The Vietnam Rorschach Test of Robert McNamara

The Vietnam War did not end in 1975. The Vietnam War will not be over until the last Vietnam veteran, the youngest of whom is 52 years old, has died.

However, the death of the man generally considered the "architect" of that war offers an opportunity to consider why people on all sides of that war, people who agree on absolutely nothing else, agree on hating Robert McNamara.

Although I hate, have always hated and always will hate the Vietnam War, McNamara ranks relatively low on my list of Vietnam War villains, which is topped by War Criminals Henry Kissinger, Curtis LeMay, William Westmoreland and Richard Nixon, not to mention Lt. William Calley and the many like him.

Nevertheless, Michael Lind's metaphor holds:

The clue to McNamara's significance is that he was demonized by the left, the right and the center. If there is a Rorschach Prize, he deserved it. Other American public figures have been hated by one side, but usually they have been defended by the other. I can't think of anybody else in American history whom liberals, conservatives and moderates all joined in denouncing.

Why? The vitriol that was directed against McNamara always seemed excessive and even unhinged to me. After all, he wasn't the president. Why not blame Kennedy for deepening the U.S. involvement in Indochina, or Johnson for escalating it, or Nixon for prolonging it? But Kennedy, Johnson and even Nixon have had their partisans, who have sought to minimize the collateral damage done to the reputations of these presidents by their failed Vietnam policies.

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For whatever reason, McNamara instead of other figures below the presidential level was singled out in the public mind as the iconic symbol of failure in Vietnam. But this still does not explain how people who disagreed on everything else have so often agreed to make McNamara the symbol of all that was wrong in American foreign policy.

The solution to the mystery is simple, if subtle. There have been three influential critiques of the Vietnam War. The critiques are those of the antiwar left, the pro-war right and the realist center. Each critique generated its own image of McNamara to fit its own theory of the Vietnam War.

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The Vietnam War was a crime to the left, a betrayal to the right, and a mistake to the realists. It followed that Robert McNamara, the ritual scapegoat chosen to stand in for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was a war criminal to the left, a near-traitor to the right, and a fool to the realists. Had another scapegoat like Bundy or Rostow been chosen instead of McNamara to symbolize the failure of Vietnam, that individual would have been denounced with equal fervor as a hubristic fool by the realists, a near-traitor by the conservatives, and a Nazi-like war criminal by the radical left.

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What will historians in the future say about Robert McNamara and his role in Vietnam? I suspect that in the decades to come, historians will increasingly integrate the Second Indochina War -- and the first, and the third -- into the overall history of the Cold War, rather than treat it as an isolated episode or free-standing morality play. Beyond that, it will all depend on who writes the history. One prediction is safe: What historians of tomorrow think of Robert McNamara will depend on their view of the Vietnam War.

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