For Americans in their 40s or 50s, the name of Ro

For Americans in their 40s or 50s, the name of Robert S. McNamara still provokes a strong emotional reaction. Even more than President Johnson, McNamara was viewed by many as the architect of the war in Vietnam. Accordingly, his book on the Vietnam decision-making process and his role in it, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, is a work of great importance, representing in effect his apology for a policy that he now regards as disastrously ill-thought-out. The remainder of this report will survey the book chapter by chapter, followed by a general conclusion.

Chapter 1: This chapter summarizes McNamara's career up to the point at which he became Secretary of Defense in the administration of John F. Kennedy. McNamara deals only briefly (pp. 10-13) with his career as an executive at Ford Motor, where he eventually became president of the company. Such brief treatment gives short shrift, perhaps, to what ought to be a fundamental issue in this book: McNamara's own mind-set, his strengths and weaknesses, and the way in which these things reflected the times.

The 1950s were a golden age of corporate managerialism and the so-called Organization Man. The brash days of "captains of industry" like Henry Ford himself were far in the past, while the age of the new captains of industry, like Bill Gates, were equally far in the future. McNamara and his colleagues would try to manage the Vietnam War as though it were a corporation, and that outlook was perhaps

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lution of support for retaliatory measures that followed it. Those retaliatory measures began the process of escalation and direct US ground force involvement, while the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was claimed as a legal basis for the enlargement of the war in the absence of a formal declaration of war. Of the two alleged attacks that make up the Tonkin Gulf incident, McNamara is persuaded that the first was real, and that the second was "probable, but not certain" (p. 128). The real significance of the attacks--real, imagined, or deliberately fabricated--was symbolic, though McNamara does not make this point. Attacks on American naval ships have long had a special emotional force. The generation that made policy in Vietnam had vivid memories of Pearl Harbor, while further back in history lay "Remember the Maine!" and even, ultimately, the incidents at sea that led to the War of 1812. Chapter 6: The Tonkin Gulf incident pushed the US toward escalation, but uncertainty continued due to the approach of the 1964 presidential election. McNamara firmly denies the allegation, often made later, that President Lyndon Johnson deliberately concealed a plan for massive escalation in Vietnam until after the election (p. 145). Yet, accor

Category: History - F