Robert McNamara Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 7 of 8
It sounds like you feel sensitive, because of your education and the type of person you are, to the need for change in an organization. In your book, as you cover the course of the war, you talk in great detail about the way your position was evolving as you conducted the war. You were in a way put in a kind of tragic dilemma, were you not? In the sense of trying to change the course of the war but limited by what you felt was a responsibility to the President and the government of which you were part?
It wasn't so much the responsibility to the President I felt, but rather the contradiction or dilemma of the belief, and I believed it then, that the dominoes would fall if we lost Vietnam. Today I think that was an exaggeration, but I believed it then. It was certainly the conventional wisdom among the foreign policy establishment, I should leave no question about that. The leaders of our policy establishment, the Bob Lovetts, the Jack McCloys, the Dean Achesons and so on, all believed it at the time. I believed it. I think we were wrong, and certainly I misjudged it. But that was one belief I held. The other belief I held that was not held by many of my associates at the time was that we couldn't win militarily in Vietnam. So I had a contradiction. If I believed that losing would advance the cause of communism across the world, both Chinese communism and Soviet communism, and yet I thought we couldn't win, what to do? What I said then was that we should shift emphasis from what I call the military track toward the political track and seek to engage in negotiations to try to withdraw our forces militarily without seriously weakening the position of the West vis-a-vis Chinese communism and Soviet communism. That was the course I was pushing and trying to pursue and I clearly wasn't persuasive enough.
And in the back of the political leader's mind, here I'm talking about Johnson primarily, to what extent was he worried about a) the Soviet Union as a military threat, b) his fear of the political consequences of losing what appeared to be a domino, and c) nuclear weapons? That is, a war that he would win would escalate into one in which nuclear weapons would have to be used?
Well, let me deal with the last point first.
The [Joint] Chiefs on two or three occasions recommended action in Southeast Asia, which they said might lead to a military confrontation with China and the Soviet Union, in which case -- they were candid and honest -- they said might require the use of nuclear weapons. They in effect wanted to expand military operations to involve a possible invasion by U.S. ground forces in North Vietnam and/or air strikes against southern China -- all this designed to reduce the supplies of men and materiel from China through North Vietnam and into South Vietnam. They were honest in saying that that might well lead to an expansion of the war [and to involve] China and the Soviet Union, and that might require the use of nuclear weapons. Johnson and I were absolutely opposed to that; we were determined not to involve this country in a war with China and the Soviet Union, and certainly not to involve it in a nuclear war. To his credit, when this subject was discussed two or three years ago at a meeting at the University of Texas, General Westmoreland, the U.S. Commander in Vietnam during the war, said, "At the time I thought I was fighting with one hand tied behind my back, but I now realize that what Johnson and McNamara were trying to do was prevent war with China and the Soviet Union, and we did prevent that, and thank God."
This was the dilemma we were facing. We were quite concerned about the Soviet threat and determined to avoid a nuclear war.
But was Johnson worried by the Soviet threat, or was he worried by fear of the political consequences of not dealing with it effectively? He was certainly worried by the Soviet threat. He held the views of McCloy, Acheson, and others -- Eisenhower -- that it's a threat if we lose the war in Vietnam; we'll lose Asia, and if we lose Asia the Soviets will be strengthened worldwide, particularly against Western Europe and North America. Therefore that is a threat we must oppose. That was a driving motive.
The second point you made, fear of the political consequences, what do you mean by that? What you mean is that in the sixties, long after China had been lost (in the forties and early fifties), there was still a charge that, in effect, Truman had lost China, or at least the U.S. had lost China. Mao had come in and forced Chiang Kai-shek out; the U.S. failure to support Chiang Kai-shek had lost China, and that was a terrible political charge, a political liability. What you are implying is that Johnson had that in his mind, and didn't wish to be charged with losing Southeast Asia, and you are absolutely right on that, but that was not the driving motive. 
The driving motive was to prevent what he feared would be extension of the Soviet and Chinese hegemony across Asia.
You were then presented with a problem. You had your doubts, you were constrained. When one reads your book, the general question that arises is at what point does a public servant who becomes disaffected from a policy that he has been a party to have a responsibility to take a position in the public debate that may be inconsistent with what his government is advocating?
Let me separate the two points.
At what point does a public servant who has a disagreement with the President have the responsibility to resign? I think it is at the point when he feels that he can no longer be effective in pursuing his views. In the book I say at the end, Johnson and I -- two individuals who loved and respected each other -- were engaged in intellectual conflict, if you will. I couldn't persuade him, he couldn't persuade me. Something had to give. We parted. To this day, I don't know, and it sounds odd to say it, but I don't know whether I resigned or was fired, but in any event we separated. And I think at a certain point that's appropriate. Up to that point, I felt 1) that he wanted me to continue; 2) that I was being effective. My last official act was to oppose the addition of 200,000 more troops to Vietnam; I had been opposing that, opposing the recommendation of General Westmoreland and the Chiefs, to send 200,000 more troops for several months. I had been effective -- as a matter of fact, I prevented it, because it hadn't been done up until the time I left, and it wasn't done after I left. So I felt I stayed because the President wanted me to, and because I thought I was effective. At the end we parted because we differed, I think that was appropriate.
