was lost simply because the American defense establishment’s management of the conflict depended heavily on computers. Rather, it proves that there is, in war and presumably in peace as well, no field so esoteric or so intangible as to be completely beyond the reach of technology. The technology in use helps condition tactics, strategy, organization, logistics, intelligence, command, control, and communication. Now, however, we are faced with an additional reality. Not only the conduct of war, but the very framework our brains employ in order to think about it, are partly conditioned by the technical instruments at our disposal.

Khrushchev backed down, Kennedy wisely instructed his staff not to betray any hint of gloating—a provocation to Soviet credibility and pride could lead to a later war. Similarly, he rejected additional plans for an invasion, which Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put before him in case the Soviets did not honor a promise to remove their missiles. Kennedy continued to see an invasion as carrying huge risks: “Consider the size of the problem,” he told McNamara, “the equipment that is involved on the other side, the Nationalists [’] fervor which may be engendered, it seems to me we could end up bogged down. I think we should keep constantly in mind the British in the Boer War, the Russians in the last war with the Finnish and our own experience with the North Koreans.” Given his concerns about getting “bogged down” only ninety miles from U.S. shores, would Kennedy have been as ready as Lyndon Johnson to put hundreds of thousands of ground troops into Vietnam?

Having reviewed the record in detail, and with the advantage of hindsight, I think it highly probable that, had President Kennedy lived, he would have pulled us out of Vietnam. He would have concluded that the South Vietnamese were incapable of defending themselves, and that Saigon’s grave political weaknesses made it unwise to try to offset the limitations of South Vietnamese forces by sending U.S. combat troops on a large scale. I think he would have come to that conclusion even if he reasoned, as I believe he would have, that South Vietnam and, ultimately, Southeast Asia would then be lost to Communism.

Early in his administration, President Kennedy asked his cabinet officials and members of the National Security Council to read Barbara Tuchman’s book The Guns of August. He said it graphically portrayed how Europe’s leaders had bungled into the debacle of World War I. And he emphasized: “I don’t ever want to be in that position.” Kennedy told us after we had done our reading, “We are not going to bungle into war.” Throughout his presidency, Kennedy seemed to keep that lesson in mind. During the Bay of Pigs crisis in April 1961, against intense pressure from the CIA and the military chiefs, he kept to his conviction—as he had made explicitly clear to the Cuban exiles beforehand—that under no conditions would the United States intervene with military force to support the invasion. He held to this position even when it became evident that without that support the invasion would fail, as it did.

So I conclude that John Kennedy would have eventually gotten out of Vietnam rather than move more deeply in. I express this judgment now because, in light of it, I must explain how and why we—including Lyndon Johnson—who continued in policy-making roles after President Kennedy’s death made the decisions leading to the eventual deployment to Vietnam of half a million U.S. combat troops. Why did we do what we did, and what lessons can be learned from our actions?

LIED-ABOUT WARS Advertising campaigns, marketing schemes. The target is public opinion. Wars are sold the same way cars are, by lying. In August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson accused the Vietnamese of attacking two U.S. warships in the Tonkin Gulf. Then the president invaded Vietnam, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Democrats in power and the Republicans out of power became a single party united against Communist aggression. After the war had slaughtered Vietnamese in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, confessed that the Tonkin Gulf attack had never occurred. The dead did not revive. In March 2003, President George W. Bush accused Iraq of being on the verge of destroying the world with its weapons of mass destruction, “the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Then the president invaded Iraq, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Republicans in power and the Democrats out of power became a single party united against terrorist aggression. After the war had slaughtered Iraqis in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Bush confessed that the weapons of mass destruction never existed. “The most lethal weapons ever devised” were his own speeches. In the following elections, he won a second term. In my childhood, my mother used to tell me that a lie has no feet. She was misinformed.

files in the McNamara study offices, I had discovered that this assumption was mistaken. Every one of these crucial decisions was secretly associated with realistic internal pessimism, deliberately concealed from the public, just as in 1964–65.

