In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.

• Author: Reeves, Richard

In 1989, I interviewed Robert McNamara for my book President Kennedy: Profile of Power When the questions turned to Vietnam, the former defense secretary stopped me and said that he had long ago decided that he would not speak or write about the war in Vietnam - ever. But, if I was interested, he said, I might want to look for the memorandum he wrote after his last trip to South Vietnam before Kennedy's death.

He was vague about the details, but clear in urging me to judge him (and Kennedy, too) by that memo. Despite McNamara's almost conspiratorial tone that day, the memo of October 2, 1963 - a report to the President by him and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor - was no secret. Everything in it, including the deliberately misleading idea that the U.S. was accomplishing its goals in Vietnam and might be able to end the war in 1965 and withdraw 1,000 of its 17,000 uniformed "trainers" by the end of 1963, was announced by the White House and was on the front page of The New York Times.

To McNamara, the memo proved that he and Kennedy had been just about ready to shut down U.S. involvement in the war until fate intervened and the young president was shot down in Dallas. If this were true, it would offer an absolution of sorts to McNamara, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. There was no secret plan to end the war. General Taylor, for one, said later that the real purpose was to pressure the South Vietnamese government to "put their noses to the wheel or the grindstone or whatever" by threatening to abandon them if they didn't shape up in-the war against the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. I thought the old warrior, or civilian director of warriors, took reporters for fools, and I wondered how many times he had tried this and whether he had gotten away with it.

Now McNamara has changed his mind about talking and written In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. It is a strange and amazing book. I would guess that no other high-ranking official of the U.S. government has ever written a book intended, apparently, to demean his own contribution to the Republic. On almost every one of its 320 pages, McNamara asserts that he and his colleagues who decided the country's policy towards Vietnam were misguided, wrong, stupid, deceptive, and deceived.

It is as savage an attack on McNamara as anyone has written - or likely will write. "Mea culpa" doesn't suffice to describe the late thoughts of this tortured man. He...