With all the discussion of Robert McNamara’s death today, I wonder what people think of the comparisons between McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld that were made during the Bush administration. Accurate or inaccurate?
I have very little to say about this except that Rumsfeld has never seemed that bright to me whereas McNamara was sharp as a tack even at age 80 in the Fog Of War documentary I watched, for better or worse.
Paddy
O/T but well worth the watch-
VIDEO– Shuster to Senator Carper (D): How Can We Believe You’re Not Influenced By All The Money You Get From Insurance Companies?
Comrade Stuck
McNamara was wrong and admitted it, WHILE STILL IN OFFICE, and quit rather than go along with continuing the mistake. Rumsfeld is a lying self absorbed buffoon who deserves eternal damnation in the pits of Hell. That answer your question?
Violet
Outside of the sharpness thing, I think they were very similar. Similar backgrounds, made similar decisions about their respective wars, influenced by people in similar ways. McNamara showed regret, and Rummy is now starting down a similar path it seems to me (“those Geneva conventions…it just kind of happened”). Heck, I think they even look a little bit alike.
Saw this at Daily Kos today. It’s someone else’s photobucket, I’m not rehosting: http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z205/JekyllnHyde_photos/Not%20Used/July%205th%202009/55a290e3-7ce3-48ee-9ecf-c3236cd7b7e.gif
Kind of scary how similar they are
Craig
I’d say that McNamara’s more appropriate comparison in the Bush Administration is Colin Powell. McNamara burned his reputation in Vietnam just like Powell did in front of the UN, but he at least had enough self-awareness to realize, in the end, what a failure the war was, and he left his post, in part, due to his skepticism about it.
Zuzu's Petals
NPR replayed Terry Gross’ 2004 interview with Erroll Morris this morning. He made the “Fog of War” documentary. Worth a listen.
Cris
I really hadn’t seen those Rumsfeld/McNamara comparisons you allude to. But prompted by your question, I came across this interesting one: Rumsfeld & McNamara: Macho Tendencies of American Foreign Policy (Nov 13, 2006)
ZaftigAmazon
I do think Rumsfeld is a lot dumber. Both Rumsfeld and McNamara were arrogant people, who were convinced of the rightness of their policies. The difference is that McNamara had something of a conscience; the loss of life in Vietnam did weigh on him, and he seemed willing to learn something from his mistakes (if not admit them publicly). Rumsfeld never will.
Keith G
Robert McNamara seems to have been more self-aware and less of a pure militerist. Still had enough hubris to get a whole bunch of people for no good reason.
Keith G
….or what Comrade Stuck at # 2
JK
Musical Tribute to Robert McNamara
A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission)
Simon and Garfunkel – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpvklDPRlhg
Llelldorin
My impression is that they were opposites. Neither made a good Secretary of Defense—the opposite of bad here is even worse.
McNamara was fundamentally a statistician. In particular, he had the statistician’s tendency to treat measurable quantities as the be-all and end-all of a subject–he tended to ignore underlying theory or historical evidence in favor of statistical trends on measurable data. That sometimes clears away meaningless clutter and lets you see an underlying pattern, but it also sometimes clears away all the evidence that your underlying assumptions about a problem are incorrect. In Vietnam, it was deadly, because it blinded him to key errors in his assumptions (for example, the ancient enmity between Vietnam and China wasn’t suddenly irrelevant because both happened to be communist).
Rumsfeld, by contrast, believed far too strongly in his gut reactions over statistical evidence. In Rumsfeld’s case the statistics were screaming at him that his plans for Iraq were mad, but Rumsfeld had “learned” what he thought was the lesson of Vietnam—statistics are so much nonsense. The problem is that there’s a huge gap between “statistics aren’t the whole story” and “statistics are wrong because I say so very loudly.” If Rumsfeld demostrated anything, it’s that sticking your fingers in your ears and humming to avoid statistics is an even worse approach than relying on them entirely, as McNamara did.
I could easily be wrong; that’s just my impression from press accounts.
Napoleon
@Comrade Stuck:
What he said. In a lot of ways I always liked McNamara because he could admit he was wrong.
Brachiator
Intelligence is overrated when your fundamental world view is flawed and distorted.
Rumsfeld and McNamara are two sides of the same imperialist coin. Mac was part of Kennedy’s team of “the best and the brightest.” But McNamara and the people around him (including Kennedy) felt that only American values mattered, that they could impose their will on the world, and that the South Vietnamese would inevitably bend to our will.
And then of course, there was the Domino Theory, the insane idea that if South Vietnam fell to the Commies, then every other nation with any particle of Communism would fall as well.
Rumsfeld and company are the mirror image to these arrogant fools. Rumsfeld and company believed the same crap as McNamara, but they also believed that Mac failed because he was a liberal. And so Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld was going to show how it should be done, how America’s will could be imposed on the world. Fixated on America’s inability to secure a definite win in Vietnam, Rumsfeld decided to fight this war all over again in Iraq.
But instead of Hearts and Minds, he unleashed Shock and Awe, the foolish fantasy that a quick military offensive would turn the Iraqis into docile putty.
