In “East of Eden” John Steinbeck wrote:
A war comes always to someone else. In Salinas we were aware that the United States was the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. Every American was a rifleman by birth, and one American was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight.
Pershing’s expedition into Mexico after Villa had exploded one of our myths for a little while. We had truly believed that Mexicans can’t shoot straight and besides were lazy and stupid. When our own Troop C came wearily back from the border they said that none of this was true. Mexicans could shoot straight, goddam it! And Villa’s horsemen had outridden and outlasted our town boys. The two evenings a month of training had not toughened them very much. And last, the Mexicans seemed to have outthought and outambushed Black Jack Pershing. When the Mexicans were joined by their ally, dysentery, it was godawful. Some of our boys didn’t really feel good again for years.
Somehow we didn’t connect Germans with Mexicans. We went right back to our myths. One American was as good as twenty Germans. This being true, we had only to act in a stern manner to bring the Kaiser to heel. He wouldn’t dare interfere with our trade—but he did. He wouldn’t stick out his neck and sink our ships—and he did. It was stupid, but he did, and so there was nothing for it but to fight him.
The illusion Steinbeck so expertly described lives on today. We still believe that our troops are tougher and better than any other fighting men on the planet. We’ve since added to it by deluding ourselves about our technology, believing that it increases our innate superiority. In short, then as now, we believe ourselves to be masters of war.
In the early 1960s Robert McNamara believed that very same thing. He might have blanched at putting it quite that way, but he did believe it. He believed that with the proper application of mathematics, logic and technology even a thing so fundamentally chaotic and unpredictable as war could be tamed. That earnestly misguided hubris was at least partially responsible for the deaths of millions of people. We most often mourn the 58,000 Americans killed because they are our closest kin. But many times that number died on the receiving end of American arms and American actions in Southeast Asia. And even that ghastly butcher’s bill doesn’t account for the unknowable number who never fully recovered and the lives that were shattered both here in America and over there. By the end of the 1960s McNamara knew how foolish he’d been; he spent the rest of his life, which ended on Monday, dealing with it.
He was an ambivalent figure, as many commentators have tried to articulate since his death: an indisputably nice, intelligent and well meaning man, who nevertheless was up to his eyeballs in blood. Contemplating his monstrous actions in the 1960s, and, for those of a certain age, remembering them, isn’t an easy exercise, especially in light of the fact that McNamara himself later called the war a mistake and more or less admitted that he was a war criminal.
Part of what makes McNamara so frustrating is that there is so little to be learned from him. We’ve known since the time of the Greeks that hubris can be fatal and that it comes in new disguises and with different trappings each time. That his mistakes, if not his methodology, have been repeated so recently in Iraq (and possibly Afghanistan) makes it all the more maddening. While he was still alive we ignored every mistake he made and crashed into two wars where we have only the barest of understandings of what we’re doing and who we’re fighting.
The fundamental foolishness that blinded McNamara, that belief that the very nature of who we are as Americans can make wars clean and winnable, lives on to this day. It seems unlikely that we’ll ever get an honest, albeit late, mea culpa from the architects of our more recent wars. So we’ll have to make do by remembering McNamara’s.
