In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.

In 1989, I interviewed Robert McNamara for my book President Kennedy: Profile of Power When the questions turned to Vietnam, the former defense secretary stopped me and said that he had long ago decided that he would not speak or write about the war in Vietnam - ever. But, if I was interested, he said, I might want to look for the memorandum he wrote after his last trip to South Vietnam before Kennedy's death.

He was vague about the details, but clear in urging me to judge him (and Kennedy, too) by that memo. Despite McNamara's almost conspiratorial tone that day, the memo of October 2, 1963 - a report to the President by him and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor - was no secret. Everything in it, including the deliberately misleading idea that the U.S. was accomplishing its goals in Vietnam and might be able to end the war in 1965 and withdraw 1,000 of its 17,000 uniformed "trainers" by the end of 1963, was announced by the White House and was on the front page of The New York Times.

To McNamara, the memo proved that he and Kennedy had been just about ready to shut down U.S. involvement in the war until fate intervened and the young president was shot down in Dallas. If this were true, it would offer an absolution of sorts to McNamara, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. There was no secret plan to end the war. General Taylor, for one, said later that the real purpose was to pressure the South Vietnamese government to "put their noses to the wheel or the grindstone or whatever" by threatening to abandon them if they didn't shape up in-the war against the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. I thought the old warrior, or civilian director of warriors, took reporters for fools, and I wondered how many times he had tried this and whether he had gotten away with it.

Now McNamara has changed his mind about talking and written In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. It is a strange and amazing book. I would guess that no other high-ranking official of the U.S. government has ever written a book intended, apparently, to demean his own contribution to the Republic. On almost every one of its 320 pages, McNamara asserts that he and his colleagues who decided the country's policy towards Vietnam were misguided, wrong, stupid, deceptive, and deceived.

It is as savage an attack on McNamara as anyone has written - or likely will write. "Mea culpa" doesn't suffice to describe the late thoughts of this tortured man. He has written a breast-beating plea for mercy. Yes, yes, it was me, he seems to say. Please forgive me! McNamara is no longer sure of anything and the results are pathetic. "We were wrong, terrible wrong," he writes. Then follows, again an again and again:

I was wrong. . . . We were wrong. . . . They were wrong. . . . We often did not have time to think straight. . . . The truth is I did not understand the plan. . . . I misunderstood the nature of the conflict . . . . We lacked experts for us to consult to compensate our ignorance. . . . We totally misjudged the political forces. . . . Once again, we failed miserably to coordinate our diplomatic and military actions. . . . In retrospect, we erred seriously.

Sad, too, are McNamara's dances around that McNamara-Taylor Report of October 1963. At one point, he corroborates Taylor' statement. "By threatening to reduce U.S. help or even actually reducing it," he writes, "we thought we could, over time, convince South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem to modify his destructive behavior." At another, he cites the memo to support what he had implied to me and so many others: "With the advantage of hindsight, I think it highly probable that, had President Kennedy lived, he would have pulled us out of Vietnam."

Yes, but when? Kennedy was the one who got us into Vietnam. There is nothing new in the book upon which to base this - most of the sourcing is from "Foreign Relations of the United States," volumes which have been public for years. Without providing any new information, McNamara's spin on the events of the summer and fall of 1963 carries no more historical weight than any other well-informed guess about Kennedy's intentions.

Killing Time

The pivotal event seems to have occurred late in the summer of 1963. On August 24, with the President, McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk out of town for a summer weekend, a cabal led by Undersecretary of State Averell Harriman, and including Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman and Michael Forrestal, persuaded (or tricked) Kennedy into signing off on a telegram to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge that gave the CIA permission to work with the South Vietnamese army and overthrow Diem's government.

Two months later, on the first day of November 1963, Diem was dead, assassinated in the coup. From that day on, South Vietnam was An American colony and the U.S. was in the quagmire. Author McNamara does not state (or does not understand) that a key event in the run up to the murder of Diem was his own switching sides during his late September visit from pro-Diem to pro-coup - maneuvered, or tricked again, by Harriman and Lodge.