Rumsfeld even had his version of the Domino Theory, here the delusion that once we installed democracy and capitalism in Iraq, the other Muslim nations would fall neatly in line.
So McNamara had the brains and insight to finally see how spectacularly he had failed. Big freakin’ deal. He died with the blood of thousands on his hands.
Doctor Science
Reading “Nixonland” recently, I was struck by how similar Cheney’s personality is to Nixon’s, but how enormously less *competant* Cheney is at doing any job except bureaucratic infighting. Similarly, Rumsfeld resembles McNamara in macho, personality and basic paranoid/technocratic approach, but has been hugely less competant at anything like actual work.
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are all aristocrats (aristo-bureaucrats?), in a similar way: they have no skills or interest in any job that involves work, it’s all about the dynamics of Versailles. They show they’re Americans by despising the art and sophistication of a Versailles-like court, so the result is the worst of both worlds: an inbred, contemptuous aristocracy painted gray.
Mike in NC
Read this: “The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War” by Paul Hendrickson (1997). Unlike McNamara, neither Rummy nor Cheney will ever show a crumb of remorse for their war crimes.
Justin
I voted for Bush in 2000, and I was a Republican.
Until I watched the Fog of War.
And literally overnight, I realized that Iraq was Vietnam. I subsequently voted for Kerry, and then eventually became a Democrat.
The Fog of War is by no means my favorite movie, but I can’t say any other movie has impacted me more. So kudos, to McNamara for turning me into a Democrat.
Able Stanton
I thought you were in Stockholm?
Anyway, McNamara was wrong – he wasn’t dumb.
Rummy probably wasn’t dumb when he wasn’t out of his league. Cold Warrior, pharmaceutical CEO Rummy wasn’t dumb. Post-Clinton, Post-Iron Curtain, Get Saddam, neocon Rummy didn’t just realize that he was dumb, he thought he was the smartest guy in the room – which given the crowd he ran with, may have been true a lot of the time. Perhaps he failed to understand that in the 21st Century the room itself got a lot bigger.
I don’t think that there is any amount of “fail” that could have happened in Iraq that would have convinced Rummy he was wrong there.
The broad strokes of the 2006 election defeat were basic enough for all of the dummies in the room to understand. Rummy had to go – not because he’d failed in Iraq, but because the liberal media had succeeded in convincing the electorate that we’d failed in Iraq. Like Bush, Rummy will go to his grave buoyed by delusions of grandeur over having ended tyranny in the Middle East.
Comrade Stuck
At the time it didn’t seem “insane” to most Americans, though it turned out to be wrong. The primary mistake or lie, or whatever you want to call it, was a faulty analysis of the internal politics of Vietnam, particularly in the south. There were people early on who came to the right conclusion that there was a fatal lack of will to win by the people we tried to help. And a seemingly limitless will of the enemy.
This misread, or denial of our top leaders, missed the predetermined outcome when it mattered.
Similar parallels could be drawn with the Bushies total misread of Iraq’s history, and the nature of it’s people to resist outside interference.
dbrown
The comparisons are worthless – first, McNamara in his own words handled three near thermo-nuclear wars with the USSR and avoided them both because the USSR had some level headed people (now that is really a strange statement) and some smart thinking by him and by Kennedy. Also, the bay-of-pigs had happened and a war was running that was at its height was killing a thousand Americans per month against a real army of a million war harden fighters. The country had cities burning and the war polarized the US in a way only the civil war had.
McNamara was a major player in allied bombing of Japan and had the lessons of ignoring Germany and realized 100 million had died because of it.
Rumesfled was a total ass that had the IQ of about 87 and couldn’t find his own ass without following cheney’s finger up in it. Rumesfled served as a soldier during no combat operations and avoided Nam. His idea of leading was following the most stupid idea possible and thanks to the brillance of real soldiers and tough and hard fighting American frontline men, the forces succeeded despite that ass licking retard.
qingl78
When I was younger I thought that McNamara was evil and should be tried for war crimes.
When I got older and in a position of power and made a few mistakes (with the best of intentions) my attitude softened and now I am sympathetic.
To be in power is to act and if you act you will make a mistake. Like I said, the older I get the less judgmental I am.
I guess he could have resigned but then he would have been forgotten much like Palin will be. I know from bitter experience that what keeps people around (like Colin Powell, or McNamara) is the belief that you can change things and sometimes this is true and sometimes not.
Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz are not right in the head and you can tell that right away and I have no sympathy for them.
And #6:
That was exactly NOT what McNamara was like if you watched “Fog of War”. They have him on tape telling Johnson to set a timetable to get of Vietnam and trying to de-escalate Vietnam.
Comrade Stuck
he did resign.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
Yeah, what dbrown said (about Rumsfeld). I think they were complete opposites in every particular. McNamara made a lot of mistakes–a LOT of mistakes–but his problem was his number-crunching, cost/benefit-analysis approach to every problem. To his credit, he recognized the error of his ways, eventually. Neither Rummy nor any of the other Busheviks will ever do so, except maybe Colin Powell–we’ll see what he reveals about the whole fiasco in the coming months and years.
I’ve flogged this book on here before, but I can’t recommend highly enough Voltaire’s Bastards by John Ralston Saul. He documents the increasing domination of government and administration by the MBA mentality following WWII, and McNamara is the prime example of that.
On the subject of the National Debt, he also asks the pertinent question of why debts to moneylenders (who traditionally ranked somewhere between racetrack touts and pimps on the social scale) have become the most sacred obligations imaginable. I’d like to see somebody running for President on the premise that they’ll simply repudiate the National Debt.
srv
A lot more people will have to die in the ME for Rumsfeld to be a monster on the scale of McNamara. McNamara’s math killed more people in Tokyo in one night than have died by conservative estimates in Iraq.
Rumsfeld was an idiot, but not for wanting to stay in Iraq. That’s why he didn’t plan for Phase IV and why he got sacked (he opposed the surge). While Fog of War is a good documentary, you mainly hear McNamara talking out the left side of his mouth, and don’t hear everything that came out the right side. Just because he finally figured out that it wasn’t winnable (boy, you really had to be a rocket scientist on that call) doesn’t make him some hero.
Johnson doubted the war way before McNamara started flip-flopping on it, and by that the time he started doing that, it was already too late.
Wile E. Quixote
@Comrade Stuck
No, McNamara never admitted he was wrong while he was in office, where do you get this bit of crazy from? McNamara said in the 1990s that he knew that the Vietnam war was wrong and a lost cause while he was SecDef under Johnson, but he didn’t say anything about it because he was afraid of getting a wedgie from Lyndon Johnson or something.
As for McNamara’s supposed intelligence he was very, very good at dissembling. McNamara has always reminded me of Albert Speer, another technocrat, although unlike McNamara a competent one, whose work enabled great evil and who then spent the rest of his life telling everyone how bad he felt about the fact that millions had died because of the work that he did. I’m sure that McNamara and Speer are comparing notes in Hell even as we speak.
The people who post about McNamara’s supposed remorse are suckers and chumps, you guys probably bought into the redemption of Richard Nixon as well. It’s a tribute to McNamara’s PR machine, if not your intelligence and credulity. Well here’s a blast of reality for you, it’s a column written by Joe Galloway, who, along with Harold Moore wrote the excellent We Were Soldiers Once and Young that the movie We Were Soldiers was based on.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003990847
Joe Galloway, Legendary War Reporter, On Death of Robert McNamara: Look Back, In Anger
By Joseph L. Galloway
Published: July 06, 2009 6:10 PM ET
“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” —Clarence Darrow (1857–1938)
Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.
McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.
Back in 1990 I had a series of strange phone conversations with McMamara while doing research for my book We Were Soldiers Once And Young. McNamara prefaced every conversation with this: “I do not want to comment on the record for fear that I might distort history in the process.” Then he would proceed to talk for an hour, doing precisely that with answers that were disingenuous in the extreme — when they were not bald-faced lies.
Upon hanging up I would call Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam and run McNamara’s comments past them for deconstruction and the addition of the truth.
The only disagreement i ever had with Dave Halberstam was over the question of which of us hated him the most. In retrospect, it was Halberstam.
When McNamara published his first book — filled with those distortions of history — Halberstam, at his own expense, set out on a journey following McNamara on his book tour around America as a one-man truth squad.
McNamara abandoned the tour.
The most bizarre incident involving McNamara occurred when he was president of the World Bank and, off on his summer holiday, he caught the Martha’s Vineyard ferry. It was a night crossing in bad weather. McNamara was in the salon, drink in hand, schmoozing with fellow passengers. On the deck outside a vineyard local, a hippie artist, glanced through the window and did a double-take. The artist was outraged to see McNamara, whom he viewed as a war criminal, so enjoying himself.
He immediately opened the door and told McNamara there was a radiophone call for him on the bridge. McNamara set down his drink and stepped outside. The artist immediately grabbed him, wrestled him to the railing and pushed him over the side. McNamara managed to get his fingers through the holes in the metal plate that ran from the top of the railing to the scuppers.
McNamara was screaming bloody murder; the artist was prying his fingers loose one at a time. Someone heard the racket and raced out and pulled the artist off.
By the time the ferry docked in the vineyard McNamara had decided against filing charges against the artist, and he was freed and walked away.
The Moar You Know
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge: An awesome idea. Fortunately, no Americans have money invested in US Savings Bonds, so the damage to our economy would be negligible.
You’re the smart one.
Lennox
Inaccurate because Mcnamara would have likely been one of the best SecDef’s we’ve had if he hadn’t broken himself on the shoals of Vietnam.
Rummy would have figured out a way to screw up the armed forces no matter what.
Brian J
Well, from a recent piece in GQ, there’s that quote from Frances Fargo Townsend, a former terrorism official during the Bush administration: “I want to know if the president knows what a fucking asshole Don Rumsfeld is.” Based on what I know of the two men, it applies to Rumsfeld far more than it does to McNamara, even if it looks like we’ll be affected by the latter’s actions more than the former’s actions. It doesn’t erase or entirely atone for the mistakes a person may have made, but acknowledging where you went wrong and changing your mind based on facts and new information shows intellectual integrity and maturity. Not enough people in the Bush administration appear to have had that.
