The tormented Robert McNamara

My local newspaper recently carried an editorial cartoon showing Robert McNamara, the controversial former Secretary of Defense who died on July 6, standing in front of St. Peter in heaven.

"There are 58,000 soldiers in here who'd like to have a word with you," St. Peter angrily tells McNamara, citing the number of U.S. troops killed in Vietnam. Taking a similarly harsh view of McNamara, the New York Times' front-page headline reporting his death described McNamara as "Architect of Futile War."

From the start, I vigorously opposed the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. But I believe that McNamara has been unfairly vilified as the person primarily responsible for the war.

McNamara, a Republican, knew nothing about Vietnam when President Kennedy selected him in 1961 to head the Pentagon. McNamara had been president of Ford Motor Co., where he had gained a national reputation as the ultimate professional manager.

The seeds were sown for a U.S. role in Vietnam as far back as the Truman Administration. After World War II ended, Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader of Vietnam's independence movement, sought U.S. aid to gain freedom from French colonial rule.

With the Cold War already under way, President Truman ignored his plea. Had Truman, and later President Eisenhower, shown some sympathy for the Vietnamese independence cause, perhaps Ho's regime might have tempered its Soviet ties.

France finally granted Vietnam its independence only after its disastrous military defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The country was split in two. A pro-Soviet regime was established in the north and a pro-Western government was created in the south. The two states were soon at war, with North Vietnam sponsoring a Communist insurgency, the Viet Kong, in South Vietnam.

U.S. military advisers began to arrive in 1959 to support the battle against the Communist forces. When he became president, Kennedy expanded the number of American military advisers from a few hundred to about 17,000. In 1963 his successor, President Johnson, sent U.S. combat units in for the first time to fight the Communists. By 1975, when the U.S. forces finally departed from Vietnam, President Nixon had expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia.

To use George W. Bush's terminology, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were the "deciders" in getting the U.S. involved in Vietnam and for prolonging the war for 15 years. Robert McNamara, who had such a prominent role in Vietnam, quit the Pentagon in early 1968 after belatedly deciding that it was a mistake for the U.S. to continue the war.

As Business Week's Pentagon correspondent for nearly a decade until 1963, I have long had a personal interest in McNamara's career. I interviewed him several times and consider him to be one of the most interesting men I've ever met.

In an industry where eggheads rarely flourished, McNamara made his mark as a thoroughgoing intellectual in his years at Ford Motor Co. He shunned Detroit society, socialized little with auto industry tycoons, and lived instead in Ann Arbor, a university town 40 miles away. His friends there were largely professors and the kind of academic people who go into business. I reported and wrote a cover story about McNamara for Business Week's Feb. 11, 1961 issue.

Although I considered the Vietnam war a tragic blunder, I concede that McNamara vigorously improved the management of the Defense Dept. He firmly unified the three military services that had been plagued by costly rivalry and wasteful duplication of weapons development. He also strengthened civilian authority over the military establishment and enforced managerial control over the billions of dollars worth of military procurement.

Despite McNamara's sudden policy disagreement with the President over Vietnam, Johnson obviously thought so highly of McNamara that he recommended him to become head of the World Bank, where he served until 1981. In his years there, McNamara shifted the bank's focus to the problem of world poverty.

"[McNamara] is like a jackhammer," President Johnson once said. "No human being can take what he takes. He drives too hard. He's too perfect."

I developed a great deal of sympathy for McNamara after he left the Pentagon. For many years before his death, he was seriously tormented by the prominent role he had played in the tragic events in Vietnam. In books, articles, speeches, and a widely publicized documentary film, The Fog of War, McNamara became an anti-war crusader. He was particularly critical of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

McNamara died at age 93. He spent the final years of his life wrestling with the Vietnam war's moral consequences. He lived long enough to see how terribly wrong he had been and how much turmoil and tragedy the war brought to both Vietnam and the U.S. It was rare to see a man of McNamara's stature repent so publicly.

