5/4/2023 0 Comments Personal nightmare all deaths“Halt the bombing of the North, and negotiate a cease-fire with Hanoi.” “Stop the buildup of American forces,” he said he told McNamara. “He wanted to know what I would do if I were sitting in his place,” Allen wrote in his 2001 memoir of Vietnam, “None So Blind.” “I decided to respond candidly.” He called in a CIA analyst, George Allen, who had spent 17 years working on the question of Vietnam. 26, 1966, McNamara read a CIA study called “The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist,” which concluded that nothing the United States was doing could defeat the enemy. He said with conviction, “No amount of bombing can end the war.” But by February 1966, when McNamara held a private briefing for reporters, he no longer possessed the radiant confidence he had always displayed in public. combat troops arrived in Vietnam and American warplanes pounded the enemy. When Johnson became president after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, McNamara found that the new president was depending on him to win the war, which soon became a full-fledged conflict for America. ![]() Kennedy called him the smartest man he had ever met. He was 44 and had been named president of the Ford Motor Co. The idea of the United States’ losing a war seemed impossible when McNamara came to the Pentagon in January 1961 as the nation’s eighth defense secretary. The American failure in Vietnam, he said, was seeing the enemy through the prism of the Cold War, as a domino that would topple the nations of Asia if it fell. “We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes,” he said. The greatest of these was to know one’s enemy - and to “empathize with him,” as McNamara explained in Errol Morris’ 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. ![]() ![]() He had spent decades thinking through the lessons of the war. He could be seen in the streets of Washington - stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind - walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare. In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war, confessing in a memoir that it was “wrong, terribly wrong.” In return, he faced a firestorm of scorn.īy then he wore the expression of a haunted man. He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until much later in life. Nothing he did, none of the tools at his command - the power of American weapons, the forces of technology and logic, or the strength of American soldiers - could stop the armies of North Vietnam and their South Vietnamese allies, the Viet Cong. More than 16,000 died 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come. Half a million American soldiers went to war on McNamara’s watch.
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