CNN won’t tell you this, because he wasn’t Michael Jackson, but Robert McNamara made it to 93 years of age. Then died. 58,000 American service-men made it to around 19 before they were killed in Vietnam. A lot of people blame all that on McNamara. At least some of it. His passing was noticed a lot of places online, and a lot of passion was expressed. The consensus does not seem to be very forgiving.
I met McNamara once, and I’ve seen him on the metro a couple times. He seems very nice, you might say genial. If you look at his later life, you’d call him something of a do-gooder. Maybe he was trying to burn off the guilt with good deeds. He finally published a book, apologizing for a mis-managed war, one he apparently knew we shouldn’t be fighting. He offered up lessons about how that happened, how we got so lost in the Fog of War.
But Vietnam vets I knew at the time were not having it. It was too easy, they said, to ask for forgiveness, years later, when the war is fading into history and things are pretty safe. There are no negative consequences, only a boost in karma, a round of public acceptance, and a boatload of book royalties. Sadly, in our culture, redemption and apology is a big money-maker if you’re in the Memoire-writing class.
Does he get points for knowing it was wrong at the time? You might think the reverse, actually. If he’d been convinced he was doing the right thing, of even doing something morally wrong that had a good chance of success, that might be more forgivable.
In the long run, it’s not up to me. Or to the public, or even to the still-angry veterans. Well, maybe they get some say. And the 58,000 war dead. But really, we don’t know what’s in a person’s soul, or whether change is real or just convenient. But we do have a gift, a lesson from McNamara. Whether he was sincere, repentent, or ultimately redeemed, he still gives us a look at how very smart men ended up doing something very stupid. And costly. It’s something all smart men should probably read.