There have already been hundreds of official and semi-official obituaries on McNamara, and I don’t have too much more to offer. While it’s pretty clear that he was an incredibly intelligent man, his mismanagement of the Vietnam War – which killed 3 million people, including 58,000 Americans – will rightfully define his disastrous legacy. His attempts over the ensuing decades to justify his decisions in the war and rationalize his role in the deaths of millions of people have been mixed at best. I suspect, like Marc Cooper, that a good chunk of his inability to convincingly do so is because the sheer moral weight of his crimes is impossible to come to terms with – I, too, would likely to do my best to rationalize such horrors.
I don’t care so much, though, and neither does Stephen Walt, who has written the best semi-obituary on McNamara I’ve read yet. American foreign policy, and those who have played a role in its execution, is littered with errors in judgment, misguided policy, and heinous crimes. Unfortunately, as Walt notes, this hasn’t prevented its poorest, most reckless architects – McNamara, Henry Kissinger, and, more recently, Dick Cheney come to mind – from spending their post-office careers doing their best to condone their actions and defend the considerable damage they have done. It’s an unfortunate combination of hubris and misplaced self-confidence, and Walt correctly calls McNamara and similarly minded ex-office holders to task for their predictable, public mea culpas and unsolicited (and unwarranted) advice.
McNamara may have been a gifted analyst and corporate executive, blessed with a lot of raw smarts, but he was also one of those people who could not imagine being wrong or resist the desire to tell the world what to do. Failure in Vietnam did not teach him humility; he ran the World Bank with same ego-driven sense of infallibility he had brought to the Pentagon (and with predictably mixed results). Yet this second experience with failure did not temper his love of the limelight or his desire to prescribe How Things Should Be Done. He spent the last decades of his life offering high-profile advice on various aspects of nuclear weapons policy — with the same degree of self-assurance he had always displayed — and he sought the spotlight once again with a belated memoir on his role in Vietnam. As always, however, it was filled with “lessons” for others; to the last, McNamara retained an unwarranted confidence in his own ideas as well as an inability to keep quiet.
Overall, McNamara’s post-Vietnam behavior raises a broader question about the role of former officials who have led their country into major disasters. Ordinarily, we should respect the men and women who have devoted years of their lives to public service and listen carefully to the counsel of those who have the benefit of long experience. Moreover, someone who is no longer competing for a job in Washington may be more likely to give honest advice than someone who is still worrying about the questions she might face at a confirmation hearing.
But in some cases — and a lot of former Bush administration officials come to mind here — the failures are of sufficient gravity as to render all subsequent advice suspect. And when a government official’s repeated errors have left thousands of their fellow citizens dead or grievously wounded, along with hundreds of thousands of other human beings, it would be more seemly for them to remain silent, in mute acknowledgement of their own mistakes. And if they persist in pontificating — as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, and Dick Cheney are now doing — a nation that understood the importance of accountability might have the good sense to pay them the attention and respect they deserve. Which is to say: none.
Read the rest of his post (I highly recommend it) here.