Brachiator
@Comrade Stuck:
It’s not that it “turned out to be wrong,” it was that some were finally able to admit its fundamental stupidity. It wasn’t just that it was the result of a faulty analysis of the internal politics of Vietnam, it was a complete misreading of history and human nature.
It was a function of American hubris, so wrong headed that dictators only needed to shout “I see Communists!” and the US would come running with aid (from Indonesia to Haiti to the Dominican Republic).
This is largely true, and only shows that there is a core of the political elite that refuses to learn anything, and instead foolishly insist “this time, American power will work.”
The only problem is that it is not the fools at the top who pay for these mistakes, but the soldiers and civilians who end up bearing the brunt of our leader’s arrogance.
And the sad thing is that, despite all the good intentions of a new group of leaders, we are stumbling into the same BS in Afghanistan. The news is all about the massive offensive launched by US and allied forces. Less covered is how the offensive is meeting little resistance as the Taliban fade into the countryside rather than engage superior forces.
Able Stanton — Rummy had to go – not because he’d failed in Iraq, but because the liberal media had succeeded in convincing the electorate that we’d failed in Iraq.
What would success in Iraq have looked like? The purpose of the war changed depending on the lie that the Bush Administration wanted to push. The Iraqi people didn’t ask us to invade and to topple Saddam. There were no WMDs there, nor even any existing via program to develop WMDS. There was no army to defeat in Iraq, and the idea that all of Al Qaeda had been lured there so that we could convenient squash them was nonsense. The US could neither direct nor contain the eruption of hostilities between Sunni and Shia, nor guarantee any security for the Kurds.
Comrade Stuck
@Wile E. Quixote:
I never said he admitted it publicly. He submitted a plan to deescalate the war and when Johnson rejected it, he resigned/ I’d say that was as clear a message as any. I know he didn’t go out publicly after quitting and join the anti- war movement, out some kind of weird loyalty he described in Fog of War, but he did what has always been considered the honorable thing to do in such situations, and quit.
The topic of this thread is to compare McNamara and Rumsfeld. Neither is a hero of any sort in my book, but one is a far sight more honorable than the other, IMB.
tigrismus
Re the comic in comment 3: as bad as it might have been to believe in the domino theory in the 60’s, to still believe it in 2003 reaches a whole ‘nother level of absurdity. Rumsfeld had MacNamara’s negative example to learn from and not repeat, and failed to do either.
SGEW
In “tribute” to McNamara, I watched Fog of War today on YouTube (just went to look for the link, but it’s been taken down – not so surprising, I suppose). Errol Morris is the best documentary filmmaker America’s ever produced, hands down. Anyway . . .
A few differences between McNamara and Rumsfeld come to mind:
– Age. Donald Rumsfeld was in his late sixties when he became Sec. of Defense. McNamara was 45. Not dispositive, but is, I believe, illuminative.
– Scale of casualties. McNamara’s knowing policies resulted in tens of thousands of G.I. deaths, and millions of civilians killed (even without discussing his actions in WWII). Rumsfeld was a piker.
– Scale of perceived threat. McNamara thought he was facing down the combined might of the Soviets and China, who were armed with thousands of nuclear missiles and tens of millions of soldiers. Rumsfeld had to deal with a cave dwelling doomsday cult with fewer than a single regiment’s worth of fighting men.
– Quality of bosses. J.F.K. and L.B.J. were no angels (to quote Wonkette, “the only good president Texas ever gave us was Johnson, and he was a monster“), but they were not George W. Bush. Would McNamara have quit far sooner if Bush was his boss? Would Rumsfeld have gone as batshit crazy if J.F.K. was looking over his shoulder? The tenor and sanity of the administrations the two men served under is too different to draw any easy comparisons.
– Regret. Was McNamara’s mea culpa just self-serving false breast-beating? Crocodile tears from the ultimate reptile? Whatever: at least he attempts to do the god damned decent thing. I am willing to bet at high odds that Rumsfeld will never, ever, admit that invading Iraq was a fundamental mistake, or that he has doubts about whether he is a war criminal. At least McNamara had doubts.
geg6
First, I must preface my thoughts by saying that I think they are both war criminals and, thus, beyond any redemption, here on earth or in the afterlife in which I do not believe. Then we get to how they were similar. First, they both thought they were always the smartest people in the room. They both believed in the domino theory and that the only way to finally defeat the enemy was through military means. Neither was able to accept advice or criticism. Both intimidated superiors and inferiors alike through their ability to always win the bureaucratic battles, always playing the game well, and simply bulldozing through. They both thought they’d solved the problems of the last American military blunder, never understanding that every war is unique. They are different in that McNamara was never a cynic, as I believe Rummy is. Mac truly wrestled with what to do and how, which shows he had a conscience and was the quality that probably led him to finally understand just what a failure he created. Rummy’s only just realizing what deep shit he’s in and flailing about to set up the idea that no one could have foreseen that the Geneva Conventions would be taken seriously. In other words, Mac was a Kennedy liberal and Rummy is a neocon. One is a criminally arrogant, militaristic, pompous bully with a conscience and the other is a criminally arrogant, militaristc, pompous bully with the conscience of a sociopath.