MEMOIR: My father was a rebel

When I was growing up, my parents never tried to influence my choice of a future career. Like so many of my friends, living within a few blocks from Yankee Stadium, my boyhood ambition was to be a big-league baseball player. I was regarded by my peers as a smooth-fielding second baseman, but I couldn't hit a curve ball. That, and some other athletic weaknesses, guaranteed that I would never make it to the big leagues. Journalism soon supplanted baseball as my career goal. And all the while, my mother and father never suggested what I should do with my life.

In contrast, my father had to contend with his father, an Orthodox rabbi who insisted that his son follow in his occupational footsteps. My father, however, was a rebel who declined to satisfy his father's ambition for him.

My grandfather belonged to the Hasidim, a Jewish mystical sect whose religious practices are marked by more emotional fervor than most other Orthodox Jews.

My father was brought to the U.S. in 1906 as an eight-year old from the sector of Poland then under Czarist Russian rule. The family settled on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

In the strict style of the Hasidim, my grandfather refused to allow my father to attend public school because he frowned on the mixing of sexes in the classroom. My father went to the local elementary school for several days, then was quickly withdrawn when Grandpa learned that there were girls in my father's class and that the all the teachers were women.

My father was then enrolled in a yeshiva, an all-day Jewish religious school where he learned English and a smattering of other secular subjects after regular school hours. The secular subjects were usually taught by immigrant college students.

It was generally assumed that my father would go on to a rabbinical seminary when he completed the equivalent of public high school at the yeshiva, and that he would subsequently be ordained as an Orthodox rabbi.

But my father's personal career objective did not match my grandfather's. My father's faith in Orthodoxy had suffered from exposure to the radical free-thinking views of the neighborhood's galaxy of socialist soapbox orators. The prospect of remaining in the Hasidic fold after completing his yeshiva studies and becoming an Orthodox rabbi had become remote.

My father's ambition was to become a doctor. However, his limited secular education and the family's modest financial means made such an ambition unattainable.

An alternative career path developed during his final term in the yeshiva. It was opened by Rabbi Stephen Wise, a nationally renowned Reform Jewish rabbi. Wise had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish community in his native Hungary. When he settled in the U.S., however, he decided that the Reform Jewish movement was more likely to flourish in this country than Orthodoxy.

He eventually became a Reform rabbi and a leader in the Reform movement. He realized that the students being educated in the Orthodox yeshivas were far better prepared in Talmudic and other traditional Jewish religious studies than the young men usually entering Hebrew Union College, the Reform seminary in Cincinnati.

Wise decided to recruit graduates from the Orthodox institutions, offering them scholarships to Hebrew Union for training as Reform rabbis. My father received such an offer and quickly accepted it. His father, however, objected. To my pious grandfather, becoming a Reform Jew was tantamount to leaving the Jewish faith.

To avoid family controversy, my father reluctantly rejected Rabbi Wise's offer. He was now 18 and decided to leave New York to seek his fortune elsewhere, unfettered by paternal supervision.

For the next couple of years, my father drifted from a job as a clerk in a dry-goods store operated by a Jewish merchant in a small town in Arkansas to one as a shoe salesman in Tennessee. After learning that Henry Ford had begun to pay $5 a day to work on his assembly line, he headed for Detroit and was hired. He was presumably the only former Hasid who ever became a factory hand for the Ford Motor Co.

During World War I my father was drafted into the Army. He served briefly and was discharged for medical reasons. In a strange move still criticized by military historians, his outfit, the 339th Infantry Regiment, was shipped in September 1918 to Archangel and Murmansk in Russia.

The regiment, which acquired the popular name of the "Polar Bears," was a unit in the Allied North Russian Expeditionary Force which was deployed in what one historian has called "a confused effort to thwart the Russian Revolution."

My father was always preoccupied by the irony that, had he not been discharged earlier from the Army, he would have been forced to return to the very land his family had fled only a decade before. That was something he could not have as easily rebelled against as he had done to his father.