Steve Walt eulogizes McNamara. This one's hard to excerpt:
Unlike the American soldiers who fought in Indochina, or the millions
of Indochinese who died there, McNamara did not suffer significant
hardship as a result of his decisions. He lived a long and comfortable
life, and he remained a respected member of the foreign policy
establishment. He had no trouble getting his ideas into print, or
getting the media to pay attention to his pronouncements. Not much
tragedy there.McNamara may have been a gifted analyst and
corporate executive, blessed with a lot of raw smarts, but he was also
one of those people who could not imagine being wrong or resist the
desire to tell the world what to do. Failure in Vietnam did not teach
him humility; he ran the World Bank with same ego-driven sense of
infallibility he had brought to the Pentagon (and with predictably
mixed results). Yet this second experience with failure did not temper
his love of the limelight or his desire to prescribe How Things Should
Be Done. He spent the last decades of his life offering high-profile
advice on various aspects of nuclear weapons policy — with the same
degree of self-assurance he had always displayed — and he sought the
spotlight once again with a belated memoir on his role in Vietnam. As
always, however, it was filled with "lessons" for others; to the last,
McNamara retained an unwarranted confidence in his own ideas as well as
an inability to keep quiet.Overall, McNamara's post-Vietnam
behavior raises a broader question about the role of former officials
who have led their country into major disasters. Ordinarily, we should
respect the men and women who have devoted years of their lives to
public service and listen carefully to the counsel of those who have
the benefit of long experience. Moreover, someone who is no longer
competing for a job in Washington may be more likely to give honest
advice than someone who is still worrying about the questions she might
face at a confirmation hearing.But in some cases — and a lot
of former Bush administration officials come to mind here — the
failures are of sufficient gravity as to render all subsequent advice
suspect. And when a government official's repeated errors have left
thousands of their fellow citizens dead or grievously wounded, along
with hundreds of thousands of other human beings, it would be more
seemly for them to remain silent, in mute acknowledgement of their own
mistakes. And if they persist in pontificating — as Elliot Abrams,
John Bolton, and Dick Cheney are now doing — a nation that understood
the importance of accountability might have the good sense to pay them
the attention and respect they deserve. Which is to say: none.
