TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021191/0211510.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 13.3 KB | 357 lines

                                                                                INTERVIEW, Page 70

On the Mistakes Of War


ROBERT MCNAMARA, architect of the Vietnam War, talks about the
Persian Gulf conflict -- and, for the first time, about the
one he can't forget

By CARL BERNSTEIN/WASHINGTON and Robert McNamara


    Q. Is the war in the gulf moving out of control?

    A. No military operation can be totally under control,
especially one with high-tech weapons. That's the lesson of the
Cuban missile crisis and Vietnam. Is this situation under
control? The answer is "Yes, but." Bush and Powell and Cheney
are doing a superb job, but I tell you Jesus Christ himself
can't keep one of these things under control.


    Q. How did events get out of control in Vietnam?

    A. It's not just events moving out of control. It's a
slightly different expression of somewhat the same thing, which
is that because of misinformation and misperceptions, there are
misjudgments as to where a nation's interests lie and what can
be accomplished. Take the missile crisis, for example. In what
was a very simple situation, short in time -- two weeks --
simple in relations among states, much simpler than the gulf
or much simpler than Vietnam -- you cannot imagine the extent
of misjudgment, misinformation. Events were really out of the
control of either party, though both the Russians and we were
trying to maintain control.

    I suspect that when we really get down to formulating this
new world order and the basics for implementing collective
security, we will have to lay down the proposition that while
military action may be ultimately required to respond to
aggression, we -- the world -- will carry out an extended
period of sanctions, and we won't expect them to accomplish in
five months what probably would take 12 or 18 months.


    Q. You testified before Congress that military action
against Iraq would be fraught with danger for the U.S. Why?

    A. What I said in my testimony seems to be occurring now.
Namely that I did not believe there was more than a 1-in-10
chance this war could be ended through quick surgical air
strikes with minimal casualties. I thought it would have to be
accompanied by substantial ground action that would lead to
substantial casualties -- with the likely result that there
would be serious instability in the political relationships
among nations in the region. I'd say there is a fifty-fifty
chance now of American troops' fighting on the ground in Iraq.


    Q. You've never spoken publicly about your experience in
Vietnam. Why?

    A. I've never even talked to my children or my closest
friends about it.


    Q. Did you ever imagine anything like the large number of
casualties that the U.S. experienced in Vietnam?

    A. Certainly at the beginning there was no anticipation of
that. That is correct.


    Q. When did it become apparent? Does it relate to the gulf?

    A. The situations are not analogous, except in one sense:
the consequences of military action are unpredictable. I
learned this as Secretary time after time after time: we did
certain things we thought would lead to certain results, and
the results were different. The Soviets have learned the same
thing. Nobody predicted at any particular point in the 1960s
the evolution of events in Vietnam. And I think what Powell and
Schwarzkopf and the Marine generals have said here, and said
very responsibly, is "We can predict the outcome but not the
blood costs, particularly; we know we can win, but we can't
predict how long it will take; and we cannot predict the
political relationships in the area after military action."
There may be a power vacuum, there may be Arab against Arab,
Arab against the U.S. Who knows?


    Q. What does the end of the cold war allow us to do?

    A. We have a tremendous opportunity now to develop a vision
that is free of the psychological constraints we have operated
under for most of my adult life because of the threat of
communist aggression. We can stand back and look at ourselves,
look at our society. And, my God, we need it! If you look at
what's happening in the country you could cry. It's the
children. It's just awful what's going on. And something can
be done. To say we don't have the resources is nonsense.

    There were real threats in the cold war, risks that some
governments in Western Europe would be subverted or otherwise
end up controlled by the communists. Later we confronted very
serious pressures against Berlin and other parts of the world.
But I suspect we exaggerated, greatly exaggerated, the strength
that lay behind those threats, and therefore I think we
probably misused our resources and directed excessive resources
toward responding to those threats at considerable cost to our
domestic societies.


    Q. Are we doing the same thing in the gulf today?

    A. No question about it. The cold war occupied not just the
efforts of our best minds, but caused our leaders to focus on
the Noriegas or the contras or some of these other issues, as
opposed to more fundamental problems.


    Q. I would add the Ho Chi Minhs. Is that fair?

    A. And the Ho Chi Minhs. I agree.


    Q. Where else did we exaggerate the threat?

    A. To begin with, the nuclear threat. And I'm not just
talking about the missile gap. We could have maintained
deterrence with a fraction of the number of warheads we built.
The cost is tremendous -- not just of warheads. It's research,
and it's building all the goddam bombers and missiles. Over the
past 20 years the unnecessary costs are in the tens of
billions. Insane. It was not necessary. And moreover, our
actions stimulated the Russians ultimately.


    Q. You spent an hour and a half with Gorbachev a few weeks
ago. How did he seem to you?

    A. You could see he's going through hell. Our objectives
there and Gorbachev's objectives aren't that different. He
doesn't want disorder. He sure as hell doesn't want to use
military force there. I'm not arguing that military force may
not be used; I'm arguing that he doesn't want to use it. What
I am fairly confident of is that whatever happens in the Soviet
Union, there is not going to be reconstitution of the threat
that we felt we faced for 45 years.


    Q. What were your worst moments as Secretary of Defense?

    A. The Cuban missile crisis was very, very bad. There was
a moment on Saturday night, Oct. 27, '62 -- it sounds
melodramatic and I don't mean to be -- when, as I left the
President's office to go back to the Pentagon -- a perfectly
beautiful fall evening -- I thought I might never live to see
another Saturday night.