They taught that business leaders had a duty to serve society as well as their shareholders, and that a company could drive for profits and at the same time meet social responsibilities. I think of this in a phrase Walker and Learned might have liked: “There is no contradiction between a soft heart and a hard head.” That has been a guiding principle in my life.

The point I wish to emphasize is this: human beings are fallible. We all make mistakes. In our daily lives, they are costly but we try to learn from them. In conventional war, they cost lives, sometimes thousands of lives. But if mistakes were to affect decisions relating to the use of nuclear forces, they would result in the destruction of whole societies. Thus, the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons carries a high risk of a potential catastrophe. Is there a military justification for continuing to accept that risk? The answer is no. In

He can either act as a judge or a leader….I have always believed in and endeavored to follow the active leadership role as opposed to the passive judicial role.

In “Flag Plot,” the naval operations room, Anderson became irritated with McNamara’s specific instructions on how to run the blockade. The admiral told McNamara that the Navy had been conducting blockades since the days of John Paul Jones and suggested that the defense secretary return to his office and let the Navy run the operation. McNamara rose from his chair and retorted that the operation was “not a blockade but a means of communication between Kennedy and Khrushchev,

Like most Americans,” McNamara remembered many years later, “I saw communism as monolithic. I believed the Soviets and the Chinese were cooperating in trying to extend their hegemony.” To him—and to Kennedy and most of the men closest to him—it seemed clear that the “Communist movement in Vietnam was closely related to guerrilla insurgencies in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya and the Philippines….We viewed these conflicts not as nationalistic movements—as they largely appear in hindsight—but as signs of a unified communist drive for hegemony in Asia.

Defense Secretary McNamara agreed with Taylor and Rostow that their report should be fully implemented. But Secretary of State Rusk thought such a small force was unlikely to alter the outcome in Vietnam and worried that Diem might prove in the end to be a “losing horse.” Assistant Secretary of State George Ball was more blunt. “Taylor is wrong,” he warned the president. “Within five years we’ll have three hundred thousand men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again. That was the French experience.

President Kennedy was not so sure. He was appalled that Diem and Nhu had been killed. Three days later, he dictated his own rueful account of the coup and his concerns for the future. Monday, November 4, 1963. Over the weekend the coup in Saigon took place. It culminated three months of conversation which divided the government here and in Saigon….I feel that we [at the White House] must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of…August in which we suggested the coup. In my judgment that wire was badly drafted. It should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given consent to it without a roundtable conference at which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views. While we did redress that in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined. I was shocked by the deaths of Diem and Nhu. I’d met Diem…many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a ten-year period, he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent. The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government or whether…public opinion in Saigon—the intellectuals, students, etc.—will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not too distant future.

In foreign affairs, Johnson was admittedly less self-assured. “Foreigners are not like the folks I’m used to,” he once said. To deal with them, he retained in office all of his predecessor’s top advisers—Dean Rusk at State, Robert McNamara at Defense, McGeorge Bundy as his National Security Advisor. “You’re the men I trust the most,” he told them. “You’re the ablest men I’ve ever seen. It’s not just that you’re President Kennedy’s friends, but you are the best anywhere and you must stay. I want you to stand by me.

McNamara leaned over to the microphone and tried to say “Vietnam muôn năm,” but, because he wasn’t aware of the tonal difference, the crowd practically disintegrated on the cobblestones. What he was saying was something like “The little duck, he wants to lie down.

McNamara revealed in his memoir In Retrospect that he had secretly advised President Kennedy, and after him President Johnson, that under no circumstances should they ever initiate nuclear war. He didn’t tell me that, but it was implicit in everything he had said. There is no doubt in my mind that he did give that advice and that it was the right advice. Yet it directly contradicted the U.S. “assurances” on U.S. readiness for first use he felt compelled to give repeatedly to NATO officials throughout his years in office. (NATO retains a first-use policy to this day, as does the United States outside the NATO area—perhaps now with a new degree of sincerity, indicated by the first-use premises of the Bush administration’s nuclear policy review leaked in March 2002.)

