In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.

• Author: Ervin, Mike

Goethe called his works "one long confession." This desire for psychic purging may have motivated him to write Faust, the allegory of every man's fight between conscience and a quest for power.

Faust saves his soul by making a great self-sacrifice, thus nullifying his contract with the Devil. Only in self-denial does he find fulfillment.

Compare Goethe's literary hero with our contemporary, aging Faust, Bob McNamara, writing "the book I planned never to write."

The purpose of the memoir, McNamara says, is to "put before the American people why their government and its leaders behaved as they did and what we may learn from their experience." Not just to free himself from three decades of accumulated guilt does McNamara use public space to simultaneously flail and defend himself.

"I have grown sick at heart," he writes, "witnessing the cynicism and even contempt with which so many people view our political institutions and leaders."

But McNamara's memoir will only increase that cynicism and contempt. How will parents of dead soldiers or civilians, Vietnamese or American, feel when they read that as early as 1966 McNamara had become "increasingly skeptical of our ability to achieve our political objectives in Vietnam through military means." Nevertheless, he continues, "this did not diminish my involvement in the shaping of Vietnam policy."

Defense Secretary in the 1960s and memoir writer in the 1990s, McNamara still gropes for the elusive coherence that can offer a graceful endgame for his life. The Great Administrator, who examined as if they were business reports the daily mounting body counts, the spread of anti-war protests, and the request for more U.S. troops to embark for Vietnam, recalls that "1966 began with an event that deeply depressed me."

The next sentence should refer to a Pentagon request to use nuclear weapons, or reports on the increasing drug use by GIs. Instead, the depressing event involves an original member of the best and brightest: "MacGeorge Bundy left the Administration."

This emotional revelation offers insight into McNamara's moral learning disability, that ethical gap that allowed him to order missions of death without questioning his own integrity. Bundy was a pillar of stability, one of the solid crowd of patriots and intellects that reinforced McNamara when he authorized "Westy" (General William Westmoreland) to send more troops and when he lied to the public by declaring he saw "light at the end of the...