US architect of Vietnam War, McNamara, dies
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The former American Defence Secretary, Robert McNamara has died at the age of 93.
Mr McNamara will be most remembered as a key player in America's involvement in the Vietnam War, when he was Defence Secretary in President Kennedy's administration. Mr McNamara, who served as Defence Secretary from 1961 to 1968 in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, died peacefully in his sleep.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speakers:Jonathan Pollock, Professor of Asian & Pacific studies at the US Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island
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POLLOCK: Well, to some extent, I suppose he did. On the other hand, McNamara was and is faulted, both for being dishonest, frankly, during the war, when he asserted that had an approach that would win it. And then, he was in his own way, equally dishonest in subsequent years, when he claimed in his memoirs that he entertained doubts all along the way, and yet, never conveyed those doubts to President Johnson or other officials in the US government. So, he leaves, a, what should say, is a very complex legacy.
LAM: Hmm. So how do you think contemporary scholars might rate Robert McNamara as defence secretary?
POLLOCK: I think that the verdict on McNamara as defence secretary is going to be a very negative one. He was a man who posessed equal portions of brilliance and arrogance, it did not serve him well. I think that the phenomenon of trying to endlessly quantify war and to make assertions about how wars could be won from the air, and not on the ground, ill-served American interests. And it affected profoundly entire generations of officers, including people such as Secretary of State Powell, who was a foot soldier during the Vietnam war. They were part of that - consequences of the policies that McNamara stayed with. It is true that McNamara tried to compensate or expiate his own feelings of responsibility, via other things, such as public service in subsequent years. And I don't dispute that. But I think his record as Defence Secretary is a very, very sordid one, one that integrated to himself, so much of the judgement of what wise policy was, without often paying heed to considerations of those in uniform.
LAM: So do you think his policies during the time of the Vietnam War and indeed, Vietnam itself, that it had an impact of some sort on US military culture and development?
POLLOCK: Oh it did, no doubt, and I think it profoundly affected officers in the post-Vietnam era, including, as I mentioned before, Colin Powell. But you know, lessons that are learned can be unlearned, and alot of parallels are often made between Secretary McNamara and Secretary Rumsfeld when he returned to the Pentagon in the second Bush administration. In both cases, often being highly-contemptuous of the opinions of uniformed officers and in effect, offering solutions, magic answers, that were much more complicated in reality, than they were in theory. And I don't think that that verdict on McNamara really goes away at all. It doesn't mean that he alone assumes responsibility for the war, there was lots of culpability, including frankly, among a number of very senior officers as well. But in the sense that, our policies went hideously awry lingers, it doesn't change. We can rewind that historical tape, but frankly, the more that we learn, the more it doesn't change, in terms of the overall verdict.
LAM: But do you think his heart was in the right place, that at the core of the matter, he believed sincerely that he was doing the right thing by America?
POLLOCK: Well, Mr McNamara obviously has to answer for that in his own conscience. The sense one gets is that he was deeply tortured by alot of the decisions that he made, and that he was not honest and forthcoming at the time, that he was serving as Defence Secretary, and that the country paid a terrible price for it. I think he tried to reflect on that as best he could, but his reflections I think were very, very incomplete, and I think frankly, went with him to his grave.
