The Fromson File

C’MON, MR. MACNAMARA, ENOUGH PLEADING… For weeks, I’ve been debating with myself about seeing A Fog of War, Errol Morris’ widely-acclaimed documentary that features Robert MacNamara once more taking us to the edge of the cliff, then walking away from the truth. Unfortunately, one or two generations of Americans cannot recall the arrogance, ignorance and duplicity we were subjected to in the days, not only of MacNamara, but also John Foster Dulles and Henry Kissinger. Those of us who endured the Vietnam era’s Defense Secretary during his truly unctuous days as the military architect of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations cannot seem to escape his shadow. Once again, he leaves us with unanswered questions. Had he ever visited the Vietnam War Memorial? Ever talked to veterans or the families of those who never came back to “the world” except in body bags? How did he resolve the break with his son and the rest of his family who were opposed to the war? He would infuriate me so much with his pontificating and self-assurance when he visited Saigon in 1965 that I intentionally would drive one of our CBS News bureau’s two cars, an Edsel, to his press conferences. For those of you too young to know what I’m talking about, the Edsel was a lemon of a car manufactured by the Ford Motor Company when MacNamara was its president before he was brought to Washington by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. In 1966, when I broke the story of a serious bomb shortage in the U.S. arsenal in Vietnam that endangered the lives of American pilots, he demanded time for a rebuttal on a CBS News program. His chief spokesman, a hatchet man named Arthur Sylvester, went on the air to insist that I did not know what I was talking about but furthermore that I was lying. A month later, the New York Times confirmed the bomb shortage story and we heard nothing more from MacNamara. In a wide-ranging interview in A Fog of War, documentarian Morris gives MacNamara carte blanche to “explain” once again his side of the tragedy, which may be another way of asking: what went wrong in Vietnam? How did he rationalize his role in it? I thought MacNamara tried to do that, however imperfectly, in his two mea culpas, published in 1995 (In Retrospect: the Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam) and in 1999 (Argument Without End). Selling Himself Having made the rounds in behalf of Fog of War before establishment audiences at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, in Washington and at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, drew surprisingly sympathetic audiences. Pity the old geezer. He's seen the error of his ways. Please, give me a break. On February 4th in, of all places, he even went to Berkeley, his alma mater and the place where rebellion against the war really was ignited. MacNamara revived old memories for me. As a reporter, I was on the Sproul Hall steps of the University of California in December 1964 the night campus cops clubbed anti-war demonstrators, throwing some of them down the stairs and arresting countless others. Watching Morris’ compelling film, it appeared that MacNamara seems to be begging people to hear his story just one more time. He apologizes. He says, in effect, that everyone who orchestrated the involvement in Vietnam and then expanded the commitment exponentially should bear responsibility for it. In what seemed like a distraction, he has an almost “Gee Whiz” explanation of the horrors of war, prefacing the Vietnam era by reminding us of the fire-bombing of Tokyo in World War II and how terrible it was. As if people with any knowledge of the Second World War did not know that our airmen, under the command of General Curtis LeMay, destroyed 300,000 homes in Tokyo and other Japanese cities. What finally brought me to the point of wanting to scream at MacNamara was that moment in Morris’ Epilogue when he asks, “Why didn’t you speak out against the war after you left the Johnson Administration?” MacNamara’s response was “I don’t want to talk about that.” Now, what kind of an answer is that? Are we to believe that at the ripe old age of 87, he still is unable to come clean? Let’s concede that in 1968 his admiration for LBJ compelled him to walk off like a good soldier. Or that the plum of the World Bank presidency that Johnson arranged for him bought his silence? Mark that down to politics. But what was holding him back now, probably his last opportunity to reach the public? This is only conjecture, of course, but it is just possible that a public break with LBJ by MacNamara might have raised the intensity of the debate over the war. Perhaps it even would have forced Johnson to decide against seeking re-election even sooner than his March 30 1968 declaration. Coupled with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy shortly thereafter, war weariness conceivably might have ended the conflict before Richard Nixon’s election in 1968? None of that happened, of course. But Nixon in the White House resulted in three more years of fighting and an additional 25,000 Americans killed in action, more than double that amount of wounded and a countless number of Vietnamese deaths before the ignominious end of America’s involvement. The Obsession with China Listening to MacNamara casually explain the logic of the Vietnam conflict, the fear he and all the Johnson advisors had of China, left me dumbfounded. I wish that Morris had pressed him on this issue, but he did not. I was reporting from Vietnam and the rest of Asia at the time. In 1967, China clearly was in turmoil. It was still recovering from a horrendous famine earlier in the decade that resulted in the deaths of perhaps one hundred million people. Not only were the Chinese in the midst of a bitter internal struggle that actually sidelined Mao Zedong for more than a year. But when the man they called the Great Helmsman re-emerged as China’s principal leader, he orchestrated the Cultural Revolution that engulfed the mainland in unparalleled madness. China was waging war against itself, but it was in no condition, emotionally or physically, to wage war against anyone else or peddle its doctrine to the countries of Southeast Asia. In no way was it able to take advantage of the looming U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. But MacNamara, and the cadre of so-called China experts in and around the White House, in the think tanks, universities and public policy groups in Washington and New York were true believers in the myth of the domino theory. There was no logic to it, only a fiction created by the columnist Joseph Alsop. He and I used to argue about it for years in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Saigon. To his death, he remained a man of unshakable convictions. Too bad Joe did not live long enough to witness the humiliating defeat dealt the Chinese army by North Vietnam in a border war in 1989. I can only imagine how MacNamara might have answered this question if only Errol Morris had asked it: “What persuaded any of you to believe that China actually posed a a serious threat to the region or to U.S. interests? Given his answer at the conclusion of “A Fog of War,” he might well have answered the same way: “ I don’t want to talk about that.”