Carmichael also criticized the student peace movement and argued that if peace activists wanted to be relevant to most people, they needed to start organizing to resist the draft: The peace movement has been a failure because it hasn’t gotten off the college campuses where everybody has a 2S [draft deferment] and is not afraid of being drafted anyway. The problem is how you can move out of that into the white ghettos of this country and articulate a position for those white youth who do not want to go. . . . [SNCC is] the most militant organization for peace or civil rights or human rights against the war in Vietnam in this country today. There isn’t one organization that has begun to meet our stand on the war in Vietnam. We not only say we are against the war in Vietnam; we are against the draft. . . . There is a higher law than the law of a racist named [Secretary of Defense] McNamara; there is a higher law than the law of a fool named [Secretary of State] Rusk; there is a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. We will not allow them to make us hired killers. We will not kill anybody that they say kill. And if we decide to kill, we are going to decide who to kill.89

It is very hard to recapture the innocence and confidence with which we approached Vietnam in the early days of the Kennedy administration,” Robert McNamara lamented three decades later.24 Unlike cabinet members in a parliamentary system such as Great Britain’s who before assuming office have studied the issues for years as shadow ministers in the political opposition, McNamara and his senior colleagues possessed scant knowledge and even less understanding of Southeast Asian history, language, and culture. What did they know about Vietnam? “Not enough to have done what we did,” McNamara later confessed.25 “It was a tiny blip on the radar and we didn’t understand at the beginning how it would develop,” McNamara admitted, looking back.26 While by 1961

While by 1961 many of the early dynamics of the Cold War—Stalinist brutality, Sino-Soviet cooperation, Moscow’s considerable influence on other Communist movements—had begun to fade, American perceptions, assumptions, and political rhetoric remained rooted in an earlier mindset. (The Soviet Union suffered from its own simplistic myopia about the West during this period.) As a result, Kennedy and his advisors made policy on Vietnam by relying on Cold War blueprints that assumed the monolithic nature of Communism, defined Communism and nationalism in mutually exclusive terms, and understood the domino theory as a given, filtering it all through fear of a domestic political firestorm that would follow the loss of a country to Communism. They feared the costs of what they termed a “cut-and-run” policy “too much and too automatically,” said Bundy retrospectively.27 More fundamentally, “we never fully explored each other’s views about Communism and the danger of it in Asia, particularly Southeast Asia,” McNamara later acknowledged.

For their part, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese were flabbergasted when they learned of Diệm’s and Nhu’s deaths as a result of an American-inspired coup; they could not believe the Americans would allow South Vietnam to be disrupted in this way. “They were gifts from heaven for us,” said a senior Vietcong official.155 “Both Ho Chi Minh and he (Mao) thought that Ngo Dinh Diem was not so bad,” wrote journalist Edgar Snow, based on an interview with Mao Zedong in January 1965. “After all,” said Mao, “following his assassination, was everything between Heaven and Earth more peaceful?” Even Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, who participated in the coup that brought down Diệm, later said that “he actually ran the country pretty well” given the circumstances confronting him.156 Diệm had many faults, but his pride meant that he “didn’t want us in there fighting his war,” noted McNamara.157

The third day revealed the smokingest gun of all—a memo from Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs John McNaughton breaking down, in Robert McNamara’s preferred statistical terms, why we were persisting in Vietnam: 70%—To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat…. 20%—To keep SVN (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands. 10%—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life. ALSO—To emerge from the crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used. NOT—To “help a friend.

