- My dear friend and late Nation colleague Andrew Kopkind
liked to tell how, skiing in Aspen at the height of the Vietnam War, he
came round a bend and saw another skier, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara,
alone near the edge of a precipice. This was during the period of Rolling
Thunder, which ultimately saw three times as many bombs dropped on Vietnam
as the Allies dropped on Europe in the Second World War. "I could
have reached out with my ski pole," Andy would say wistfully, "and
pushed him over."
-
- Alas, Andy shirked this chance to get into the history
books and McNamara survived the 1960s, when he contributed more than most
to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went
on to run the World Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction
from their lands and death of many millions more round the world.
-
- And now here he is, the star of Errol Morris's much-praised,
in my view wildly over-praised, documentary The Fog of War, talking comfortably
about the millions of people he's helped to kill. It reminded me of films
of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and then head of war production. Speer
loved to admit to an overall guilt. But when he was pressed on specific
nastiness, like working Jews or Russians to death in arms factories, he
would insist, eyes ablaze with forthrightness, that he knew nothing of
such infamies.
-
- It's good to have a new generation reminded of history's
broad outlines, like the firebombing of Japanese cities and Vietnam, but
even here McNamara's recollection--surprising to many--of his role in advising
Curtis LeMay to order his bombers to fly at lower altitude, the more effectively
to incinerate Japanese cities, goes unexamined.
-
- Did the young McNamara, admittedly a lieutenant colonel
in the Air Force, really play such a role? I asked my associate, Rohit
Goel, to check, and he contacted Michael Sherry, Professor of History at
Northwestern University, author of The Rise of American Air Power. Here's
what Sherry e-mailed back:
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- "I did extensive research in the late 1970s and
1980s on the American bombing of Japan, and especially on LeMay's decision
to fly in at lower altitudes. I do not recall that McNamara's name ever
popped up in those records, and since McNamara's was a famous name by then,
I wouldn't have ignored it. Nor was McNamara mentioned in the several hours
of interviewing I did with LeMay. While not denigrating his [i.e. McNamara's]wartime
record, I suspect there is some latter-day expansion of the importance
of his wartime roleóthat not uncommon tendency of old soldiers to
inflate the past. In this case, there may also be a familiar theme at work
that surfaced, sometimes in ugly conflict, in McNamara's tenure as defense
secretaryóthe superiority of civilian expertise over military wisdom;
perhaps McNamara is figuratively writing that theme back into his story
of World War II... In any event,doubt LeMay saw McNamara as a major figure
in his decision-making, and LeMay's resort to firebombing was the product
of several factors (including pressure from Washington, and simply the
apparent failure of other efforts to do much), not simply of the technical
advice he received."
-
- The documentary's gimmickry-cuts to black, Morris shouting
his questions away from the mike, McNamara off-center in the frame, montage
of typewriter-ribbon wheels, skulls dropping in slow motion down a stairwell,
captions offering very banal "lessons"-gives us a clue.
-
- Morris didn't have much to throw at McNamara. He didn't
do enough homework, and it's no substitute to say he's evolved a technique
whereby we can look into McNamara's eyes. We can look into the eyes of
anyone on remote camera on the Koppel Show. So what?
-
- Time and again, McNamara gets away with it, cowering
in the shadow of baroque monsters like Curtis LeMay or LBJ, choking up
about his choice of Kennedy's gravesite in Arlington, sniffling at the
memory of Johnson giving him the Medal of Freedom, spouting nonsense about
how Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam, muffling himself in the ever-useful
camouflage of the "fog of war."
-
- Now, the "fog of war" is a tag usually attributed
to von Clausewitz, though the great German philosopher and theorist of
war never actually used the phrase. Eugenia Kiesling argued a couple of
years ago in Military Review that the idea of fog-- unreliable information--wasn't
a central preoccupation of Clausewitz. "Eliminating fog", Kiesling
wrote, gives us a clearer and more useful understanding of Clausewitz's
friction. It restores uncertainty and the intangible stresses of military
command to their rightful centrality in ëOn Warí. It allows
us to replace the simplistic message that war intelligence is important
with the reminder that Clausewitz constantly emphasizes moral forces in
war."
