Will Donald Rumsfeld Have a Robert McNamara Moment?
Is former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, onetime collegiate wrestling champion, fitness freak and an all-around tough guy who preferred to stand at his Pentagon desk rather than sit, losing his stuff?
According to a gossipy report in the WaPo, the people accompanying the 75-year-old Rumsfeld when he lunched last week at Morton’s in Washington had to help him onto an escalator, held his elbow and opened doors for him.
A Republican tipster told the WaPo that “he looked old,” although that was not my impression when I watched him lie and obfuscate his way through a House subcommittee hearing on the Pat Tillman cover-up a mere two weeks ago.
Now as someone 15 years Rummy’s junior who has his own share of aches and pains, I have a certain amount of empathy for him. After all, he was in the engine room for the first three years of the Iraq war and his name is writ large on the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. I can only imagine that the stress he was under might finally have caught up with and literally crippled him.
But what I really want to know – but do not expect to find out anytime soon – is whether Rumsfeld has had or at some future time will have what I call a McNamara Moment.
Robert McNamara, for you youngins out there, was secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was in the engine room for the early years of the Vietnam War, which didn’t turn out too swell, either.
Like Rumsfeld, McNamara was a control freak who thought he had all the answers, surrounded himself with sycophantic acolytes, did not take kindly to dissenting generals, was a technocrat who worshipfully embraced sophisticated weaponry, projected an unshakable faith that he was doing the right thing, communicated poorly in public forums . . . and turned out to know jack about how to run a war.
And like Rumsfeld, was forced out or quit depending upon whom you talk to.
McNamara left the Pentagon in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War to run the World Bank for a decade or so and had been absent from the world stage for several years when he wrote In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, a reflection on his years running the war that was published in 1995.
This was followed by media appearances and speaking tours amidst an extraordinary outpouring of animus from a lot of people with a lot of pent up hostility over the war, including Yours Truly, and more or less culminated in The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. This Academy Award-winning 2003 Errol Morris documentary largely consists of interviews with the man himself.
McNamara has never explained the circumstances of his catharsis, that point at which he realized his manifold failures as defense secretary and the immense suffering, death and deprivation that he and LBJ were responsible for. One can only assume that it did not come to him in the middle of the night a la Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, but rather in a drawn out metamorphosis befitting a man of his intellect and analytical skills.
McNamara never actually apologized for his role in the Vietnam debacle, but clearly was haunted by it, and his mantra became “We were wrong, terribly wrong.”
Rumsfeld also has not apologized and it is difficult forseeing that he will ever do so, but is he too haunted by Iraq?
Again, I wish the man no ill and have not a shred of schadenfreude now that it appears his health may be failing. Rumsfeld is intensely proud and very private, so I do not know if he weeps bitter tears when he reads that yet another man or woman he was responsible for sending into battle without enough support, let alone the proper equipment, is pulverized by an IED, shot dead by an insurgent sniper or snaps under stress and is brought home in a straightjacket.
Nearly 16,000 Americans had been killed in Viet Nam when McNamara left; by the time the United States finally withdrew in 1975, the number stood at over 58,000. Nearly 3,000 Americans had been killed in Iraq when Rumsfeld left; the number now stands at nearly 3,700.
And continues to grow and grow.
8 Responses to “Will Donald Rumsfeld Have a Robert McNamara Moment?”
Don’t hold yr breath. Public accountability meant something once. McNamara served in that time. Rummy didn’t.
But Fog of War is a great film: http://www.cosmoetica.com/B178-DES122.htm
Rumsfeld won’t succumb to the inescapable realization of absolute failure as McNamara did and not just because he might die before the US leaves Iraq.
If you listen to McNamara you can tell that two things bothered him the most about Vietnam. The fact that the North finally took all the country, in effect making the entire US action in Vietnam a failure, and the large amount of US soldiers who died for this failure.
Rumsfeld won’t have those issues to contemplate. Even though the Bush Administration’s objectives may not be obtained to Iraq. The officially stated goal of eliminating Hussein and the defeat of his army has been accomplished. And although the cost in dollars is 19% higher so far the cost in soldiers lives is 86% lower so far.
Good points, At. But, hawks might argue that the goal in Vietnam was not Vietnam itself, but checking Commie expansion, then point to the demise of the Soviets and the rise of quasi-capitalist Vietnam and China as evidence that our blunting the Domino Theory was a success.
Tapdancing has many virtues.
Speaking as one who explored this very comparison repeatedly in posts in posts over the last year (most recently December with “Bartender – One more Rum & Mac for the road!”) I think you miss one important point.
The critical “McNamara moment” was in 1968 when he resigned/was fired as SECDEF, rather than his confessional decades later. The point is that he claims he knew in 1968 that Vietnam was lost, communicated that to President, but not to the American people. The unknown, is whether it would have hastened our dis- engagement in that war if in 1968 the architect of that war had come clean with the American people.
Rumsfeld’s position on the war is on the record in his leaked memo to the President from the time of his resignation (another point of eerie comparison to MacNamara – see above post). There is no similar expression of “the war is lost” that i can read.
I wonder whether the more apt comparison looking for a “Mac Moment” is Colin Powell. Powell understood that the Iraq adventure was being planned managed in direct contravention to his own “Colin Doctrine”, A doctrine he developed specifically to keep the Army from bieng embroiled in another Vietnam. Like MacNamara, if he had chosen to share his real views with the American people in 2002, it might have made a difference in our actions since then. At least he only waied years for his mea culpa, as opposed to MacNamara’s decades.
mw:
I more or less concede the point, and it is a good one. I equivocate only because McNamara did not go public over his private communications with LBJ until nearly three decades later, while I am unaware that Powell shared his “moment” with anyone who mattered. The Rumsfeld memo you cite in your post is fascinating insofar as it is advice not taken.
Yeah. Powell is a really interesting case in this regard. He has backpedaled from the Iraq decision almost continuously since leaving office. His June 10 Meet The Press appearance is the closest he has come to disowning it completely. He is very critical of the decisions made throughout and since, although he is still rationalizing his UN appearance (I comment here – and that is my last blog self reference).
I never got around to posting about this quote specifically, but I found this exchange with Russert to be particularly telling:
This is the moment where Powell chose personal loyalty and “being part of the team”, over what he knew to be a wrong decision. This is where he forgot (like MacNamara) that his loyalty to the American people took precedence over his loyalty to the President. This is where Powell failed us.
I suspect that, to this day, he still does not understand the degree to which that very conversation with the President, may have been the tipping point that put us on this course.
MW: ‘This is the moment where Powell chose personal loyalty and “being part of the teamâ€, over what he knew to be a wrong decision. This is where he forgot (like MacNamara) that his loyalty to the American people took precedence over his loyalty to the President. This is where Powell failed us.’
I would say that Powell’s failings came earlier, when he tied his military career’s rise to that of the Bush clan. Military men know one thing- war and conquest. They are not trained in diplomacy nor realpolitik, much less backdoor politicking.
So, yes, Powell’s failings come from his putting politics ahead of the military, but that was long before his failed ‘Adlai’ moment at the UN.
Plus, such a tying of his fortunes to the Bush have made him an Uncle Tom to most of Black America.