Kissinger Will Never Cry

Jonathan Schell has a superb piece in The Nation about the day, 42 years ago, when he confronted Robert McNamara with his own eyewitness account of the U.S. bombing civilian villages in Vietnam.

Schell does not by any means absolve McNamara of responsibility for Vietnam, any more than McNamara sought to absolve himself. But he does make clear why McNamara, of all the many who contributed to that catastrophe, deserves to be singled out:

Certainly, if one puts McNamara's tears in one pan of a scales and the deaths of 3 million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans in the other, there is no doubt which way the scales would tip.

On the other hand, how many public figures of his importance have ever expressed any regret at all for their mistakes and follies and crimes? As the decades of the twentieth century rolled by, the heaps of corpses towered, ever higher, up to the skies, and now they pile up again in the new century, but how many of those in high office who have made these things happen have ever said, "I made a mistake," or "I was terribly wrong," or shed a tear over their actions? I come up with: one, Robert McNamara. I deduce that such acts of repentance are very hard to perform.

If a statue is ever made to him, as probably there will not be, let it show him weeping. It was the best of him.

Read the whole thing.