McNamara recounts a meeting, set up by Lodge, between himself and a British Vietnam expert named P.J. Honey at Lodge's Saigon residence on September 26, 1963. (In McNamara's notes from the time, Honey is referred to as "Professor Smith.") Honey's thoughts - he urged McNamara to back the overthrow of Diem - "carried special weight with me because of his strong background and because he had previously supported Diem," he writes. Strangely, when I asked McNamara in a letter about this meeting, he claimed not to remember ever meeting Honey.

McNamara makes much of the fact that just after Kennedy was killed, he realized that he had been wrong - and arrogantly so - about Vietnam. On December 21, 1963, after another visit to Saigon, he wrote a memo saying:

There is no organized government in South Vietnam at this time. . . . It is abundantly clear that statistics received over the past year or more from GVN officials and reported by the U.S. mission on which we gauged the trend of the war were grossly in error. . . . It is my conclusion that the coup came when there was a downward trend which was more serious than was reported. And, therefore, more serious than realized. . . . There are more reasons to doubt the future of the effort . . . than there are reasons to be optimistic about the future of the our cause in South Vietnam.

That memo, however, was "to the record" - for his own files rather than to the new president, Lyndon Johnson. For the next five years or so, he went in the opposite direction, lying to protect the falsehood of an inevitable American victory.

In Retrospect does, however, reveal one big lie: the fiction that President Kennedy was unaware that his administration was in the assassination business, with Fidel Castro as the usual target. More than once McNamara advocated assassinating Castro. "The only thing to do is eliminate Castro," he said at a Cuba Task Force session after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961. "I mean it. It's the only way." He was saying the same thing at least as late as the end of 1962, according to the minutes of various task forces dealing with covert Cuban actions.

In 1975, testifying before the Church Committee investigating the CIA and its assassination plots, McNamara, by then president of the World Bank, said this: "I do not believe that President Kennedy gave the authority. I also do not believe that the CIA would take such actions without the authorization of the President. I know that it is contradictory, but that's the way it is."

Can We Talk?

That background is not part of his book, but McNamara is now more straightforward about who was giving the orders in the Kennedy White House, writing: "During my seven years in the Defense Department (and I believe throughout the preceding and following administrations) all CIA `covert operations' (excluding spying operations) were subject to approval by the President and the secretaries of state and defense, or their representatives. The CIA had no authority to act without that approval. So far as I know, it never did." For that reason alone, it strikes me as worthwhile that McNamara, for his own reasons, did finally decide to write this down and clear up one of the more enduring questions of Kennedy's presidency.

He does not tell all, by any means. But there are flashes of a human being there when he writes of the pain his family endured as millions of his countrymen saw him as some kind of monster. In the midst of his statistics and heavy-handed discussions of public policy, he tells of anti-war demonstrators' attempts to burn down his vacation house outside Aspen, Colorado, and of his friend, the President's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, beating her fists against his chest and crying, "Do something to stop the slaughter!"

McNamara's last chapter is called, of course, "The Lessons of Vietnam." They are quite ordinary. Except for some detail they are probably the same ones taught by good high school history teachers: Don't fight a people you don't know anything about and can't figure out; tell the truth if you want the long-term support of the American people; organize better, etc.

But, truth be told, McNamara still doesn't understand Vietnam. He still calls it a "tiny" country. Unified Vietnam has more than 70 million people and it is more than 1,000 miles from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). The Vietnamese have been there for thousands of years and they will be there a thousand years from now. We never had a chance.

What is the lesson, then? Perhaps that Americans on both sides of the divisive national debate on Vietnam should not wait until they are 78 years old to tell the truth about what happened. The war was foolish, perhaps pointless, but many of us are still trying to justify what we did or did not do then. Some of us are trying to have it both ways. We have a president now, a protester then, who seems to be destined, like McNamara, to wait his entire life before standing up and saying what needs to be said: "The war was a mistake. I thought so then. I think so now. Whether we agree or disagree on that, it's over and we have to move on together now."