Word: mcnamara
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With his recently published memoirs, McNamara broke 25 years of silence and proved that the nation has yet to recover from the disillusionment of that defeat. For four years in the 1960s, McNamara was in the national spotlight, confidently predicting a quick victory in Vietnam. Now he has once again entered the public spotlight, but this time to tell his compatriots what went wrong...
...McNamara to admit his failures is a display of intellectual honesty unmatched by any other senior policy maker of the time. McNamara's courage in assuming this burden has gone largely unnoticed before those who can never forgive him for prosecuting the war and those who see his confession as one more betrayal of the heroic sacrifice of our nation's veterans and war dead...
...memoirs, McNamara reaches the conclusion that many Americans already had more than 25 years ago. The war was not against a Communist monolith directed by the Kremlin but against a nationalist government willing to bleed itself white to defeat an "imperialist" aggressor. McNamara now admits that the U.S. can and should have withdrawn at the earliest possible opportunity...
Still, it is far easier to condemn McNamara in hindsight than it is to appreciate the Cold War atmosphere of the 1960s. To the policy makers of the time, Communism was a very real threat, proven by the crises in Berlin and in Cuba that brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of war. Fear of falling dominoes in Southeast Asia and of the credibility of U.S. commitments elsewhere led the administration into the quagmire of Vietnam...
...McNamara now admits, he had realized as early as 1965 that the war in Vietnam was not winnable. He continued to send more Americans into Vietnam in an attempt to force the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. At the same time his fear of "escalation" led him to hamstring the military's efforts to push northwards toward North Vietnam or to disrupt the enemy's supply lines, the so-called "Ho Chi Minh Trail" that went through a nominally neutral Laos...