Brachiator
@Brian J:
Nonsense. Acknowledging your mistakes when you are still in a position to try to rectify them shows intellectual integrity and maturity. Bobby Kennedy is the best example of this. He had been one of the architects of his brother’s Southeast Asian policy, and in disowning it had to in part disown his own brother.
Changing your mind when it doesn’t matter show that you can parrot your sensitivity and maturity is just another episode of Oprah.
Comrade Stuck — The topic of this thread is to compare McNamara and Rumsfeld. Neither is a hero of any sort in my book, but one is a far sight more honorable than the other, IMB.
Mac’s resignation in 1967 was a step in the right direction. But he should have done more. Ultimately, he was a coward, more interested in maintaining the shreds of his reputation than in making up for the enormity of his prior actions.
Remorse is cheap and easy. And in McNamara’s case, totally pointless.
AhabTRuler
No, McNamara was quite sure that he was a war criminal, anyone who served under LeMay would not think otherwise.
devopsych
My dad was the CIA analyst who put together the Order of Battle estimate in ’65 ’66. He considered McNamara to be a soulless corporate number cruncher. Smart, though. No serious historian will ever accuse Rummy of being smart.
Comrade Stuck
Of course it was. Though an argument could be made that sometimes it was worth it, like in Korea, where the US had some success of keeping at least half the country from Communism. If we hadn’t have made the effort there, the problem now with NK would have been twice as bad.
And I would argue that
is a large component that makes up the politics of any particular country.
And I am not arguing that American interventions have been good or justified, and certainly that most have ended well, because they have not, and a lot of people got killed unnecessarily for our hubris. But I also don’t agree that we should never help other countries militarily, though never uninvited and never as preventative war, and always with sober analysis with what we are getting into.
Brian J
Um, I think we are basically on the same page here. I don’t know what I said to make you think otherwise. I guess I should have mentioned that it’s easy to comment when your words don’t have direct effects, but I thought it was implied.
theo
They didn’t come from similar backgrounds at all.
McNamara rose in an era of upward mobility. He grew up lower middle class in Oakland and had to struggle his way into Berkeley and beyond. Peerless technocrat in WW2. Got the Ford CEO job on account of intelligence and managerial innovation. Probably too reliant on management techniques. Always the smartest guy in the room, but nevertheless sometimes knew his limitations.
Rumsfeld may be the nearest thing the Bush administration could have given us. Grew up rich on the North Shore of Chicago, good college athlete (unlike Bush), actually a good businessman (unlike Cheney and Bush). Definitely too reliant on management techniques. Usually the smartest guy in a fairly dumb clubroom. Completely unaware of his limitations.
Both were very successful, and it made them both cocky and overly optimistic. But only McNamara seemed to be dimly aware of this, maybe because his class background made him much more self-aware and introspective (e.g. Fog of War), or because his more intellectual tendencies led him to cultivate debate.
Comrade Stuck
I’m sure his resignation was an act of maintaining a good rep/ Jeesh.
Query. How many sec defs have resigned in protest to their presidents war policy, in the middle of said war, one in which the sec def had supported wholeheartedly?
dbrown
@geg6:McNamara did call himself a war criminal (later in life) and if the story about the ferry is true, maybe even felt people had the right to kill him over it – weird if true.
Rumesfled is an asshole who was, is and always will be too stupid to ever realize what a soulless monster he is (the death rate of civilians in Iraq was in the 200,000 – 400,000 range) and unlike Germany and Japan that killed many, many tens of millions, the Iraqi people never deserved to be murdered in such vast numbers.
The 1 – 2 million Vietnamese that died did not deserve to be murdered either, but as I pointed out, a number of near nuclear wars were just avoided and that changes people’s view of war and while not justifying what was done, is still far more easier to judge in hindsight then at the time.
The two are separate monsters but to compare them is like comparing bushwhack and his father relative to Iraq.
SGEW
By the way, here’s a scene that didn’t make it into Fog of War:
Robert McNamara reading Dylan Thomas’ poem The Hand That Signed The Paper.
srv
@Lennox:
Three letters for ya: TFX
JK
Interview With Robert McNamara where he defends his decision not to speak out against Vietnam War while he was Def Secy
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/share.html?s=news01pa3d
Ked
There are a lot of differences between the two men, but the essential contrast I think has to do with what Rummy spent the twenty-some years doing between postings as SecDef.
Rumsfeld did keep his hand in the game a little bit, but what really distinguished him was (at least moderate) success as a CEO.
I’m not going to argue that business executives are, by definition, toxic personalities. I’m not going to argue that they’re overpaid, overpriveliged, and compensated disproportionately to their performance. I’m not even going to argue that corporate culture is in many ways antithetical to military culture… though I do believe all of those things are true to some degree. That ways lies (oh noes) class warfare or something.
What I propose, though, is that executive/corporate/Wall Street expectations and perceptions of reality has come entirely unmoored from reality.
Profits are supposed to go up. Every year. And when they don’t, it is perfectly reasonable to take actions which will increase paper margins while destroying future value of the company, or its reputation, which is the same thing.
