Robert McNamara and His Battle with the Truth

For Robert McNamara, the argument over Vietnam ended before the war began. By giving his new book the title Arguments Without End, McNamara raises expectations he can not live up to. Rather than writing about arguments, defined as principles and ideas fleshed out by facts and information, he appears interested only in the latter. He never addresses the moral or intellectual underpinnings of the decision to go to war. Repeating a journey he made more than thirty years ago as secretary of defense to President Johnson, McNamara traveled to Hanoi six times to meet with Vietnamese leaders involved in the war. The idea behind the meetings and this book is that American and Vietnamese decision-makers acted on faulty assumptions, misperceptions, and a general lack of information. McNamara believes that with correct information, the war might not have begun or might have ended much sooner. This intellectual framework hobbles those meetings and their potential to educate and inform. By reducing this historic opportunity to a “fact-finding mission” thirty years too late, McNamara again reveals his incapacity to deviate from the technocratic approach to public policy he made famous through devices like the “body count” in Vietnam. ¹ This is unfortunate. At a conference on Vietnam hosted by the Johns Hopkins University in 1998, McNamara admitted that the war presented him with a problem he could not solve. This book and his approach to the meetings that form its basis, reveal that he has only partially learned that lesson.

The meetings and the book are largely McNamara’s project. However, a team of American historians was involved, and it is difficult to separate his perspective and objectives from theirs and those of the Vietnamese. As for the book’s format, McNamara wrote the introduction and conclusion to each chapter. In between, the team of American historians frames the issues and provides excerpts of the transcripts from the meetings in Hanoi. The sections written by the historians provide a sound, if conventional, historical account of the conflict in Indochina from 1945 onwards. In contrast, the sections written by McNamara read like memoranda, often written with numbered points, and at times range to the polemical. At the same time, the Vietnamese opened certain portions of their archives to the American team, revealing some new information about their conduct of the war that will be of interest to readers.

The choice of the book’s format as well as its conclusions rely on a number of essential assumptions that McNamara makes and the Vietnamese reject. Two assumptions stand out as particularly important for the success of the project. First, McNamara assumes the war was a “tragedy” for both sides. His Vietnamese counterparts fundamentally reject that idea, arguing instead that the war was a noble cause that cost three million Vietnamese their lives. In his earlier memoir, In Retrospect, that conclusion seemed appropriate. Using the term tragedy signaled a desire to acknowledge the terrible nature of the war and to deflate the emotional Cold War rhetoric that surrounded Vietnam. When sitting across the table from a former National Liberation Front (NLF, or VietCong as popularized in the United States) commander, the idea of the war as a tragedy loses its persuasive power. Without a basic agreement on how to conceptualize the war, the discussions sputter and often times lapse into polemics from both sides.

A second and equally injurious assumption is that on a strategic and policy level the interests of the United States and the Vietnamese were symmetrical. The American team argues that containment and the “domino theory” motivated their actions, whereas the North Vietnamese argue that the United States became their enemy by siding with the French in the Indochina War. The Vietnamese claim that the United States attacked them and that it repudiated Vietnamese attempts to reach out to it as a truly anti-colonial power. McNamara fails...