Legacy Lost in the Shuffle

Been wrestling with the need to write about the passing of Robert McNamara. I just watched an episode of Charlie Rose where he replayed interviews with McNamara from episodes in 1995 and 2003. The 2003 episode was an interview with McNamara and Errol Morris. Morris is the noted documentarian who made The Fog of War, the Oscar-winning film about McNamara's life and career. I highly recommend viewing the The Fog of War, and you can see parts of the Rose interviews here:




With that said, here are some thoughts.

It's been seven days since the passing of Robert McNamara. He died Monday, July 6 at the age of 93. I know it's a recurring theme in my blog entries, but it must be noted that the media coverage of his death, and more importantly what he did during his life, has been embarrassingly scant.

McNamara served as Defense Secretary for JFK & LBJ, and is known as one of the primary architects of the Vietnam War, as well as the US bombings in Laos and Cambodia. He will forever be remembered (for those who care to give a shit about history that isn't about which celebrities are fucking each other) as being part of the brain-trust that contributed to the death of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, and Americans.

But it is the role he played in that circle, as a voice clamoring for death and war, for the eradication of the evils of Communism across the globe, that desperately needs attention. His legacy is that of a technocrat, far removed from the brutality and realities of war, who advanced and helped create the modern industrial military complex.

It is imperative, particularly now as we are mired in two wars (regardless of when troops pull out of city limits, we're still engaged in war) that were planned, justified, and now are being executed (in terms of the plans and accompanying PR spin) by individuals (almost exclusively white men) who built careers much like McNamara's.

McNamara is important not just because of what he did, though that certainly is important in its own right. But if we take a broader look, it is possible to view the significance of his decisions and deeds as being overshadowed by the manner by and through which he institutionalized roles and careers like his and the modern-day neocon hawks and neoliberal cheerleaders of globalization that now orchestrate, dictate, and articulate our foreign policies and the perspectives they normalize.

As someone whose just getting into this whole blog writing genre, I think it's better to collect and refer you to the writings of others who have already articulated much of what needs to be said. These things need to not only be said, but they need to be thought about, remembered, and more importantly taught.

We need to speak up about the time in our history that McNamara influenced so profoundly in an effort to illustrate how what we normalize and take for granted today related to the professionalization of careers predicated on the existence of bad guys and evil-doers, death, destruction, and the annihilation of peoples with divergent viewpoints (particularly those in poor and brown/black populated nations) is a construction that happened in a particular moment. It is not normal or natural; it has only been made to seem that way.

With that, I urge you to read the following:

Great piece by Michael Lind on Salon.com on the bipartisanship of blaming the Vietnam War on McNamara.

Joseph Galloway's commentary on taking pleasure in reading McNamara's obit.

Andrew Lam arguing that McNamara's mea culpa and purported hindsight still failed to grasp the gravity of his role in Vietnam.

Sam Smith of the Huffington Post interviews Errol Morris on his thoughts of the life of Robert McNamara.

The obit that the AP, Huff Post, and others ran.

Short piece by Joseph Nye on redemption and reflection, both of self and others.

Joe Costello offers an interesting lens through which to view McNamara by comparing and contrasting his life, legacy, and the meanings they were built on and helped build to those of Hunter S. Thompson.

And finally, I'll leave you with a weird video clip and accompanying text of McNamara reading reading Dylan Thomas' The Hand that Signed the Paper. This was a scene from the previously mentioned Errol Morris that was deleted and was not included in the final cut of the film. Self-awareness escapes us all, and all we can hope is a degree is knowledge about ourselves. Perhaps more dangerous than not engaging in this pursuit that we know will never come to an end and will only produce minimum results is the belief that you are more in touch with who you are than in fact is the case. This is all comes to life here: