New documentary on former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
One of the movie’s most powerful passages covers McNamara’s little-known service in World War II, when he was attached to Gen. Curtis LeMay’s 21st Bomber Command stationed on the Pacific island of Guam. LeMay’s B-29s showered 67 Japanese cities with incendiary bombs in 1945, softening up the country for the two atomic blasts to come. McNamara was a senior planning officer. He describes in particular the firebombing of Tokyo, then a city of wooden houses and shops. “In that single night,” says McNamara, his eyes filling with tears, the first of his several emotional moments in the film, “we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children.” Newly retrieved military film taken from the air pans across 50 square miles turned to ash.At this point, Morris abruptly asks McNamara if he knew “this was going to happen.” McNamara replies: “Well, I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it. I analyzed bombing operations, and how to make them more efficient.” McNamara then recalls a moment after the war ended when he was standing with LeMay and the controversial general said to him, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” “And I think he’s right,” says McNamara. “He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.”
And then he does one of his flip-flops. He starts talking about the fuzziness of “the rules of war,” apparently referring to the Geneva Conventions. “Was there a rule then,” he asks rhetorically, “that said you shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death 100,000 civilians in one night? … LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”
He holds the same kind of self-discussion about the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, saying, “Now what kind of law do we have that says these chemicals are acceptable for use in war and these chemicals are not? We don’t have clear definitions. I never in the world would have authorized an illegal action. I’m not really sure I authorized Agent Orange — I don’t remember it — but it certainly occurred, the use of it occurred while I was secretary.”
McNamara’s detractors will likely say that instead of shedding tears now about the victims of war and engaging in legalisms, he could have saved a lot of lives when he was running the Pentagon for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson by going public with his knowledge that the Vietnam War was a lost cause — and that Johnson had admitted this in private.
But it must also be said that it is McNamara alone, among the many planners of the war, who has come forward to say he was wrong. Henry Kissinger, in all his revisionist books and speeches, has never admitted to a single regret or mistake. McNamara’s admissions may be incomplete, but they are nonetheless a contribution to history, and the act must have taken a certain kind of courage, for he knew that by coming forward at all he was offering himself up for the slaughter.