Advertising copy is treated as higher authority than actual facts on the ground. It doesn’t matter what your own experts say, it doesn’t matter what the facts and evidence they have on hand. When the ad says your personal toys can be plugged into the network, you’re completely justified in blowing a few salaried-position-equivalents worth of resources in trying to make it true. (Yes, yes, true story. Stories, really.I see lots of this stuff in the technical consultant side of my job.)
You can say anything, set any direction, create any initiative you want. If you keep yelling that gas prices will collapse into the $1/gallon range next year, that’s the reality that your workers will have to pretend to live in, at least until your business collapses. Industries have been distorting reality for decades – the whole nonsense the Bush admin was spouting about defining the world by exerting their rhetorical will was nothing new.
Worst of all, at the top level, there are no consequences. So you blew up the largest car company ever? No problem finding your next job, if you want one. So hard to live out your life on the tens of millions of dollars of net worth you’ve accumulated. You’ll never have to meet a worker whose job you destroyed, whose town has disappeared, whose state can’t meet the constitutional balanced budget clause you lobbied for, your children will never have to attend the schools whose budgets are slashed.
…and *that* is the attitude that Rummy brought to the Pentagon this time. That is the way he tried to run the shop. Everything else follows.
toujoursdan
McNamara went on to do a lot of public service work after he resigned. Rumsfeld hasn’t done anything.
As head of the World Bank McNamara changed the WB’s focus to poverty reduction and disease control. One could argue that millions of African lives were saved because of his focus on preventing River Blindness.
He also pushed the government to make a pledge not to use nuclear weapons in Europe first. And he was against the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Ked
Wow, I’m bitter tonight. Hell of a thing, especially with such a fantastic TdF stage playing on the DVR.
passerby
This is a really great thread y’all have going here. Each and every comment contributes to the debate. I’m enjoying the read. So, thank you.
terry chay
McNamara on US and Cuba.
Ruckus
Whenever I hear the name of either McNamara or Rumsfeld I always think of this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSqkdcT25ss
Llelldorin @11 hits it correct on how they each look(ed) at the world.
But [email protected] sums it up – it does not matter how smart you are or how you look at the world, if your basic world view is fucked up. Both of these clowns were in position to at least try to not get thousands killed and they both failed. Miserably.
Sorry is never enough, after the fact, in war.
Cat G
@srv: Proving once again that Juice is the best place to hang out. My Dad was an active carrier pilot during McNamara’s tenure, and you can always get him quickly up to Mach 1 on the stupidity of the joint Air Force/Navy fighter. I’d never read about it though, but thanks for the link. I can’t remember if the story is told my J Califano or Bill Moyers but one of them was sent temporarily to the Pentagon by the White House to participate in the attempt to unify procurement. They were debating uniforms, and had gotten to the belt category. The Marine Commandant was arguing for keeping the Marine belt, reason: you could open a beer with it.
As for McNamara v Rumsfeld, they can both burn… Rumsfeld was more concerned with Pentagon primacy and “modernization” than running the Iraq war in a competent manner, and McNamara was willing to go along with a war that poisoned America for at least a generation, and ruined the lives of millions of Americans and Vietnamese. McNamara was rewarded with the top job at the World Bank.
MikeJ
I been Norman Mailered, Maxwell Taylored.
I been John O’Hara’d, McNamara’d.
I been Rolling Stoned and Beatled till I’m blind.
I been Ayn Randed, nearly branded
Communist, ’cause I’m left-handed.
That’s the hand I use, well, never mind!
I lost my harmonica, Albert.
Tom
I find it hard to completely demonize a man that was part of the group of leaders in the US and USSR that saved billions of lives (and perhaps the planet) during the missile crisis. How does that stack up against his crimes in Japan and Vietnam? I honestly don’t know. Perhaps that, along with his work for the World Bank, tips the scales back towards equipoise.
Rumsfeld has a lot of work to do to catch up, in my opinion.
WereBear
I always felt McNamara, such as with the River Blindness crusade and his work at the World Bank, was trying to atone.
Rumsfeld would ask, “Atone for what?”
mcd
@Comrade Stuck:
Just curious.
Wouldn’t this mean that Viet Nam should be twice as bad (or more) now since we didn’t stop Communism there? Obviously, this is an admittedly ridiculous hypothetical — but I’m interested to hear your thoughts.
Keith G
@Comrade Stuck:
For better or for worse, McNarmara’s reason for his public silence was that having a Sec Def thusly speak out would certainly give aid and comfort to the enemy and not be helpful at all to those soldiers who would certainly be remaining in country.
In ’64 he was telling LBJ that Vietnam was not as it seemed and that the American would have to be “educated” about what the realities were. LBJ demurred saying, “Now is not the time.”
Comrade Stuck
@mcd:
My thoughts are that I could have used a better phrase to describe what I was describing. But your right, it is also a poor hypothetical. Two very different countries with different histories and cultures. I will go back to my original point on the US’s lack of vigorous honesty and analysis on Vietnam before going all in, that the south did not have the necessary will to win, and smart people should have recognized that and stayed out of entering a ground war there.
In contrast, the ROK soldiers were just as committed, or maybe more so than the communist soldiers of the North, and fought ferociously to remain non communist. They are the exception and not the rule however.
Mike in NC
This is actually true (the open frame brass buckle) and I have a DFH friend who still always wears his. Obviously predates twist-off bottle caps.