Kennedy refused throughout his presidency to commit U.S. combat forces to Vietnam. “JFK saw the U.S. support for Vietnam as strictly limited to helping the Vietnamese help themselves,” McNamara later said. Kennedy never deviated from this position, even as the situation in South Vietnam steadily deteriorated during his three years in office. He had always been dubious about the effectiveness of Western military power on the Asian mainland. He knew from the Bay of Pigs the limits of what the generals recommended. He understood the basic principle of guerrilla warfare: that the object was not killing enemy soldiers, but winning the allegiance of the people—that the solution in Vietnam was fundamentally political, not military. He never accepted the premise that the United States should save South Vietnam at all costs and he never made an unqualified commitment to maintain its independence. If the South Vietnamese were not capable of defending themselves, “he thought it impossible to do so with U.S. military forces,” said McNamara. He went on: “At the time of Kennedy’s death, I think he was very concerned about the dominoes. But when he got to a point where he had to choose between the risk of the dominoes falling and adding 400,000 men,” McNamara surmised, “he wouldn’t have done it.” Perhaps Bobby Kennedy, who knew the president better than anyone, put it best. “Nobody can say for sure what my brother would actually have done, in the actual circumstances of 1964 or ’65. I can’t say that, and even he couldn’t have said that in ’61. Maybe things would have gone just the same as they did. But I do know what he intended. All I can say is that he was absolutely determined not to send ground units.

McNamara’s successor as secretary of defense, Clark Clifford—who knew Kennedy quite well—agreed. “In judging matters of this kind,” said Clifford, Kennedy “was a real cold fish. He could be totally objective.” There was a JFK smile, and behind doors, also a set of gritted teeth. “Under that façade of charm and attractiveness . . . President Kennedy could be as coldly analytical as anybody I ever saw . . . He was cold, calculating, and penetrating,” with “the ability to step away” and “with a surprising degree of objectivity look at the problem.” Clifford could imagine Kennedy eventually saying, “I’m not willing to take the chance. I don’t like what I see ahead. I’m suspicious of the people who are involved. I just don’t think I ought to accept the representations of the military with full faith and credit extended. I’m going to be more cautious. I’m just not going to get more deeply involved in what is obviously a stinking mess.”159 Kennedy was not, as his aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger dryly observed, “inclined to heavy investments in lost causes.”160 McNamara concurred: “In the most basic terms—avoiding risk—I’ll guarantee you, that moved him.”161

Influenced by strategic theories of the day—advanced most prominently by Harvard economist Thomas Schelling*—that conflicts were essentially bargaining situations, that one could signal an adversary that he should in his own interest avoid certain courses of activity, and that participants in a conflict coolly and rationally calculate costs and benefits and arrive at consistent expectations of each other, Taylor, McNamara, and Bundy had assumed bombing would be perceived by North Vietnam as limited and would be controllable—something that could be turned on and off like a faucet. “It’s something you can stop. It’s a bargaining chip,” McNamara would say of bombing—one that seemed to have the advantages of both flexibility and control.146 Taylor, McNamara, and Bundy thought bombing would not last long, perhaps a few months at most. They made the cardinal error of assuming that the North Vietnamese agreed with them. They did not contemplate what would happen if Hanoi did not perceive bombing as a limited gesture and proved willing to absorb its costs because they did not believe bombing would fail, making such considerations moot. They might not have agreed on when to start a bombing campaign, but nobody doubted it would work. None of them foresaw that bombing would instead feed demands for greater military action, that it would be only the first step in what would become a massive American military effort in Vietnam.

When the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened, McNamara had been unable to appear at it publicly. “It was absolutely impossible for me,” he later said—the personal pain and shame at that stage was simply too great. By the end of the 1980s, though, he made regular nocturnal visits to the memorial, “but not in a way that anybody could observe me doing it.” After hours, “I’d just walk down in the dark,” and quietly study the thousands of names inscribed on a mournful facade that echoed the night sky above him. It was a “tremendous” experience for him. He felt “a sense of honor for those who served and a sense of continuing questioning of those who caused them to serve”—not least himself.

McNamara, the statistician, knew the probability of defeat was very high.