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Summary: An honest interpretation of Vietnam politics
Review: McNamara vividly tells the reader what the realities of Vietnam politics were in the 1960s.These realities examined in the book are:1)The United States' containment policy was severely tested at this critical time.Should the U.S. stay in Southeast Asia and contain communist expansion or should the U.S. withdrawl and focus on Western Europe,Cuba,and South America? 2)Cold war tensions made it very difficult for the U.S. to discern China's and the Soviet Union's motives about communist domination.Was the communist movement a nationlist movement confined only to the eastern world or was it striving for global domination?
Putting the Vietnam crisis within its proper time frame,McNamara felt that the U.S. took the proper approach to containment.The tragedy in Vietnam during his tenure as defense secretary lie not in U.S governmental subterfuge,but in tricky interpretations(listed above)of the cold war.
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Summary: 52,000 Lives Too Late
Review: Mr. McNamara finally accepts responsibility for the political rationale of the Vietnam deception. However, the book is a poorly written attempt to rationalize the blood of 52,000 brave Americans that will be his final legacy.
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Summary: Back to the future.
Review: One cannot help but wonder what our current Secretary of Defense will write when his time comes. One has the feeling that the subtitle of McNamara's retrospective, "The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," will be a good starting place for that "sequel." McNamara writes, "We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why." Americans today will have to decide whether or not we have actually learned our lessons and are now more wise than the last generation, more able to predict the tragedies that will arise during and after today's war. Anyone who recalls the Kissinger scheme to achieve "a decent interval" while bugging out of Southeast Asia will likely recall Eric Von Marbod comparing the logic of that process to that of "a man who impregnates nine women in the hope of getting a baby in one month." How can one not think of Afghanistan, Iraq, (and now Iran) without thinking of the Vietnam era? Despite all the criticism directed at him, the author reflects great credit upon himself and the country by even attempting to set the record "straight." One can indeed be wrong even when totally convinced one is "acting in the principles and tradition of this great nation." How could we have slipped out of Vietnam if we had really believed in the domino theory used to justify that war? What will become of the "nexus of WMD and terrorism" that is today's rationale for preventive war? As we watch to see how we extricate ourselves from the war on terror, there is much to be learned from the old political schemes of Robert McNamara's era. Recent remarks by Secretary Rumsfeld in the wake of heartbreaking setbacks in Iraq indicate that he may indeed have begun to learn that more frank our leaders are with the people, the more chance of success we have.
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Summary: Dry in tone, but important reading
Review: Perhaps only Lyndon Johnson could have offered more insight into the decision-making that guided the United States' involvement in Vietnam. From that standpoint, this book is fascinating and heart-breaking. McNamara concisely offers up question after question that should have been debated - but were not - within the Johnson administration.Still, I have a couple of issues with this book. One, McNamara seems overly generous in distributing blame to others, especially President Johnson. It's true that McNamara takes on blame himself, and it's also true that Johnson deserves ultimate responsibility for the actions of his administration. Still, it somehow seems unfair, considering LBJ is no longer around to defend himself. And I don't feel McNamara takes enough blame upon himself as Secretary of Defense. Two, a lesser issue, is McNamara's irritating habit of referring to almost everyone by their first name, making it difficult at first to keep up with the cast of characters (except General Westmoreland, who is annoyingly reduced to "Westy" throughout the book). It is at the end, when McNamara sums up the lessons learned from Vietnam, that "In Retrospect's" real power comes through. These are important lessons that would serve us well in the post-9/11 world, if only our "leaders" had the foresight to study them. Sorry to add a political tone to this review, but I can't help but be frustrated at those whose egos lead them to repeat the mistakes of the past. This is McNamara's greatest legacy - the urgent plea to build a brighter future, from one who led us through the past. That alone makes "In Retrospect" important reading.
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Summary: Let's Give Mcnamara A One-Way Ticket To Vietnam!
