Robert Strange McNamara

McNamara, the king-sized embodiment of Kennedy’s “best and brightest” [click picture to enlarge], is dead at 93. What did McNamara leave behind?

David Ignatius, the Washington Post’s leading columnist on foreign policy and the son of McNamara’s army secretary, says McNamara found:

Vietnam shattered the rationalist's faith: Here was a peasant enemy, fighting in what looked to us like pajamas and living off handfuls of rice, that somehow persisted against all of America's military might -- and all of McNamara's slide-rule calculations.

To Ignatius, the larger McNamara lesson is:

[B]e wary of the notion that smart people can solve any problem if they just try hard enough. . . -- and encourage us to consider, even when we feel most confident, the possibility that we could be wrong.

Liberals seemed to have taken at least part of that lesson to heart. Last January at the beginning of Obama’s administration, liberals worried that overseas, Obama would follow “the best and brightest” into the same misguided use of force Vietnam proved to be.

Yet McNamara has also become a bogeyman for conservatives afraid of what Obama’s “best and brightest” are doing to our economy. George Will writes:

Today, something unsettlingly similar to McNamara's eerie assuredness pervades the Washington in which he died. . . The apogee of McNamara's professional life, in the first half of the 1960s, coincided. . . with the apogee of the belief that behavioralism had finally made possible a science of politics. Behavioralism held . . . that the social and natural sciences are not so different, both being devoted to the discovery of law-like regularities that govern the behavior of atoms, hamsters, humans, whatever. . . [that t]hings that can be quantified can be controlled. And everything can be quantified.

And Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board argues:

Obama's "New Foundation" [like Kennedy’s “New Frontier”] is an era of soaring rhetoric, big plans and boundless self-regard, issued by an administration convinced it can apply technocratic, top-down solutions to huge and unpredictable systems -- the banking, auto and health-care industries, for instance, or the climate. . . people deeply impressed by their own smarts, the ones for whom the phrase "the best and the brightest" has been scrubbed of its intended irony. . . the mentality of the planner remains alive and well in Washington today, along with the aura of cool intellectual certainty.

But those who looked closest at McNamara’s Vietnam tragedy seem to have reached more nuanced conclusions. Errol Morris, the filmmaker whose documentary “The Fog of War” focused on McNamara and Vietnam, wrote:

the taped conversations between President Lyndon Johnson and . . . Mr. McNamara [suggest] that the pressure for escalation did not come from Mr. McNamara, but from Johnson. Mr. McNamara was not an enthusiast for [Vietnam].

And Ignatius similarly writes:

McNamara was a reluctant warrior, half in and half out, increasingly convinced that our firepower wouldn't work in this asymmetrical war. For the military, that was his greatest sin -- that he sacrificed young American lives without fully believing in the possibility of victory.

My view about McNamara formed after reading ex-Vietnam correspondent Neil Sheehan’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book about the war, A Bright Shining Lie:

McNamara’s doubts about Vietnam show clearly throughout The Pentagon Papers. Beginning in mid-1966, McNamara used his first team, Alain Entoven’s Systems Analysis numbers crunchers, to document that Vietnam was unwinnable—Vietnamese forces had the initiative in 85% of clashes with Americans. While 1966 may seem late, most American deaths in Vietnam occurred after that date.

In fact, the mid-1966 U.S. death toll in Vietnam was around 5,000, a total that eventually reached 58,193.