In McNamara, competing visions of morality, ethics, war and peace

NEW YORK — When he died Monday (July 6) at age 93, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara was still viewed by many with harsh opprobrium as the chief architect of the Vietnam War. Others praised his efforts, however late in life, to publicly wrestle with his inner demons and the moral consequences of a […]

NEW YORK — When he died Monday (July 6) at age 93, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara was still viewed by many with harsh opprobrium as the chief architect of the Vietnam War. Others praised his efforts, however late in life, to publicly wrestle with his inner demons and the moral consequences of a failed war.

Few figures in the last half century were as polarizing as McNamara. In the days since his death, reaction has ranged from the notably harsh to the mildly conciliatory for a man whose career personified the rise and promise, and subsequent troubles and decline, of post-war America.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert blasted McNamara as an “icy-veined, cold-visaged and rigidly intellectual point man for a war that sent thousands upon thousands of people (most of them young) to their utterly pointless deaths.”


Journalist Walter Pincus, meanwhile, who was a friend of McNamara, evoked McNamara’s efforts to fight global poverty during his 13 years as head of the World Bank and his post-government opposition to nuclear weapons.

Pincus, writing in The Washington Post, reported that McNamara’s last message to his wife expressed the hope that others would continue “to pursue the objectives which I have sought (very imperfectly at times) to move the world toward peace among people and nations, and to accelerate economic and social progress for the least advantaged among us.”

The competing visions of McNamara reflect a man who was defined by war but who tried, however imperfectly, to lay claim to some legacy of peace. And while he was not a religious figure, nor a particularly religious man, McNamara came to embody weighty moral issues of war and peace in one of the most emotionally charged ethical debates of the country’s recent history.

McNamara’s contrasting image was perhaps best displayed in Errol Morris’s Oscar-winning 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,” which portrayed him as a figure at one moment horrifying, the next startlingly human.

The horror comes as McNamara reflects on his role as a military aide to Gen. Curtis E. LeMay during the firebombing of Japan during World War II. He practically leaped into Morris’ camera and loudly declared: “On (a) single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children.”

The human, even vulnerable, moment came with the candid acknowledgement that LeMay later told the young McNamara, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”


“And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals,” McNamara says. “What makes it immoral if you lose, and not immoral if you win?”

McNamara’s public grappling with the dilemmas of that war, and with the subsequent war for which he would forever be linked, rarely though occasionally had a religious element. The product of a lower middle-class California family with a mixed Roman Catholic-Protestant heritage, McNamara was nominally a Presbyterian.

When serving as an executive of the Ford Motor Co. prior to being named John F. Kennedy’s Pentagon chief in 1961, McNamara became a Presbyterian elder. In her 1993 biography of McNamara, journalist Deborah Shapley noted that while he served as Defense Secretary, McNamara and his first wife occasionally attended a Presbyterian church in Washington, D.C.

At the Pentagon, McNamara was known to take an interest in moral theology and had at least one meeting with clergy who opposed the war. Perhaps most notably, Shapley notes, was McNamara’s heart-felt horror and shock when a Quaker anti-war activist, Norman Morrison, set himself on fire in a parking lot just below McNamara’s Pentagon office in November 1965.

An understated but notable Presbyterian element emerged later in life when The New York Times attacked McNamara in 1995 after he wrote in a memoir that Vietnam was “wrong, terribly wrong.”

“Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” The Times said, ” … (his) regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books for our dead soldiers. The ghosts of those unlived lives circle close around Mr. McNamara.”


It added: “What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.”

Yet coming to McNamara’s defense was an old critic, the late Robert McAfee Brown, the renowned liberal Presbyterian theologian and an ardent opponent of the Vietnam War.

McAfee Brown wrote The Times in protest, saying that “it is a great and almost unprecedented moral achievement for a man in public life to have offered such an honest accounting of how people like himself, with initially good intentions, became enmeshed in structures of their own creation from which it was finally impossible to escape. … All honor, therefore, to Mr. McNamara for having set a pattern virtually unknown in our nation’s public life.”

Reflecting this week on McNamara’s life, Donald W. Shriver Jr., another Presbyterian theologian and ethicist who has written about the political dynamics of forgiveness, noted that, indeed, McNamara expressed public remorse — a rarity for an American public official.

But it was all a bit too little, too late, Shriver said.

“He came close to apologizing but didn’t quite get there,” Shriver said, “and he said in the `90s what he should have said in the late `60s.”

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