5/17/2023 0 Comments In retrospect![]() ![]() President Clinton, for one, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that writing the book “was a courageous thing for him to do.” Asked if he thought McNamara’s admission of error vindicated his own conduct during the war, Clinton responded, “Yes, yes, I do. McNamara’s contrition has, from some quarters, won him praise. “We were wrong, terribly wrong,” he now declares. Speaking about his book on television, he openly wept as he talked about Vietnam. In In Retrospect, he writes that he remained silent for “fear that I might appear self-serving, defensive, or vindictive, which I wished to avoid at all costs,” and perhaps “because it is hard to face one’s mistakes.” In a recent interview with the New York Times, he attributed his long silence to overpowering grief and a sense of failure. ![]() Although McNamara is anxious to put this particular worry to rest, declaring, “I was not under medical care, not taking drugs except for an occasional sleeping pill, and never contemplated suicide,” he left office in 1968 clearly shaken deeply by the direction the war had taken.įor the next two-and-a-half decades, McNamara refrained from publicly discussing Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson even worried aloud to several of his aides that McNamara too might take his own life, just as Truman’s Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, had done nineteen years earlier. ![]() “I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts,” writes McNamara of Morrison.īy late 1967 the strain of the war had clearly exerted a toll on McNamara. Morrison, appeared just outside the window of McNamara’s Pentagon office, poured an inflammable liquid over himself, and lit up-with his one-year-old daughter in his arms. We do not know precisely when this occurred, but the memoir hints that seeds for it had already been planted by November 2, 1965, the day an antiwar protester, Norman R. I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.”Īs we learn from In Retrospect, McNamara’s Vietnam-era memoir, he subsequently had a change of mind. His reply: “I don’t object to its being called McNamara’s war. Kennedy via Berkeley, Harvard, and the Ford Motor Company, was asked by a reporter how he felt about the fact that the conflict in Vietnam was being named after him. McNamara, the whiz kid who at age forty-four came to run the Pentagon for John F. In retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. ![]()
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