Argument Without End in Search Of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy [Paperback]

When In Retrospect first came out, some of the people at the college where I teach came up to me and said: "Did you hear? McNamara's published a book and he says the Vietnam War was all a mistake!" Whoa - talk about your late-breaking news! Still, I suppose hearing those sentiments from the highest levels imparts a certain power to them that us lowly grunts could never hope to possess - but I think I recall saying "this is a big mistake" on my first patrol (I served in 'Nam in '68-'69).

The rub, of course, comes when we try to figure out WHY it was a mistake, and it is here that McNamara can give us something truly significant. Does he? I think that he does, but what he has to give us has been dished up many times before.

Apparently realizing that he hadn't provided those answers the war requires in In Retrospect, McNamara instituted a series of conferences between policy makers active during the "McNamara Years", from the U.S. and North Vietnam McNamara's stated goal is to search for "lost opportunities. Were there ways to avoid U.S. entanglement; or, having become entangled, were there ways for the U.S. to disengage before so many lives were lost? McNamara's idea here is to find those lost opportunities and lay them before the public.

So, it was with excitement that I read this book - maybe, finally, McNamara will come clean. And come clean he does, though not in the way he expects.

I knew I would have a different reaction to this book when I read how shocked McNamara was to learn the North Vietnamese side of the argument wanted to start in 1945 in the search for missed opportunities. McNamara's original intent was to limit discussion to the years 1961 - 1967; his years as Secretary of Defense. Here we have a sense of the man's over-arching ego; nothing important could have occurred before or after those dates. It is simply beyond my comprehension how the so-called "best and brightest" could be surprised at the date of 1945. For those of you who don't know, that's the date when the Vietnamese, under Ho Chi Minh, declared themselves independent of France, using words from the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration on the Rights of Man. That is the date that Baodai, the last emperor of Vietnam, formally abdicated his throne and anointed Ho Chi Minh as his successor. That is the date when Ho Chi Minh made direct appeals to Pres. Truman to ensure the rights of the Vietnamese were respected. It is a date that is no secret now, and wasn't then.

How, then, could the chief architect of American policy towards Vietnam be so awesomely ignorant of such an important starting point? The answer to that question is one of the lessons one might draw from the war: U.S. policy makers had no interest in Vietnam per se. It was merely a stage, upon which the righteous Americans would meet and defeat the forces of "the Evil Empire". The McNamaras and the Rusks and the Rostows felt no need to learn anything about their potential adversary - to our ultimate sorrow. Know Thy Enemy. That lesson is nothing new; applied to this specific war, one can find it in Fire in the Lake, Frances FitzGerald's excellent work about the war published in 1971. What is new is McNamara's bald admission that he really had no interest in learning about the Vietnamese, nor did anyone else in the American administrations.

Another interesting part of the book is McNamara's complete lack of understanding at the refusal of the North Vietnamese to negotiate while we were bombing them. Despite the numerous lessons about the failure of strategic bombing to shorten wars and "force" the enemy to the negotiating table, America pursued the continued bombing of North Vietnam in order to accomplish those self-same goals. All of this was known to McNamara and his cronies, and yet they allowed the strategic bombing of North Vietnam to be one of the major foci of American policy. And now, thirty years after McNamara's involvement in the war, he still doesn't get it.

I wish to touch on just one more facet of Argument Without End. It includes a chapter by Col. Herbert Schandler and McNamara, entitled "U.S. Military Victory in Vietnam: A Dangerous Illusion?" Most of the chapter was written by Schandler, who did his time in 'Nam in the infantry. The answer to the rhetorical question posed in the title is, Yes - a U.S. military victory in Vietnam is and was a dangerous illusion. I strongly agree with that answer, and I'm glad this chapter is in the book. But, dollars to doughnuts, this chapter won't shut up those deluded folks who think "we could've won if only the military had been allowed to win". This is because Schandler never really answers those critics who contend that the military had its hands tied in Vietnam. This is too bad, because the answer is not all that difficult to comprehend. If the military had done exactly as it pleased in Vietnam, we still would have lost. Without the support of the people we were supposed to help, there was no hope. Herein lies another lesson from the war: if we aren't true to our democratic principles in our foreign policy, our foreign policy will fail. We pontificate at great length about "self-determination", but we sure didn't allow it in Vietnam.

In the end, these two books show Robert Strange McNamara to be not very bright - certainly not the best. They show a man steeped in his own arrogance, and that arrogance in him and those around him cost thousands of American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives. But give the man credit, he doesn't flinch from laying it all before us - even if he doesn't complete understand exactly what it is he's telling us.

McNamara continues his quest for both personal redemption and additional explanation to back his conclusions from his last book, that "we were wrong, we were terribly wrong." THe book unites a vriety of US historians, government officials and academics with some of their counterparts from Vietnam. On paper the idea seems to be a good one, but the book does not read well nor does it contain the hoped for insights that one might have expected to take place about a war that is now some 20 years past. THe fault is not entirely McNamara's; the Vietnamese are recalcitrant and unable to get past the dogma of the one-party state they come from, they admit little and are far more willing to blame rather than pursue any meaningful discourse. There are a few good revelations; for one McNamara finally admits that the war, except at the very beginning, was never really about the Vietnamese, it gradually became more about us saving face and presenting a tough exterior to the Soviets and Chinese. Also, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the basis for escalation of the war, rather than being an orchestatred effortt by the Soviets or CHinese, was actually just a Vietnamese low-ranking official protecting the harbor. Mcnamara and the other participants show how misperceptions by both sides about the other's motives resulted in gradual escalation, and how these perceptions destroyed many diplomatic opportunities. THe Vietnamese indicate they were more willing to negotiate than we had thought, but only if we agreed to stop the bombing, something we never did for any length of time. Also interesting is that the Vietnamese, early i nthe war, were more than willing to consider a coalition governemnt in SOuth Vietnam, providing the NLF was part of it. This of course was the sticking point, any NLF involvement was a no-no for the US. But the book is constructed poorly, alternating between oral history, transcripts of actual discussions, and McNamara's own opinions and those of other Americans. Indeed, it often gets so confusing that we do not know who's opinion we are listening to. McNamara tells us that he undertook the project so we can learn from our mistakes, yet he fails to address the critical lesson of the war, that it had no moral basis, was inconsistent with our stated principles, and never amounted to anything other than mass devastation of a foreign land. And despite his oft repated ststement that the war was America's mistake, there is more and more evidence coming out that men like McNamara ignored the bulk of the evidence about the effectiveness of the war and the bombing during their time in power. THus the book still seems, like the first one, to be an attempt to cleanse his conscience than really uncover the truth. Finally, it is also clear that McNamara had no head for politics and still doesn't. So while the book answers some questions, it also raises some new ones. If any lessons are to be learned fro mthis book, they should be played out over decisions about future conflicts, but the authors seem unable to draw them. Ultimately, the book is a failure. especially when compared with some of the new one's coming out such as American TRagedy by Kaiser, or Choosing War by LOgevall. Buy these instead.

I am sure that many will rate this book, based upon McNamara's performance during the Vietnam era, probably awarding only one or two stars. However, this is an important book that reveals the many and complex reasons and way that we became involved in the Vietnam war.

The book is a difficult read but is packed with insight into the thinking (or lack thereof) by senior personnel on both sides. There are also many interesting references into the behavior of the Chinese and Soviets.

This may not be the definitive book on the Vietnam war, but it should be one of the major written analyses. Read it.

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