Napoleon
@Wile E. Quixote:
Funny, as I gave this more thought I start thinking this is the perfect comparison for him.
And as to your quote with Halberstam hating him more, that only cements him as being my favorite author of all time.
RIP David
AhabTRuler
I’ll give you a whole mess of LatAm countries that fought ferocious internal battles over political and economic alignment.
Korea and Vietnam both conveniently (from a certain point of view) were partitioned by external events, setting up the possibility of more traditional “set piece” wars, as opposed to other, low-intensity conflicts throughout the Cold War.
Seth Owen
I do think there were differences — McNamara was much more empirical tha Rumsfeld — but those differences in detail are overwhelmed by the fundamental similarity in both men, arrogance.
Their arrogance led them in each case to completely discount the lessons of history or the wisdom of experience. Neither showed any hint of intellectual curiousity about why the military’s way of dealing with problems came about. They each seemed convinced that they had found a way to overcome the timeless verities of war and didn’t have the humility to recognize that the principles of war have not changed and will not.
instarx
I did not know McNamara (before my time) but I do not get the impression that he was a horrible person, just wrong about Vietnam. However, I did know Rumsfeld when he was the CEO of G.D. Searle Pharmaceuticals in the mid 90’s, and he was a mean, vile, hateful, egotistical, and abusive jerk. People working there were afraid to go into his office. He would humiliate anyone at any time.
A few years ago I saw a PR piece about Rumsfeld when he was still SecDef where some civilian lackey at the Pentagon was saying how great Rumsfeld was and that he wasn’t mean at all. I almost threw up when I heard that. Rumsfeld was and probably still is a truly vile creature.
So in my opinion the difference between McNamara and Rumsfeld is that McNamara was a human being and Rumsfeld is not.
Hillary Rettig / www.lifelongactivist.com
Rumsfeld’s business career is as evil as his political one. He gamed the FDA to approve his company Searle’s sweetener aspartame for sale, despite substantial evidence that it caused multiple problems from headaches all the way up to possible brain tumors:
Since its discovery in 1965, controversy has raged over the health risks associated with the sugar substitute. From laboratory testing of the chemical on rats, researchers have discovered that the drug induces brain tumors. On Sept 30, 1980 the Board of Inquiry of the FDA concurred and denied the petition for approval.
In 1981, the newly appointed FDA Commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes, ignored the negative ruling and approved aspartame for dry goods. As recorded in the Congressional Record of 1985, then CEO of Searle Laboratories Donald Rumsfeld said that he would “call in his markers” to get aspartame approved. Rumsfeld was on President Reagan’s transition team and a day after taking office appointed Hayes. No FDA Commissioner in the previous sixteen years had allowed aspartame on the market.”
Rumsfeld is his very own axis of evil, with at least two axes.
Wile E. Quixote
@Tom
I’ve always found the bullshit about how well Kennedy and crew handled the Cuban Missile Crisis to be completely baffling. Kennedy spent years amping up tensions between the US and the USSR, he lied about the missile gap and he knew that he was lying, the US had ten times the warheads the Soviets did and the Soviets had nothing that could match Curtis LeMay’s Strategic Air Command. Kennedy’s cold warrior mentality led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, so exactly how does he deserve any credit for not letting it escalate to an all out nuclear war? If Kennedy hadn’t been a fuck up and a cold warrior the Cuban Missile Crisis wouldn’t have happened. It’s as if an arsonist set a building on fire but then put it out before any lives were lost, guess what, he’s still an arsonist and he’s still going to jail.
Wile E. Quixote
@Comrade Stuck
“Honorable”? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The “honorable” thing to do would have been to go to the press and reveal that the Vietnam war was based upon a shoddy tapestry of lies and misconceptions and that America could not win. That would have been the honorable thing to do, not quitting your job and keeping your mouth shut. Because Robert S. McNamara did what you think of as “the honorable thing” the war dragged on and thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians died and our country was torn apart and grievously wounded. Do you want to know who did the “honorable thing”? Daniel Ellsberg, remember him? Ellsberg took real risks to reveal the Pentagon Papers, to reveal the tapestry of lies that Vietnam was based upon. Now if Daniel Ellsberg had had your definition of honor he would have just resigned from his job as a RAND analyst and kept his mouth shut.
Or consider, if Mark Felt had your definition of honor he wouldn’t have said a word about the Watergate break-ins, he would have kept his mouth shut and resigned from the FBI. Your definition of honor is probably really great for any member of the Soprano family or any other criminal gang of thugs, but it fucking sucks for government officials in a democracy.
r€nato
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge:
That’s an awesome idea, if you’d like to destroy the value of the dollar and ensure that nobody ever again loans money to the US government.
Comrade Stuck
@Wile E. Quixote:
Again, as compared to Rumsfeld, he was honorable. He gave his reasons for not going public and joining the anti war movement. He went to Johnson with a deescalation plan and was rejected so he resigned in protest. That was an honorable thing to do. Whether it would have been more honorable to publicly criticize the war, maybe. But to me that is secondary and a choice that’s not dishonorable. You disagree. Noted.
