TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=91TT0325> <title> Feb. 11, 1991: Interview:Robert McNamara </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 Feb. 11, 1991 Saddam's Weird War </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> INTERVIEW, Page 70 On the Mistakes Of War </hdr> <body> 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. </body> </article> </text>