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Title: Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy by Robert S. McNamara, James G. Blight, Robert K. Brigham, Thomas J. Biersteker, Herbert Y., Col. Schandler ISBN: 1-891620-87-8 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: 16 May, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.59 (17 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Nothing new
Comment: When In Retrospect first came out, some of the people at the college where I teach came up to me and said: "Did you hear? McNamara's published a book and he says the Vietnam War was all a mistake!" Whoa - talk about your late-breaking news! Still, I suppose hearing those sentiments from the highest levels imparts a certain power to them that us lowly grunts could never hope to possess - but I think I recall saying "this is a big mistake" on my first patrol (I served in 'Nam in '68-'69).
The rub, of course, comes when we try to figure out WHY it was a mistake, and it is here that McNamara can give us something truly significant. Does he? I think that he does, but what he has to give us has been dished up many times before.
Apparently realizing that he hadn't provided those answers the war requires in In Retrospect, McNamara instituted a series of conferences between policy makers active during the "McNamara Years", from the U.S. and North Vietnam McNamara's stated goal is to search for "lost opportunities. Were there ways to avoid U.S. entanglement; or, having become entangled, were there ways for the U.S. to disengage before so many lives were lost? McNamara's idea here is to find those lost opportunities and lay them before the public.
So, it was with excitement that I read this book - maybe, finally, McNamara will come clean. And come clean he does, though not in the way he expects.
I knew I would have a different reaction to this book when I read how shocked McNamara was to learn the North Vietnamese side of the argument wanted to start in 1945 in the search for missed opportunities. McNamara's original intent was to limit discussion to the years 1961 - 1967; his years as Secretary of Defense. Here we have a sense of the man's over-arching ego; nothing important could have occurred before or after those dates. It is simply beyond my comprehension how the so-called "best and brightest" could be surprised at the date of 1945. For those of you who don't know, that's the date when the Vietnamese, under Ho Chi Minh, declared themselves independent of France, using words from the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration on the Rights of Man. That is the date that Baodai, the last emperor of Vietnam, formally abdicated his throne and anointed Ho Chi Minh as his successor. That is the date when Ho Chi Minh made direct appeals to Pres. Truman to ensure the rights of the Vietnamese were respected. It is a date that is no secret now, and wasn't then.
How, then, could the chief architect of American policy towards Vietnam be so awesomely ignorant of such an important starting point? The answer to that question is one of the lessons one might draw from the war: U.S. policy makers had no interest in Vietnam per se. It was merely a stage, upon which the righteous Americans would meet and defeat the forces of "the Evil Empire". The McNamaras and the Rusks and the Rostows felt no need to learn anything about their potential adversary - to our ultimate sorrow. Know Thy Enemy. That lesson is nothing new; applied to this specific war, one can find it in Fire in the Lake, Frances FitzGerald's excellent work about the war published in 1971. What is new is McNamara's bald admission that he really had no interest in learning about the Vietnamese, nor did anyone else in the American administrations.
Another interesting part of the book is McNamara's complete lack of understanding at the refusal of the North Vietnamese to negotiate while we were bombing them. Despite the numerous lessons about the failure of strategic bombing to shorten wars and "force" the enemy to the negotiating table, America pursued the continued bombing of North Vietnam in order to accomplish those self-same goals. All of this was known to McNamara and his cronies, and yet they allowed the strategic bombing of North Vietnam to be one of the major foci of American policy. And now, thirty years after McNamara's involvement in the war, he still doesn't get it.
I wish to touch on just one more facet of Argument Without End. It includes a chapter by Col. Herbert Schandler and McNamara, entitled "U.S. Military Victory in Vietnam: A Dangerous Illusion?" Most of the chapter was written by Schandler, who did his time in 'Nam in the infantry. The answer to the rhetorical question posed in the title is, Yes - a U.S. military victory in Vietnam is and was a dangerous illusion. I strongly agree with that answer, and I'm glad this chapter is in the book. But, dollars to doughnuts, this chapter won't shut up those deluded folks who think "we could've won if only the military had been allowed to win". This is because Schandler never really answers those critics who contend that the military had its hands tied in Vietnam. This is too bad, because the answer is not all that difficult to comprehend. If the military had done exactly as it pleased in Vietnam, we still would have lost. Without the support of the people we were supposed to help, there was no hope. Herein lies another lesson from the war: if we aren't true to our democratic principles in our foreign policy, our foreign policy will fail. We pontificate at great length about "self-determination", but we sure didn't allow it in Vietnam.
In the end, these two books show Robert Strange McNamara to be not very bright - certainly not the best. They show a man steeped in his own arrogance, and that arrogance in him and those around him cost thousands of American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives. But give the man credit, he doesn't flinch from laying it all before us - even if he doesn't complete understand exactly what it is he's telling us.
Rating: 1
Summary: More hollow apologies, more dead children!
Comment: The great apologist for America!
How about the reparations? $3.5 bn in 1973 = approx. $15 bn today. Where's the money????
How about cleaning up the bombs? over 60,000 Vietnamese dead from unexploded ordnance since 1975, and many more maimed, and still counting! Schoolchildren blown to pieces!
How about helping Agent Orange victims? 3rd generation birth defects continue today!
How about some action instead of more hollow apologies?
Rating: 3
Summary: nightmare re-visited
Comment: To me, only three people should take the blame on Vietnam. Jo McCarthy, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. McCarthy's witch-hunt created in the American psyche an unnatural and unrealistic fear and hatred for Communism. Jack Kennedy brought in and Lyndon Johnson kept inexperienced and naive men to conduct American foreign policy. These men, most notably Bundy and McNamara with their Harvard and Yale degrees and professorships fouled up American policy and got the U.S. into the longest and most disastrous war.
Foreign policy should be run by experienced diplomats. Hopefully, this nightmare will never be repeated.
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Title: In Retrospect : The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam by Brian VanDeMark, Robert S. McNamara ISBN: 0679767495 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 19 March, 1996 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century by Robert S. McNamara, James G. Blight ISBN: 1586481436 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: 17 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Dereliction of Duty : Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam by H. R. McMaster ISBN: 0060929081 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 June, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title:The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara ASIN: B0001L3LUE Publisher: Columbia Tristar Hom Pub. Date: 11 May, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.96 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $18.87 |
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Title: Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg ISBN: 0670030309 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 10 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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