-
- As presented by McNamara, through Morris, "the fog
of war" usefully deflects attention from clear and unpleasant facts
entirely unobscured by fog. McNamara can talk--Iíll come to the
Gulf of Tonkin incident shortly--about confusions, fog, about what actually
happened on August 2 or 4, 1964, thus detouring unfogged daylight, of which
there was plenty, about the moral failures of US commanders including McNamara,
waging war on the Vietnamese.
-
- Roberta Wohlstetter was a pioneer in this fogging technique
back in the 1950s with her heavily subsidized Pearl Harbor: Warning and
Decision, which deployed the idea of distracting "noise" as the
phenomenon that prevented US commanders, ultimately Roosevelt, from comprehending
the information that the Japasnese were about to launch a surprise attack.
Wohlstetterian "noise" thus obscured the fact that FDR wanted
a Japanese provocation, knew the attack was coming, though not probable
not its scale and destructiveness.
-
- When McNamara looks back down memory lane there are no
real shadows, just the sunlight of moral self-satisfaction: "I don't
fault Truman for dropping the bomb"; "I never saw Kennedy more
shocked" (after the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem); "never would I
have authorized an illegal action" (after the Tonkin Gulf fakery);
"I'm very proud of my accomplishments and I'm very sorry I made errors"
(his life).
-
- Slabs of instructive history are missing from Morris's
film. McNamara rode into the Pentagon on one of the biggest of big lies,
the bogus "missile gap" touted by Kennedy in his 1960 campaign
against Nixon. It was all nonsense. As Defense Secretary McNamara ordered
the production of 1,000 Minuteman strategic nukes, this at a time when
he was looking at US intelligence reports showing that the Soviets had
one silo with one untested missile.
-
- To Morris now he offers homilies about the menace of
nuclear Armageddon. It's cost-free to say to say such things, grazing peacefully
on the tranquil mountain pastures of his 87 years.
-
- Why did Morris not try to extort from McNamara, in those
twenty-three hoursd of interviews, some reflections on how people in their
forties, on active service in the belly of the beast, should behave. Would
McNamara encourage today's weapons designers in Los Alamos to mutiny, to
resign? Were the atom spies in Los Alamos in the 1940s right to try to
level nuclear terror to some sort of balance? How does McNamara regard
the Berrigans and their comrades who served or are serving decades in prison
for physically attacking nuclear missiles, beating the decks of the Sea
Wolf nuclear submarine with their hammers.
-
- Even when McNamara's record shows to his credit, no useful
point is made. Ralph Nader tells me (and wrote it in Unsafe at Any Speed)
that it's true that when he was head of the Ford Division of the Ford motor
Company in the mid-1950s, McNamara did push for safety options--seat belts
and padded instrument panels. Ford dealer brochures for the í56
models featured photos of how Ford and GM models fared in actual crashes,
to GM's disadvantage.
-
- But Morris could have put to McNamara what happened next.
As Nader describes it, in December, 1955, a top GM executive called Ford's
vice president for sales and said Ford's safety campaign had to stop. These
Ford executives, many of them formerly from GM, had a saying, Chevy could
drop its price $25 to bankrupt Chrysler, $50 to bankrupt Ford. Ford ran
up the white flag. The safety sales campaign stopped. McNamara took a long
vacation in Florida, his career in Detroit in the balance, and came back
a team player. Safety went through the windscreen and lay in a coma for
years.
-
- None of this bloody corporate handiwork shows up in the
documentary, which opts for that showy footage of skulls being dropped
down stair wells as part of safety-impact studies. McNamara invokes the
Ford Falcon--you can still see some of them bumbling around in the South--as
his effort to push small cheap cars, and of course this claim goes unexamined
too. The US car companies put out small cars in the late fifties mostly
to instruct US consumers that small cars weren't worth buying (except for
the immortal Slant 6 Plymouth Valiant, rolled out in 1960 by Chrysler,
run by engineers), as opposed to the larger vehicles which was what the
companies were interested in making money off. The Japanese and Germans
came in with well-made small cars and, helped by Nader's attack on the
Corvair (which was actually a pretty good car) captured that market, just
as they wiped out the UK's poorly managed MG and Triumph in the Forties.