    Q. Vietnam?

    A. Well, in Vietnam there were a lot of important worst
moments and less important worst moments. Psychologically,
you're dealing with a problem for which there was no
satisfactory answer, an answer that in part you're responsible
for. And that is a terrible situation to be in. That kind of
worst moment went on for a long time -- months, if not years.


    Q. And the parents of kids killed?

    A. That is a very, very burdensome problem.


    Q. Why did you order the Pentagon papers prepared?

    A. I felt we were not going to achieve our objectives --
politically and militarily -- and it was going to be essential
at some point for scholars to determine how the policy had been
formed, why the decisions had been made as they were, what the
alternative decisions might have been, and what might have
happened had the alternative decisions been pursued.

    I think you will find that my memos to the President about
that time -- 1966 -- said, "There is no good choice open to
us." With hindsight, I think some of us misjudged Chinese
objectives with respect to the extension of Chinese power. We
thought there was considerable evidence China intended to
extend its hegemony across Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond,
but I'm not at all sure now that was their intent.


    Q. Did Lyndon Johnson feel that you'd misled him, that you
had led him to believe the war could be won?

    A. No. No. No. No. He never felt that. I know that. To this
day I don't know if I quit or I was fired as Secretary of
Defense. The reason is that Johnson and I had an extremely
close and complex relationship. Toward the end there was
tremendous tension between us over Vietnam. But I loved him and
he loved me.

    But he expressed the frustration. He'd say, "Why in the
hell, McNamara, are you being so goddam difficult?" It was that
kind of feeling. All the way through to the end.

    You know, he had dreams for the country. The war had broken
his dreams. But I think history will record that that man
contributed immensely to this nation. In a sense, Johnson's
objectives in the civil rights bill and Vietnam were the same.
He was passionate in a way about human liberty and freedoms and
believed he was advancing their cause in both instances. In
hindsight it looks absurd to say that, perhaps. But without
that civil rights bill -- if he did nothing other than that,
and he did a lot other than that -- where would we be?


    Q. And McNamara. What were his dreams at the time, his
passions?

    A. I accepted Kennedy's invitation to come down, and I
accepted Johnson's invitation to stay because I believed in
this country.

    I grew up in the Depression, and I went to the University
of California, which was a very, very liberal school, Berkeley,
and I was there 1933 to '37, and it's hard for people to
believe this today, but 25% of the adult males in the country
were unemployed at the time. Parents of my classmates were
committing suicide because they couldn't provide food for their
families. Now I grew up in that environment, of a very liberal
university, a very liberal environment, and I absorbed the
values and the social objectives of many of my classmates and
professors and others at the time, and I've held them ever
since. It's something to feel passionate about, and I do.


    Q. At the time you left government, the U.S. was in the
midst of one of the greatest bombing campaigns in the history
of warfare, and today the U.S. has launched one even greater.
You thought the bombing would work at the time?

    A. No, I didn't think it would work at the time.


    Q. Why undertake it then?

    A. Because we had to try to prove it wouldn't work, number
one, and other people thought it would work.


    Q. What other people?

    A. A majority of the senior military commanders, the Senate
Armed Services Committee, the President.


    Q. Were you opposed to it from the beginning?

    A. It wasn't that I was opposed to it; I didn't think it
would work from the beginning.


    Q. During Vietnam, did you become inured to the protests --
"McNamara's War."

    A. Well, it was difficult. But among other things, there's
a constructive aspect of it. It causes you to continually
reexamine your decisions and what you're doing.


    Q. Does it also make you defensive?

    A. Sure it does.


    Q. And play with the facts?

    A. No, not play with the facts. I don't think I ever played
with the facts. You know, one point, I wasn't an indentured
servant, I wasn't a bonded servant. I could leave. And I
didn't. So it was a personal decision.


    Q. Who is McNamara? The real McNamara. Who is McNamara
emotionally?

    A. Very few people know.


    Q. Who knows?

    A. Well, Marg knew, my wife knew.


    Q. Who else? Johnson?

    A. No, I don't think so. No, people don't know. People don't
know.


    Q. Your kids?

    A. People don't know, and probably not my kids. And let me
tell you that's a weakness. If you're not known emotionally to
people, it means you haven't really communicated fully to
people. I know it's a weakness of mine. But I'm not about to
change now.


    Q. What did the war do to Bob McNamara's dreams? Seriously.

    A. No. I'm not getting involved in that. I really don't
think Vietnam is going to shape this nation's role in the
future, or constrain this nation from its developing or
contributing to the new world order. Vietnam has been very
constraining; there's no question about that. But I think you
will find that partially because of the gulf, partially because
of the Soviet action that has ended the cold war, we will be
less constrained by Vietnam in the future.

    I know that might sound like I'm insensitive to Vietnam, and
I'm not at all. Coming from me, people would jump all over --
"That son of a bitch; he's got blood on his hands."


    Q. Do you feel you have blood on your hands?

    A. You know, my wife died, 10 years ago, and she was a very
sensitive person. In part I think she died because of this, or
at least her deep trauma associated with it. I don't mean to
say she thought I had blood on my hands. But she felt the
trauma that our nation was in. And she was with me on occasions
when people said I had blood on my hands. And it was a terrible
situation --

    But back to the point; I think our nation to some degree has
been liberated from this terrible trauma of Vietnam.


    Q. And McNamara? Liberated? Ultimately, is it pain and
difficult experience that shape us?

    A. You grow.


    Q. And it hurts?

    A. You grow, you grow. If you survive, you grow.