ROBERT McNamara, the former US secretary of defense (right) and an architect of the Vietnam War, said it all could have been different if McGeorge Bundy, President Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser, had not resigned from the White House in early 1966.
“I believe if McGeorge Bundy had stayed in the government ... he and I together could have prevented what happened in Vietnam,” McNamara said in August 2007, less than two years before his death. “He and I together could have done what I couldn’t do alone, which was force the president to an open debate on these critical issues.”
In their final interviews, McNamara and Bundy dissected America’s failures in managing the Vietnam War. In haunting, mournful tones, they blamed not only Johnson and senior military leaders for a dysfunctional decision-making process, but also themselves. The interviews provide a singular look into what went wrong — as the two men saw it decades later, with the benefits and burdens of hindsight — at a time when President Barack Obama and his national security team engage in intense deliberations over another complex, distant conflict, this time in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
For a wartime president and his top advisers, “there ought to be anguish,” McNamara concluded, because there “are no easy answers.” In his last extended interview, on Aug. 7, 2007, McNamara offered harsh views of Johnson as commander in chief. Johnson, in McNamara’s view, “was more afraid of the right than the left. And he was afraid that if he did anything that in any way appeared to appease the North Vietnamese, he would be severely criticized by the right wing of American politics. Therefore he didn’t do it.”
In a final series of interviews before his death in 1996, Bundy also described how Johnson’s short-term political concerns trumped grand strategy for Vietnam. “LBJ isn’t deeply concerned about ... who governs South Vietnam — he’s deeply concerned with what the average American voter is going to think about how he did in the ballgame of the Cold War,” Bundy said. Bundy criticized Johnson’s manipulation of the deliberations over the war. Strategy meetings and conversations on the war were a facade, Bundy said. “The principal players do not engage in anything you can really call an exchange of views. ... That was prevented by him, and the process he used was really for show and not for choice.”
The discussions Johnson valued most, Bundy believed, occurred privately and reflected his instincts as a dealmaker and consensus-builder. In the summer of 1965, Johnson’s most important target was his commander in Saigon, Gen. William Westmoreland. Looking back on that time, Bundy said that Johnson viewed the general as though he were a powerful constituency wielding vital legislative votes.
Johnson’s shifting political calculations were often opaque even to his closest advisers, Bundy despaired, compromising the way the president engaged with his senior military and civilian counselors. “No one knows but LBJ himself what the issues are, what his questions are aimed at, why he is deciding as he is — or whether or when — so if we really get to help him it is almost by accident,” he concluded in one of the dozens of plaintive notes he wrote for an unpublished memoir, a book he struggled with before dying of a heart attack at age 77.
As McNamara looked back at the pivotal decisions to escalate US involvement in Vietnam, he recalled Johnson’s resistance to confronting his advisers. Then as now, the choice of a military strategy was the most crucial decision confronting the president.
As Bundy reflected, he bemoaned the failure of civilian leaders to probe and scrutinize the assumptions behind the American strategy in Vietnam — a strategy that over time devolved into an open-ended war of attrition, an endurance contest the United States was unlikely to win. Even in 2007, McNamara contended that the US defense establishment had yet to absorb the lesson: “I don’t think the military today recognizes the degree to which they failed to confront the president, confront me and the president, secretary of state, with the shallow foundation to our actions.” But he accepted responsibility for a monumental lapse in coordination and communication between civilian and military leaders.
Like McNamara, Bundy also held himself accountable for failing to apply that check and balance.
Throughout their interviews, McNamara and Bundy grappled with the extent to which senior officials should go public with their views about an ongoing war. “There are limitations on what the secretary can say publicly,” McNamara said, adding that if a top official comes forward with bad news, “you don’t just tell your own people, you tell the enemy. ... You don’t want the enemy being told ... that the senior officials believe the US is losing.” In his 1995 book, “In Retrospect,” McNamara discussed a memo that then-CIA Director Richard Helms had prepared for Johnson in 1967. It argued that a defeat in Vietnam would not necessarily undermine vital US security interests and that the risks of an unfavorable outcome “are probably more limited and controllable” than generally thought. Both McNamara and Helms said they never had any evidence that Johnson discussed the memo with anyone.
A key justification for America’s continuing entanglement in Vietnam had been disputed by the country’s top intelligence official, but it appears that not a single meeting of senior government officials was convened to debate the issue with the president. And suppose someone had urged you to go public, saying the disclosure of the memos would save tens of thousands of lives?
I would have been hard-pressed to answer, because I think we could have shortened the war and would have saved lives, and I don’t believe the price we would have paid in reduction of our diplomatic or military strength would have been significant. But I would have been held back by the wrong reasons, I fear ... when I would have felt responsibility to the president.”
Congress should provide a check and balance on the administration but often fails to do so, McNamara noted. “I think the Congress, particularly with respect to war, should play a greater role than it does,” he said. “In some way, the Congress should retain a lasting and a continuing interest in war.” McNamara shared a recommendation that he conceded was politically difficult: “I have a strong feeling that Congress should pass a law that no president can take the nation to war or keep the nation at war unless he estimates the casualties.”
Bundy, for his part, was adamant about the need to publicly explain the US purpose and interests in Vietnam — an openness Johnson resisted.
Viewed together, McNamara and Bundy’s final reflections suggest a shared vision of some of Vietnam’s most critical lessons. The two men conclude that the commander in chief must confront his advisers; the advisers, in turn, must confront the commander in chief. And military strategies proposed by the generals must be examined, deconstructed and, if necessary, directly challenged. McNamara and Bundy show how easy it is to fail at these tasks.