Review: Reading through this absorbing and well-written book often made me physically ill. As a guy who personally followed the flag into the miasma of that terrible war, I often got so angry reading the arguments and rationalizations spewed like so much vomit in the pages of this book that I literally threw this book against the wall. After I finished reading it I threw it in the garbage, where it and its author belong. After all this time, more than thirty years, McNamara's arrogance and indifference to the fate of thousands of young Americans still makes me so angry I would like to use him to personally demonstrate how easy it is to crush an enemy's windpipe. There can never be any excuse for the callous, craven, and criminal acts that the so-called "best and brightest" committed, thereby condemning a whole generation of the finest young men this country has ever produced to the horrors and insanity of Vietnam. McNamara still doesn't get it, after all this time. He is actually a bona-fide war criminal, and he should be arrested and tried just as the Allies did to the Nazis after World War Two in Nuremburg. But as Bobby Kennedy once said, "Kill one man and they call it murder. Kill a million and they call it war". When are we going to learn? These men will never see justice or the inside of a jail cell. It turned my stomach to read this outrageous account of an impenitent confessed killer looking for forgiveness and absolution after living a life of privilege and affluence, after he personally oversaw, with amazing indifference, the most atrocious set of public policies this side of Dachau. The only fit punishment for McNamara (along with a long list of other scumbag fellow-travelers like Henry Kissinger and General Westmoreland) is either immediate imprisonment, where he could live the rest of his pathetic life confined in solitary confinement, just like former Reich-Marshal Rudoph Hess, for the crimes against humanity that he admits committing. On the other hand, perhaps we could provide real justice for this pseudo-macho pencil pusher by issuing him an M-16, some provisions, and a machete, setting him down by 'chopper' in the middle of some God-forsaken jungle, along with a couple of companies of similarly equipped and well-motivated Vietnam vets a few miles away. Perhaps then, before he suffers and dies as slowly and as horribly at the hands of some people with a real sense of justice, he will understand how many of the people he anonymously condemned to such a fate for no good reason than personal cowardice thirty years ago felt. I volunteer for the mission here and now! Maybe then he would finally understand the true price of his arrogance, indifference, and cowardice. Boycott this book.
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Summary: The education of Robert McNamara.
Review: Robert McNamara's "In Retrospect" ranks up there with David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest" as one of the most enlightening books on the Vietnam tragedy. Revealing is McNamara's describing of an incident in which a protestor committed suicide outside the window of his Pentagon office. After that episode McNamara stopped talking about the war with his wife and children, all of whom were against it. Those who are interested in history will find this book absorbing and impossible to put down. However, I most recommend it to those with an interest in human behavior and decision-making.
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Summary: Lucid, honest, enlightening
Review: The horns of the dilemma that trapped us: the South Vietnamese had to win it and we could not lose it. With just the right amount of detail, McNamara clearly conveys the power of inertia that drove the U.S. to crucify itself for the sake of ideology and international prestige. This book makes me wonder how government functions at all. We expect the executive branch to make sense of voluminous data, to direct a multitude of bureaucrats and a host of officials, who all have their own egos and points of view, in a swirl of ever changing and complex events. McNamara says there was never time to adequately address Vietnam on its own amid the daily decision making and the account in this book is the proof. McNamara gave himself over to his job and tried to rationalize the irrational. He was the one who ordered the study that ended up being revealed by Daniel Ellsberg as The Pentagon Papers. He makes the case clearly that those who say we didn't do enough to win have a hard case to prove. Above all McNamara is adamant against the use of nuclear weapons and that was the ultimate constraint on our activities in Southeast Asia. Most disturbing to me is that while top officials held meetings and floundered in seeming helplessness on the hook of Vietnam, hundreds, thousands were dying in the jungles. In the dictionary, many words have several definitions. Under the word tragedy, one of them should simply be "Vietnam". Two statements made by McNamara in this book remain in my mind: not all problems have immediate solutions and military actions have unforeseen consequences.
