Robert McNamara Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 6 of 8
In the liberal administrations that you were in, both Kennedy and Johnson, there were two big goals. One was the continuation of the New Deal reforms, which ultimately became the Great Society, and the other was exercising in a responsible way American power in the world.
I'd say there were three goals. One was civil rights, which is somewhat different than the goal of the Great Society.
One was civil rights, and I think both Kennedy had it and Johnson had it [as a goal]. Johnson, a Southerner, a Texan, moved to put through the Civil Rights bill and the Voting Rights Act and people didn't think he would do that. They didn't think he would turn his back, if you will, on the South, which in a sense he did. He opposed the southerners, Dick Russell of Georgia and many others who opposed the Civil Rights bill and who opposed the Voting Rights bill. Johnson led the fight for the Civil Rights bill, in part because he'd inherited that bill from President Kennedy and he thought he owed it to the president and he didn't want to be criticized for not pursuing the Civil Rights idea that he and Kennedy had [fought for], but also he fought for it because he believed in it. And when the Voting Rights Act came out, it was his bill, it certainly wasn't inherited from Kennedy, and he fought tooth and nail to get it through. And I observed and participated in discussions he had on both of those bills, so that was one tremendous achievement.
And number two?
Number two was,following what you've said, the Rooseveltian philosophy of the role of government, particularly dealing with poverty in our society, which became the Great Society program, and focused on dealing with the Job Corps and the Head Start program. We have turned our back on a lot of that today. I think it's a disgrace that in the richest country in the world the percentage of children below the poverty line has risen by a third in the last decade or so. Today that we have 20 percent of our children below the poverty line; that is twice the level of Germany or Canada who are less wealthy than we are. I think that's a disgrace. Johnson was determined to avoid that.
Third, both Kennedy and Johnson pursued what I would call a responsible role for the U.S. in international affairs. We've turned our back on that. Look what we are doing in the United Nations today. We have failed to pay our general assessments to the UN. We are the country that owes more to the United Nations in unpaid dues than any other. We have failed to pay our assessments for general administration, we have failed to pay our peace-keeping assessesments, we have failed to fulfill our obligations to the multilateral financial institutions, the World Bank for example. We have cut our official development assistance program of foreign aid, which by the way amounts today to something on the order of .15 percent of GDP. It's less than half of that of the other industrialized countries, the lowest of any industrial nation in the world. In all of these respects, we are failing in to carry out our responsibilities to the world.
It was this third goal, though, in the time that you were in office, where things went awry. I know it's hard in a brief interview, but in a nutshell, what went wrong with our goals and why couldn't we adjust them as things began to go bad?
What
went wrong was a basic misunderstanding or misevaluation of the threat to our
security represented by the North Vietnamese pressure on South Vietnam. 
It
led President Eisenhower in 1954 to say that if Vietnam were lost, or if Laos
and Vietnam were lost, the dominoes would fall. That was a famous expression.
It wasn't just President Eisenhower who believed it; I'll call it the establishment
in the U.S. It didn't matter whether you were Republican or Democrat, if you
had been associated with foreign relations and responsibilities in the postwar
period and were dealing with the Soviet threat to the security to the West
[then you believed in the "Domino Theory"]. It was a very real threat, there's
no question of that. I think we all, in the fifties and sixties, may have exaggerated
it, but there was no question that it was a threat.
During the seven years I was Secretary, on three occasions we came very very close to war with the Soviet Union. They put pressure on West Berlin to take West Berlin from NATO in August of 1961, we came close to war then. They introduced nuclear weapons into Cuba and we came close to nuclear war with the Soviets then -- that was in October of 1962. They were backing Egypt to destroy Israel, eliminate it from the face of the earth, in June of 1967; the hotline was used for the first time in connection with that. The message from Kosygin, the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, to Johnson was "If you want war you'll get it." So we faced what we considered a terrible threat to Western security from the Soviet Communists and the Chinese Communists. I think we exaggerated, but to some degree it was real.
But with respect to Southeast Asia, I am certain we exaggerated the threat. Had we never intervened, I now doubt that the dominoes would have fallen; I doubt that all of Asia would have fallen under Communist control. I doubt that the security of the West would have been materially and adversely affected had we not intervened, or had we withdrawn after it became clear that we were having serious problems militarily. That was our major error.
Now why did it occur? Well it occurred for many reasons, but one of them was that we didn't know our opposition. We didn't understand the Chinese, we didn't understand the Vietnamese, particularly the North Vietnamese. So the first lesson is know your opponents. I want to suggest to you that we don't know our potential opponents today. We don't understand the Chinese today. In the way we've been behaving, I don't know who is more stupid: the Chinese, the Taiwanese, or ourselves. Live warheads were being shot into the Taiwan Straits within the past week or two. There was a threat of Chinese military action against Taiwan. There was action in the Congress that gave every reason to believe that if there were Chinese military action against Taiwan we would go to war with China. Over what, for what reason, with what benefit to whom? With what cost? We don't understand China today. As for Bosnia, do we understand the Serbs, or Croats, or Muslims today? I doubt it, I don't think so. Do we understand the Muslim fundamentalists today? I don't think so. I think this country is quite ignorant of many of the facets of the world that we must gain greater knowledge of if we are to act intelligently and responsibly in relation to other cultures.
You asked what difference I observed in the University of California at Berkeley today versus when I was here. I said then that one of the differences is 45 percent of the students are Asian. At least we've made that step forward, and I think that is a tremendous step. We are going to understand the Asians better and they are going to understand us better as a result of that. Each of us is ignorant of the other.
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