SPF
It was a time of seemingly absolute morality. Everything appeared black and white: civil rights v. racism; organized crime v. order; Communism v. Democracy.
Bush’s moronic “you’re either with us or you’re against us” actually seemed applicable in a time when nuclear war was always a possibility.
McNamara was dead wrong. He was a brilliant man who got the most important question of his life wrong, and realized it just moments too late. Should he be damned for that, as some have suggested? Maybe; I really don’t know.
Remember one thing, though. McNamara was a wealthy man. He could have just retired to a quiet ranch out west or a sunny condo down south. He could have spent the last years of his life drinking his days away in remorse; in self-pity. But he didn’t. He decided to subject himself to a final humiliation, a final gut-wrenching confession, simply because there existed the off-chance that he could help the most brilliant minds of our generation avoid the mistakes that haunted his. He warned us candidly, admitting to his greatest faults in public forum.
I guess I just don’t understand what more could he have done to atone for his sins.
Mentis Fugit
McNamara: Tragedy
Rumsfeld: Farce
Sloegin
Fuck McNamara.
I have 2 uncles screwed up because of him & LBJ, one after doing a 7 year stint in the Hanoi Hilton, the other one after 2 tours of choppering SEALS in and out of the bush hunting NVA and charlie.
They’re alive. There’s a lot more that aren’t. McNamara did 10 times the damage Rumsfeld ever managed to accomplish.
theo
@Hillary Rettig / http://www.lifelongactivist.com: Then again, aspartame probably saved a lot more lives than it cost, via diet soda. I can hardly imagine the level of obesity that would exist in America if there weren’t a passable alternative to sugary drinks.
bob h
McNamara was so robotically infatuated with his statistics that he could never factor the human spirit into his way of looking at things. Rumsfeld was never a quantitative person, just someone blinded by his own arrogance and a tendency to filter all data through the need to vindicate his theories. Both among the most self-destructive public servants we have ever had.
Michael
There are no medals to hand out to either American side on Vietnam.
I noticed last week the Hewitt had some 40-something unlikely-to-have-ever-served Conservative*spit* author who had written a book about the heroism of American soldiers and the evil depravity of the Vietnamese in war. In light of what Vietnam has become, I’d think that Conservatives*spit* would be getting more than a little embarrassed by our conduct there, and would start letting some of that pass. Of course, in my law practice, I can say without reservation that I’ve noticed that the people with the greatest sense of entitlement (and concomitant racism) have been redneck, trailer trash Vietnam vets – they’re the biggest whiners on the planet.
On the other side, you have a bunch of those who were the self-absorbed college kids. Rather than go the sober, reflective, service to community and nation route that the kids who did the yeoman’s work during the civil rights era did, they acted ridiculously by adopting mores, personal habits and styles which became the emblem of antiwar activism to the public at large. How can you take a stoned, goofy talking protestor seriously? Why occupy a college president’s office in protest, ferchrissakes? “Summer of Love”? Their tactics (if that’s what you can call them) were losers, and we’re still paying the consequences for them 40 years later.
Of course, your mileage may vary, but that’s my view of it from a slightly younger lens.
Doctor Science
Michael:
Speaking as someone who protested against the Vietnam War, I recommend reading Achilles in Vietnam before you call any Vietnam vet a “whiner”.
Wile E. Quixote
Uh oh, self-pimping left-wing cranktivist alert at #62.
Wile E. Quixote
@Comrade Stuck
Your standards for honor are pathetically low. Saying that McNamara was honorable compared to Rumsfeld is akin to saying that Jeffrey Dahmer is less of a mass murderer than Josef Stalin. The statement is technically correct but doesn’t change the fact that Dahmer was a mass murderer.
As far as McNamara’s “honor” goes he was supposed to be serving the American people, not just Lyndon Johnson. It seems to have escaped your notice but this is a democracy, not a fucking crime family. The honorable thing to do in a democracy, when you work for the president and know that he’s lying, is to tell the people about it. Your concept of “honor” would play really well in the Bush crime family, but it’s not what we need and should be demanding from our public officials if we want to preserve democracy. The “honor” you speak of is nothing more than loyalty to a dishonest thug engaged in a criminal enterprise.
Wile E. Quixote
@dbrown
What the fuck are you babbling about? That sentence makes about as much sense as Sarah Palin’s interview on ABC. These “near nuclear wars” that you’re babbling about were caused by defense policies implemented by Robert S. McNamara as a member of the Kennedy administration. They weren’t forced upon us by aliens or the machinations of the Bavarian Illuminati or the Trilateral Commission. Kennedy knew the missile gap was bullshit but he lied about it just like Dick Cheney lied about the connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Kennedy embarked upon a massive military build up, got us deeper into Vietnam and signed off on the Bay of Pigs invasion. Kennedy was a cold warrior and a fuck up, his policies, which were enacted by Robert S. McNamara, led us to the brink of nuclear war in 1962. Giving McNamara credit for helping us avoid a nuclear war that almost happened because of the policies he was enacting for Kennedy is stupid and ignorant, giving him a pass on the two million Vietnamese who died because of this is one of the most vacuous, stupidly contemptible, pigshit ignorant and repulsive things I have ever heard.