Robert McNamara, who died this week, was by any judgement an extraordinary man. President of the Ford Motor Company, a Harvard Professor, Secretary of Defence under Kennedy and Johnson, so-called architect of the Vietnam War and the US policy of nuclear deterrence, President of the World Bank, campaigner against poverty and hunger.
But perhaps just as remarkable was his candid reflection on his life - and his mistakes - in Errol Morris's brilliant 2003 documentary The Fog of War. At one point McNamara talks about the Tonkin Gulf incident, where two American destroyers reported being torpedoed by the North Vietnamese. The Americans believed it was a major escalation. President Johnson went to Congress and obtained approval to increase bombing — and the Vietnam War took off. The only problem, as McNamara recalls, was that the destroyers hadn't been under attack at all. The “torpedoes” were just shadows on the sonar.
“We were wrong, but we had in our minds a mindset that led to that action and it carried such heavy costs,” McNamara says. “We see incorrectly or we see only half the story at times. We see what we want to believe. Belief and seeing — they are both often wrong.”
That has always struck me as a profound observation.
I once almost met him. I was invited to a house where he was staying on a visit in the UK, but by the time I arrived, he had taken to his bed. Possibly just as well as he was apparently upset at a BBC interview with him which had again concentrated on his role in the Vietnam war rather than his later work. Some things you can't escape.
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