| It must have taken great courage - albeit post-bellum courage - for a person like Robert McNamara (Secretary Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations) to write his self-damning apologia for the Vietnam War, a book he said that he 'planned never to write'. He gave it the admissive title: In Retrospect - the Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995). He wrote it to put Vietnam in context, to explain why he and many of his bellicose colleagues in the two Administrations took the decisions they did, and to confess belatedly that those decisions 'were wrong, terribly wrong.' |
| The book appeared almost thirty years after McNamara was removed as Secretary Defense by President Lyndon B Johnson and sent into gilded exile as President of the World Bank, where he served from 1968 until 1981. During the intervening years, President Nixon negotiated the Peace Accord with the North Vietnamese that was signed in 1973, and enabled the United States to withdraw its troops from South Vietnam - that distant, defoliated graveyard where over 58,000 US nationals were killed and uncounted millions of Vietnamese decimated in a futile war that had lost its raison d'être but not its lethal velocity. [EXTRACT] |
| Published in DAWN 26 July 2005, and reprinted in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006). |
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