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Summary: Historical Look Inside Memos and Minds
Review: There are numerous verbatim copies of memos that were exchanged between President Johnson, the civilian (state and defense departments), and many military officials involved in this long-drawn out, lengthy period. From these memos, McNamera explained the circumstances, strategy, and thinking behind himself and others in the political, historical, and Cold War context of the time. He repeatedly (in my ignorant opinion) took honest and objective attempts to highlight and elucidate the (by his own admission many cases of faulty) reasoning behind why forces were there in the first place, and why escalation continued throughout the 1960s. Many Southeast Asian political factors external to Vietnam were factors in the decision to enter, escalate, and proceed, as the U.S. military did in this conflict. Some factors were: Sukarno in Indonesia (who was later toppled), Mao Zedong's promotion of "perpetual world-wide struggle through revolution," the Domino Theory (which we now know as false, but then it was difficult to know), among many other Cold War events that took place in the decade of the 1960s. The Cuban Missile Crisis, construction of the Iron Curtain, airlifts to Berlin, Khrushchev stating "we will bury you," and the mistakenly held perception that there was a "Sino-Soviet" pact, when in fact, the two didn't like each other. McNamera noted more than once that there were no "experts" on Vietnam and Southeast Asian historical, culture, and contemporary politics. They often consulted "experts" on the Soviets, Chinese, and other adversaries, who were often proved to be correct and were vital to the formulation and implementation of foreign and military policy. In Vietnam they chose to have no "experts" to turn to who knew the people. As McNamera noted, he and the military and administration didn't know very much at all about Vietnam, and its' history. A major point McNamera commonly stated was the perception of Ho Chi Minh by senior American political and military officials. Was Ho Chi Minh: 1. a nationalist who wanted to unify his country and expel foreigners who had subjugated Vietnam for hundreds of years (who also happened to be a communist, in the likes of Tito, independent of Peking and Moscow), or was he 2. A communist, who was promulgating Vietnamese unification under communism not only in Vietnam but also in neighboring South Eastern Asian nations. 3. A part of both or neither of 1. or 2. The answer now leans toward number 1. quite heavily. Should they have been aware of this then? McNamera says "yes." Although their decisions were terrible an important thing for the reader to be constantly be aware of is: the context of when these thoughts, strategies, and actions took place. The 1960s were from a radically different world than that of today. One can't even imagine, if compared to 2003. The 1960s were the most intense decade during the Cold War. Presently, to make more than a couple of assumptions or critiques of the decisions made back during the conflict can easily (although not necessarily)lead to the comparison of "apples & oranges." McNamera probably wanted to expunge himself of some of the blame he's often been given by history regarding the disastrous foreign policy-making in Vietnam that still is referred to by some as "McNamera's War." This is in part, but not entirely, true of course. Pointing mainly and/or only to McNamera is big-time oversimplification. How interesting it is that a civilian intellectual Auto Executive can all of a sudden become Secretary of Defense in a single day. After getting a phone call from JFK and receiving Kennedy's job offer, McNamera replied he wasn't qualified to be Secretary of Defense, whereas JFK rhetorically asked "who is?" The rest is history: go figure. Communists are indeed rotten autocratic people who've failed miserably. Communism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism was the biggest mistake of the 20th Century. Yes, if the Pentagon bureaucrats and civilian leaders had simply read a couple of books on Vietnamese history they might have had a more balanced view of the objectives of the Viet Minh, NVA, and let the chips fall where they knew they were going long before Saigon fell.
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Summary: McNamara's moral flaw
Review: This book gives ample evidence of McNamara's moral lacking. Noam Chomsky puts it bluntly (Manufacturing Consent, 2002):
"Robert McNamara's widely publicized book, supposedly a mea culpa and moral tract, is notable for the fact that his notion of the war's 'high costs,' and the error and guilt he feels, extend only to U.S. lives and the effects of the war on 'the political unity of our society'. He offers neither regrets, moral reflections, nor apologies for his country having invaded, mercilessly bombed, ravaged the land, and killed and wounded millions of innocent people in a samll distant peasant society in pursuit of its own political ends."
It can summarized the only thing you can learn from this book...
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Summary: A Tortured Man Explains America's Many Mistakes in Vietnam
Review: This book is a powerful explanation of what many people called "McNamara's War." It is intellectually honest, well-researched and an enormous insight to how President Lyndon Johnson's White House operated. The author explains how Johnson inherited a "God-awful" mess eminently more dangerous than the one Kennedy had inherited from Eisenhower. One evening not long after he took office, Johnson confessed to his aide Bill Moyers that he felt like a catfish that had "just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it," McNamara writes. In the last two chapters, "Estrangement and Departure" and "The Lessons of Vietnam" McNamara bravely admits many mistakes. The most glaring was not holding the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff accountable for its many reporting failures. It took McNamara nearly thirty years to finally tell his side of the story. It was worth the wait.
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