-
- The eyes don't tell the story. McNamara is self-serving
and disingenuous. Reminiscing about his acceptance of Kennedy's invitation
to come from Ford in Detroit to Camelot, McNamara claims to Morris that
he insisted he would not be part of Georgetown's pesky social round. Nonsense.
He took to it like a parvenu to ermine, as more than one Washington hostess
could glowingly recall.
-
- "It's beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend
all the variables," the systems analyst proclaims to Morris, which
would have afforded a better-informed filmmaker a chance to ask this cold
engine of statistical calculation for his take on the prime business of
the Pentagon, the allocation of pork.
-
- Why did Defense Secretary McNamara overrule all expert
review and procurement recommendations and insist that General Dynamics
rather than Boeing make the disastrous F-111, at that time one of the largest
procurement contracts uin the Pentagon's history? Could it be that Henry
Crown of Chicago was calling in some chits for his role in fixing the 1960
JFK vote in Cook County, Illinois? Crown, of Chicago Sand and Gravel, had
$300 million of the mob's money in GD debentures, and after the disaster
of the Convair, GD needed the F-111 to avoid going belly-up, taking the
mob's $300 million with it. McNamara misled Congressional investigators
about this for years afterward.
-
- The Gulf of Tonkin "attack" prompted the Gulf
of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, whereby Congress gave LBJ legal authority
to prosecute and escalate the war in Vietnam. McNamara does some fancy
footwork here, stating that there wasn't any attack by North Vietnamese
PT boats on the US destroyer Maddox on August 4, but that there had been
such an attack on August 2. It shouldn't have been beyond Morris's powers
to pull up a well-reported piece by Robert Scheer, published in the Los
Angeles Times in April, 1985, establishing not only that the Maddox was
attacked neither on August 2 nor 4 but that, beginning on the night of
July 30, South Vietnamese navy personnel, US-trained and -equipped, "had
begun conducting secret raids on targets in North Vietnam." As Scheer
said, the North Vietnamese PT boats that approached the Maddox on August
2 were probably responding to that assault.
-
- The Six-Day War? Just before this ë67 war the Israelis
were ready to attack and knew they were going to win but couldn't get a
clear go-ahead from the Johnson Administration. As the BBC documentary
The 50 Years War narrates, Meir Amit, head of Israel's Mossad, flew to
Washington. The crucial OK came from McNamara, thus launching Israel's
long-planned, aggressive war on Egypt, Jordan and Syria, which led to present
disasters. And no, Morris didn't quiz McNamara on Israel's deliberate attack
on the US ship Liberty during that war (with thirty-four US sailors dead
and 174 wounded), or on the cover-up that McNamara supervised.
-
- We have so many sponsors of mass murder hanging around,
it would be nice to see one of them, once in a while, take a real pasting.
But no, they live on into happy old age, vivid in their worries about the
human condition, writing in The New York Review of Books, passing on no
honest records about the evil it really takes to run an empire. So suddenly
people are shocked about a relative piker like George W. Bush and start
talking about Hitler. If only they knew. It's not that hard to find out.
-
- As displayed by Morris, McNamara never offers any reflection
on the social system that produced and promoted him, a perfectly nice,
well-spoken war criminal. As his inflation of his role in the foe-bombing
of Japan shows, he can go so far as to falsely though complacently indict
himself , while still shirking bigger , more terrifying and certainly more
useful reflections on the system that blessed him and mercilessly killed
millions upon millions under FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon.
I don't think Morris laid a glove on McNamara, who should be feeling well
pleased. Like Speer, he got away with it yet again.
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- http://www.counterpunch.org/
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