Yet when Johnson, influenced in part by Ambassador Lodge in Saigon, began to seriously entertain direct military pressure on North Vietnam, McNamara did not disagree; in a stunning reversal, he began to examine the range of military possibilities open to the United States at the time, including covert activities, air and sea attacks against the North, and even the use of American ground troops in place of the ARVN. In late 1964, McNamara believed, seemingly paradoxically, that the U.S. could still win the war, urging the president to “go on bending every effort to win.” On March 1st, 1965, McNamara unlocked funds for the conflict so that the Pentagon could order “everything it needed on a crash basis.” His commitment to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam went so far that he was even willing to lie - or, at the very least, grossly misrepresent the truth - when testifying before Congress in August of 1964.
To encourage Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, McNamara claimed that the C. Turner Joy had been attacked, although at the time he “knew that only scanty evidence existed” of this second attack. His testimony also included a statement that “the Maddox was operating in international waters and was carrying out a routine patrol of the type we carry out all over the world at all times.” Though the former assertion was arguably a disputed claim, the latter was clearly false. Such hawkish actions on McNamara's part strongly influenced the president in his decision to escalate the conflict. Johnson felt “bound to put aside his real misgivings and proceed” with war in Vietnam.
By the end of 1966, however, it was clear to McNamara that the policy he had advocated would not succeed in the time he had allotted, and that the war might drag on indefinitely. His insistence on statistical reports with “quantifiable data” had led to General Westmoreland's adoption of body-counting, a highly unpalatable policy that was proving unpopular with the American public. McNamara privately stated that it would take at least 600,000 U.S. troops in-country to overcome the resources of North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front, hastening to add that even this would “not guarantee success”, and that in less than a year America might be faced with perhaps one thousand U.S. deaths per week. As he told Johnson in December of 1966, he believed “military action is an unacceptable way to a successful conclusion.” He was equally clear about his opinion in public as well, testifying before a Senate subcommittee in August of 1967 that the American bombing of Vietnam was ineffective. Thus, by early 1967, McNamara began to push for a diplomatic solution, advocating pauses in the U.S. bombing campaign to encourage negotiations with the North Vietnamese. This “drastic change of approach” put him at odds with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and, eventually, the president himself, ultimately leading to McNamara's dismissal in February of 1968.
After his departure from the White House, McNamara went on to serve as Head of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. McNamara retained his active voice in American policy from time to time, such as in 1982 when he joined with several other former national security advisors to warn against the use of nuclear weapons in NATO's defence policy. In 1995, with the publication of In Retrospect, McNamara publicly voiced regret for his role in the Vietnam War. Perhaps more importantly, though, he explains not only where he went wrong, but also attempts to explain why. McNamara writes, “…we faced a blizzard of problems, there were only twenty-four hours in a day, and we often did not have time to think straight.” He also blames the dominance of the Domino Theory in the American view, writing “I believed the Soviets and Chinese were cooperating in trying to extend their hegemony. In hindsight, of course, it is clear that they had no unified strategy after the late 1950s.” The prevailing fear of communism in the McCarthy era, McNamara writes, also led to the purging of the White House's senior Southeast Asia advisors, leaving the administration essentially in the dark when interpreting Chinese and Vietnamese policy. McNamara writes that “[w]ithout men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we - certainly I - badly misread China's objectives” and confused Ho Chi Minh's nationalist sentiment with communism. On the most basic level, McNamara declares that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations “failed to analyze our assumptions critically, then or later. The foundations of our decision making were gravely flawed.” Perhaps these reasons may explain how Johnson's “brightest star in the cabinet”, the American Secretary of Defense, could have erred so disastrously.
Thus, for one man, Robert S. McNamara, the War in Vietnam was a tragedy. For the millions of Americans and Vietnamese caught up in the conflict, however, historians must struggle to see it as anything but a statistic.
