In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.

In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, by Robert McNamara (Times, 414 pp., $27.50)

Mr. Rodman, an NR senior editor, is director of National Security Programs at the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom. He was on Henry Kissinger's Vietnam negotiating delegation during the Nixon Administration.

ROBERT McNamara must be wondering why he bothered. Twenty-seven years after leaving office as Lyndon Johnson's secretary of defense, he has broken his silence with a soul-baring mea culpa on the Vietnam War, of which he was a principal architect. Instead of public admiration for his candor, he has received a torrent of abuse. Angry Vietnam veterans revile him for the incompetent military strategy; antiwar zealots denounce him for not recanting and speaking out earlier. "Evil" and a "scoundrel," writes the distinguished military commentator (and Vietnam vet) Colonel Harry Summers; "lasting moral condemnation" is what the New York Times calls down upon him.

McNamara's Vietnam memoir is indeed a destructive exercise, but not for for the reasons you have been reading in most reviews. McNamara was squeezed out of the Johnson Administration because he was already deeply disillusioned with the war. And in carrying his burden of guilt all these years, he has moved so far to the left that he confesses to more sins than either he or his country is guilty of.

The book is written in a way that brings joy especially to the hearts of the antiwar crowd even while they denounce him, since its confessions seem to vindicate their opposition to the war. That was Bill Clinton's smug reaction. Yet the book is incredibly shallow in its political analysis -- demonstrating how far in over his head McNamara was in that job from the beginning. Indeed, it's high time that someone questioned our country's habit of picking big-time industrialists for defense secretary on the theory that it's just a big management job. Sometimes the job requires a lot more than management skills: strategic wisdom and judgment, which McNamara clearly never had.

In fairness to McNamara, his long silence had an honorable motive. Given the national trauma that Vietnam brought, he feared that any apologia would be self-serving and unseemly. This reticence distinguished McNamara from egregious former colleagues such as Clark Clifford, Averell Harriman, and Cyrus Vance, who within months of leaving office were bombarding the Nixon Administration with peace proposals and demands for concessions to the North Vietnamese.

In the case of McNamara -- whose revulsion against the Vietnam War probably came the earliest and was the most deeply felt of any of that crew's -- public restraint was part of his penance. He kept in touch with Henry Kissinger, who was then Nixon's national security advisor, and poured out his doubts. Kissinger did not follow McNamara's dovish advice, but he respected the man's dignity in not joining in the public harassment of those who had inherited the mess he had helped create.

McNamara spent 1968 through 1981 as president of the World Bank, in what was even more clearly an act of atonement. He thought he could lift up the world's poor. Alas, we now know what a botch he made of that, too: a confidential internal postmortem on the World Bank's 15-year program in Tanzania, for example, criticized the Bank's leadership severely for being taken in -- to the tune of some $16 billion in loans -- by Julius Nyerere's absurd socialist policies which wrecked the country's agriculture, depressed its exports, and made it dependent on foreign donors for half of its budget. Whether we shall ever see a similar McNamara mea culpa for all this ("we were wrong, terribly wrong") remains to be seen. But I leave that subject to Brother Kudlow.

This memoir focuses almost entirely on Vietnam, leaving out the major impact that Robert McNamara had on such things as U.S. nuclear doctrine, NATO strategy, civilian - military relations, and Pentagon management and procurement. His famous pronouncement in April 1965 that the Soviets had given up the strategic arms race is also not mentioned. Fair enough. His aim here is to explain how Vietnam happened and to draw lessons. He traces the fateful decisions made during the Administrations in which he served, from the commitment of 16,000 military advisors in November 1961, through the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963 and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964, to the bombing campaign over North Vietnam and massive ground-troop involvement in South Vietnam beginning in the spring of 1965. His account accords with the commonly held view of a series of whopping miscalculations, both political and military.

McNamara is surely right that we grossly underestimated the tenacity of the North Vietnamese and never came up with a plausible military strategy to defeat them. It was a war of attrition for us, not them. He also adds an important piece to the historical record by knocking down the revisionist assertion that the Gulf of Tonkin incidents -- the two purported attacks by North Vietnamese gunboats on U.S. ships in August 1964 -- never happened. McNamara remains convinced that the first attack definitely did happen and the second one probably did. Whatever we may eventually discover if Hanoi's archives open up, this seems definitive proof of, at the very least, the sincere subjective conviction on the part of the top U.S. leadership that the attacks were genuine. McNamara's credibility on this point would seem to be total, given the self-abasement of the rest of the book.

Much of the rest of the book, unfortunately, is less credible. He speculates, for example, that John Kennedy would have withdrawn us from Vietnam if he had lived; as even Max Frankel of the New York Times retorts, there isn't the slightest evidence for this. He jumps to sweeping conclusions about the error of the domino theory. In truth, the fears of a Khrushchevite or Maoist plan to drive us out of Asia may have been overblown. On the other hand, McNamara is too quick to dismiss the view, widely held today, that our stand in Vietnam may have bought time for Southeast Asia to strengthen itself, including enabling our strategic ally Indonesia to fend off a Communist takeover attempt. As for the failure of the dominoes to fall after 1975, this has a lot to do with the (by then friendly) Chinese stepping in to fill the vacuum against the Soviets -- which was more geopolitical luck than a refutation of earlier strategic fears. Documents newly liberated from Soviet archives do not tend to vindicate the more benign interpretations of Soviet motives and designs.

There is also, last but not least, the moral issue. After the massacres of two million Cambodians, the flight of tens of thousands of boat people from Vietnam, and the Pathet Lao campaign to exterminate the Hmong tribesmen by chemical warfare -- all after we left -- it is not so hard to defend the moral worthiness of having tried to prevent the Communist takeover. Our shame was not that we tried, but that we failed. The lesson to draw is not that we should never try, but that if we commit ourselves, we had better know what we are doing and we had better prevail. That surely is a "lesson" of Vietnam more worthy of those who sacrificed in that cause.

The end of McNamara's book touches briefly on non-Vietnam matters -- especially the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the Harvard conferences he has recently attended, which brought together Soviet, American, and Cuban veterans of that crisis. The mischievousness of such conferences is demonstrated by the breast-beating conclusion of McNamara and some other Americans that it was all our fault: Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba because he feared we were planning another Bay of Pigs. (Even Khrushchev in his memoirs admitted that a big part of his motive was simply to redress the strategic balance.) Anguish about that brush with nuclear disaster has led to another of McNamara's recantations -- his energetic anti-nuclear activism, advancing proposals for disarmament and no-first-use of nuclear weapons. He has championed this cause with the same self-righteous dogmatism with which he once sold us the body counts and whiz-kid strategizing in Vietnam, and with which he now trumpets his confessions of our Vietnam errors. He may never get it right.