Reading the obituaries for Robert McNamara over the past day or so reminded me of Lyndon Johnson's primary reason for forging ahead down the road to disaster called Vietnam: fear of being tarred by Republicans as being insufficiently anti-Communist. How might American and world history be different had Johnson realized that doing the right thing (i.e., ending the use of American lives as guerrilla fodder to support a corrupt regime) outweighed any kind of pretense about partisanship ending at the water's edge? How might they be different if Jimmy Carter had realized the same thing, with regard to American aid and comfort for the Shah of Iran and his family? And, more recently and even more painfully obvious, how might they be different if Congressional Democrats had called the Bush-Cheney bluff about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
I do not believe that the leaders and, more importantly, the peoples of other nations are particularly impressed when Americans stand together for the sake of a mistake (apologies for the paraphrase, Senator Kerry). I think they are more likely to be impressed when we choose one or more leaders who believe that truth and justice, even when deeply divisive, are more important to the American way that unity achieved through partisan bullying (and a second paraphrase apology to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who deserved the belated rewards they got for creating Superman).
Which is why I'm hoping that having a different kind of President is having the potential to make American and world history different in the right way. It looks like that might be a possibility.
We'll see.
As for McNamara himself, he seems to have been belatedly aware of the egregious nature of his tenure as Secretary of Defense, and he obviously spent much of his post-LBJ career attempting to atone for it in some measure, especially in his work at the World Bank. It's worth remembering, too, that he was one of the men who helped the Kennedy Administration and the world step back from the brink of disaster during the Cuban Missile crisis. I'm forced to confess that there may be a bit of self-interest in that observation: in preparing to play Dean Rusk for a local production of "The Missiles of October," I read Robert Kennedy's "Thirteen Days." However, thespianism aside, I'm happy to recommend the book (if you haven't read it) for any number of reasons--not the least of which is the testament it serves to the difference between being tough and being belligerent.
It's a difference I hope President Obama continues to remember.
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