Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 9, 1995 TAG: 9505100026
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
There must be a Maureen Dunn in every audience, a widow who has waited for a quarter-century to ask this man to say he's sorry for the death of her husband.
There must be a John Hurley in every Q-and-A saying, ``I'm a Vietnam vet and your book is an obscenity.''
There must be a vet at every editorial-board meeting who wants to know, angrily, why in hell McNamara waited so long before he spoke out.
There must be a letter to the editor that follows his appearance in every city that reads like this one: ``I only wish that those who were playing God could resurrect our dead instead of our grief.''
This is what it's like for the whiz kid in the winter of his life, as he travels around the country telling his war story, ``In Retrospect.'' At nearly 79, Robert McNamara, the brightest of the Best and the Brightest, the supreme analyst, is trying to explain, God knows belatedly, how they went wrong. How he was wrong. How he knew it way back then.
During his two days in Boston, I saw him rustling through his briefcase, moving to the edge of his chair and back, forming his elaborate answers, taking notes and taking anger. Wiry, in shirt sleeves and a tie, giving up nothing to age except perhaps the rubber soles on his wingtips, he is as intellectually intense today as when he ran Ford Motor Co., or the World Bank, or the Defense Department.
There is something courageous in this performance, facing conflict, day after day, when he could be sitting on his deck on Martha's Vineyard. And there is something chilling. And there is something stunningly, stubbornly sad.
For many of those who lived through the Vietnam War and the Vietnam era, ``Mr. Secretary,'' as he is still called, has written a one-sentence book: ``We were wrong, terribly wrong.''
These people ask him at each stop for things he cannot give them back: their husbands, their buddies, their innocence. He in turn offers something many will not accept: the Lessons of Vietnam, neatly parsed, rigidly analyzed.
``Please read the appendix,'' McNamara asks one audience, promising that he will refund the whole price of the book to anyone who reads the appendix about the dangers of nuclear war.
``No one has asked me about the 11 lessons,'' he says plaintively at another gathering. ``The lessons are what's so important.'' He returns again and again to ``the 11 lessons'' that he wrested like some think-tank alchemist from the horrible waste of Vietnam. They are laid out as the crowning achievement of his book, as a peace offering to the future for his part in the ``mistake'' called Vietnam.
One moment, the McNamara of ``McNamara's War'' is defensive, telling a vet to ``shut up.'' The next moment he is contrite, telling a widow that he is ``more than sorry, he is horrified.''
Asked how he feels about the tough response to his book, he delivers a bloodless explanation in two parts and three subparts. Asked again, he checks off emotions saying, ``The short answer to how I feel is sad, shocked, hurt,'' and moves on.
Yet twice in my presence, he pulls out the letter from Ann Morrison, the widow of a protester who burned himself to death. Eyes filling, he reads her words thanking him for writing the book. It's a letter he carries around like a papal pardon.
There has never been an event quite like this. The tour, like the book, is an act of penance and act of egotism, a conflict that seems to escape its author. As he moves from city to city, he trips all the old land mines left behind.
Editorialists debate whether and when he should have said what. Reviewers talk about mistakes and morals. But what is painful are not just the memories of war he evokes but the flashbacks of the armchair warriors, the horrific limitations of the generation of men who led us into that war.
Listen to one of those lessons Bob McNamara points to with pride and urgency. Lesson 10: ``We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions. ... At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.'' This is what he didn't know at 45? At 50? At 55?
As a young man, McNamara fell in love with numbers, with what he calls the precise language of quantification. To this day and on every page, he writes as the still-proud problem-solver, who once got it wrong, but has now finally figured it out, solved the problem. And thinks we should listen.
In the end, we are reminded of the other lesson of Vietnam. The sorry, infuriating, bewildering reality that the best and the brightest can still succeed brilliantly at analysis and fail utterly at understanding.
- The Boston Globe
by CNB