Now, speaking out, that is somewhat of a different issue. In my case, some have said I should have spoken out more than I did. I had spoken out a lot. There was a hearing before the Senate Arms Services Committee in August of 1967. I resigned March 1 or February 29 of 1968, so a few months before I left there was this tortured hearing before the Senate Arms Service Committee at which, at the end of a long day of my testimony, Senator Strom Thurmond, who is still in the Senate at 93 years old, pointed his finger at me and he said, "Mr. Secretary, you are a Communist appeaser. What you told us today is a no-win policy." Now he said it because I was saying publicly, in effect, what I'd said to the President. So the public was aware of that part of my view.
But what the public wasn't aware of, which I couldn't really describe or discuss when I left, was that we were engaged in very delicate negotiations. I outlined these in the book. They had been triggered, oddly enough, by a visit that Henry Kissinger, who was then a professor at Harvard, had made to a Pugwash meeting in Paris. The Pugwash organization just received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, in November of last year for its activities. But in any event, they were meeting in Paris in the summer of 1967. Kissinger was there, and he was approached by two Frenchmen, Herbert Marcovich and Raymond Aubrac, whom I cite in the book, who said, "If the U.S. has a message to take to Ho Chi Minh, we'll deliver it." Now to illustrate the degree to which we didn't understand the situation in Vietnam at the time, today I believe that Ho Chi Minh was more of a nationalist, more of a Tito, than a servant or a follower of Khruschev. But at that time, we looked upon him as a vassal of the Soviets. He had lived in Paris during World War II, he had lived with this man Aubrac; he was the godfather of Aubrac's child. (By the way, Ho Chi Minh had been a pastry cook in the Savoy Hotel in London, and he lived in this country for a time.) There's a real possibility that if we had understood him better we could have avoided this war, or, after it started, we could have terminated it. It illustrates my point of how little we knew and understood the Vietnamese. But to come back to my point, I said to President Johnson "I know you think there's nothing in this, sir, but let me handle it. Something might come of it. I promise not to get us in trouble; let me handle it." So I engaged in a long series of exchanges with Kissinger with the full knowledge of the Secretary of State and the President over a period of months.
Our efforts failed, and I suggest why in the book: in part because we were clumsy and in part because maybe there was nothing in it, I don't know. But I know we were clumsy. In any event, our efforts failed, but they were still continuing when I left. After I left, the President, in March of 1968, made a speech in San Antonio in which he put forward publicly the elements of the proposal that we had put forward secretly through Kissinger to Ho Chi Minh, which became known as the San Antonio formula. That ultimately was the foundation for the start of the negotiations between North Vietnam and the U.S. in Paris. That was under way when I left; I couldn't talk publicly about it. As Secretary of Defense, when the United States was in the midst of a war with 500,000 American young people's lives at risk, in the midst of a war in a foreign country, I couldn't speak candidly or freely without self-constraint.
So in other words, you had your particular constraints, but on the other hand, I get the sense from what you've written, and from your participation in nuclear weapons discussion in the 1980s, that you really do believe in an informed public, or public education of issues, and believed in it as you were Secretary of Defense.
Frankly, one of the reasons I'm here at this university as a visiting professor, as a Regents' Lecturer, is that I hope to contribute to the public education. Later this afternoon I am going to participate in a panel discussion debating the long-term objectives for nuclear weapons in the world. I think the U.S. should lead the world in eliminating nuclear weapons. I know that's not widely accepted among security experts, but more and more security experts are accepting it. Just as recently as a month or two ago, the Stimson Center in Washington published a report signed by four retired four-star officers, including General Goodpastor, Eisenhower's military assistant who was later the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and three other retired four-star officers, recommending elimination of nuclear weapons. Paul Nitze and I also signed it. The Prime Minister of Australia just appointed a commission to consider the same subject. General Lee Butner, the former Commander of the Strategic Air Command, is a member, as I am, and I think the commission is going to recommend elimination, but it's just the beginning. Assuming it does recommend elimination, it's just the beginning of a public education campaign. I strongly believe in public education, and I think it's a responsibility of public officials while they are in office and after they leave office, to contribute to that education, absolutely.
I hear another purpose of your book emerging out of our conversation, which is that whatever emotional catharsis was involved in going through the record on Vietnam, it may have been important to write this book to maintain your commitment to public education, as a message to future generations that it's important that whatever errors were made, nonetheless, lessons were learned from them.
The subtitle of the book is The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. Now, if you don't accept it as a tragedy, then presumably there aren't lessons to be learned to prevent a similar occurrence in the future. Some people don't think it was a tragedy. Walt Rostow, Professor of History at the University of Texas, who was Lyndon Johnson's national security advisor, to this day doesn't believe it was a tragedy. He believes we fulfilled an important purpose, we achieved our objective; in a sense, we won. And he wrote a long review for the London Literary Supplement which I have included in the appendix. I just think that he's totally wrong and I do believe it was a tragedy.
If it was a tragedy, shouldn't we learn lessons? Should not those who contributed to it and participated in it draw those lessons? It's their responsibility to do so. That's one of the major purposes of the book. The last chapter focuses on lessons. We haven't learned them yet.
Next page: Conclusion: Lessons of a Life in Public Service
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