Presto Agitato: Ding, Dong!

July 06, 2009

Ding, Dong!

Robert Strange McNamara (no, really!), Vietnam-era Defense Secretary and serial revisionist, is dead. Good riddance!

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In McNamara's memoir, he pretended to take responsibility for his mistakes, but he admitted to the wrong things in order to hide the truth. The truth of his dereliction and betrayal of trust — forgetting the goal, counting pennies when lives were at stake, treating human lives as ledger-entries to be balanced by entries on the other side (these are only examples) — is much more terrible than he admitted. I'm sure H.R. McMaster's book, which has been on my shelf, unread, for some time, has much more to say on this point. I guess I will have to put it on my short list.

I don't ordinarily cheer the death of a person, but some people must shuffle off this mortal coil if only as a matter of trash-collection. I was not saddened at the death of Gen. Westmoreland, either, but I hold McNamara and Johnson morally responsible for what happened. They made the decisions. They invented the Tonkin Incident. They chose Westmoreland. Westy was only a damnfool who couldn't get his brain out of WWII. His predecessor (Harkins) had been worse. (One wonders how that was possible, but it was!)

Posted by Mike at 10:46 in Politics & Courts | Permalink

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