Today is November 6. Donald Trump has been relected to the presidency. The point of this piece is worth reiterating. Whatever the reactions of the moment, it will now be up to history — as the consequences evolve — to explain how it could have happened.
For a decade we have been swamped by and/or have wallowed in the Donald J. Trump political phenomenon.
Given all the reams of coverage, exacerbated by pervasive twenty-first century distortions, how to fathom that one half the American electorate can be in his thrall, especially as time went on and his actions, personality and character demonstrated the scale of his narcissistic malevolence.
All three branches of government have been unable or unwilling to restrain Trump’s relentless pursuit of what is by nearly every measure lawless behavior.
Now comes judgment day.
Whatever you may read or hear, the data shows that no one can really do more than guess the outcome of the presidential election or how the aftermath will unfold.
How will this country withstand another rampage by Trump through the presidency? Based on what he has said, the prospects are grim.
And when will the time of retribution or shame come for Trump apologists as it did for pre-World War II backers of “America First” or the postwar McCarthyite bullies? Virtually the entire Grand Old Party can be held accountable.
Billions have been spent on shaping the Trump race now for the third time. And yet it all seems to come down to several hundred thousand voters in a half dozen or so states.
Why?
We, or least I, need finally to acknowledge that we don’t know how or why Trump has ascended to the level he has.
I trace my bafflement and growing dismay to the years I spent as the Random House editor tasked with handling The Art of the Deal” and Surviving at the Top in the 1980s and early 1990s. Whatever as publishers we may have done, the real upward trajectory was Trump’s.
I have written before of my astonishment in the late1980s, years before he was the star of The Apprentice when a packed Atlantic City arena on hand for a professional wrestling event that Trump was promoting cheered his presence – the raucous acclaim that has been the soundtrack of Trump’s rise over the years. These were wrestling aficionados for Trump then and now, like those at his Madison Square Garden rally on October 27.
Whole cohorts of expertise have been deployed by journalists, sociologists, psychiatrists, and pundits to provide an explanation.
And yet, here we are.
Recently I listened to a presentation by the esteemed and very experienced pollster Stan Greenberg. This follow-up ensued, I checked with Stan to be sure he is being correctly represented.
This is our exchange:
Peter: Is it the case that Trump’s character, personality and record have not deterred what seems like half the voting population from choosing him? You seemed to be saying that was true.
Stan: The great working-class majority in all parties finally heard somebody that was battling for the working class in a globalized world where elite deals left them with stagnant incomes and declining industries and borders broken by ever growing migration.
Other leaders just made promises. Trump called out the elite’s trade deals and renegotiated the most important. He did close the border.
Peter: So, do you think his hold is a unique and therefore fundamentally inexplicable reality?
Stan: Yes. And I don’t think he is replaceable. When he goes off the scene, I think many of his voters won’t stay engaged for the rest of the contenders.
A complete deck of slides from Greenberg’s survey in September can be found on the Democracy Corps website . They show Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris’s relative strength on issues with voters. Greenberg gives a slight edge to Harris in the outcome.
I do not rest easily.
Whatever the tally on November 5 and in what will almost certainly be a disputed result, the consequences of this era will take time to absorb and be properly defined. And it will also take time for civilization to recover.
For a decade we have been swamped by and/or have wallowed in the Donald J. Trump political phenomenon.
Given all the reams of coverage, exacerbated by pervasive twenty-first century distortions, how to fathom that one half the American electorate can be in his thrall, especially as time went on and his actions, personality and character demonstrated the scale of his narcissistic malevolence.
All three branches of government have been unable or unwilling to restrain Trump’s relentless pursuit of what is by nearly every measure lawless behavior.
Now comes judgment day.
Whatever you may read or hear, the data shows that no one can really do more than guess the outcome of the presidential election or how the aftermath will unfold.
How will this country withstand another rampage by Trump through the presidency? Based on what he has said, the prospects are grim.
And when will the time of retribution or shame come for Trump apologists as it did for pre-World War II backers of “America First” or the postwar McCarthyite bullies? Virtually the entire Grand Old Party can be held accountable.
Billions have been spent on shaping the Trump race now for the third time. And yet it all seems to come down to several hundred thousand voters in a half dozen or so states.
Why?
We, or least I, need finally to acknowledge that we don’t know how or why Trump has ascended to the level he has.
I trace my bafflement and growing dismay to the years I spent as the Random House editor tasked with handling The Art of the Deal” and Surviving at the Top in the 1980s and early 1990s. Whatever as publishers we may have done, the real upward trajectory was Trump’s.
I have written before of my astonishment in the late1980s, years before he was the star of The Apprentice when a packed Atlantic City arena on hand for a professional wrestling event that Trump was promoting cheered his presence – the raucous acclaim that has been the soundtrack of Trump’s rise over the years. These were wrestling aficionados for Trump then and now, like those at his Madison Square Garden rally on October 27.
Whole cohorts of expertise have been deployed by journalists, sociologists, psychiatrists, and pundits to provide an explanation.
And yet, here we are.
Recently I listened to a presentation by the esteemed and very experienced pollster Stan Greenberg. This follow-up ensued, I checked with Stan to be sure he is being correctly represented.
This is our exchange:
Peter: Is it the case that Trump’s character, personality and record have not deterred what seems like half the voting population from choosing him? You seemed to be saying that was true.
Stan: The great working-class majority finally heard somebody that was battling for the working class in a globalized world where elite deals left them with stagnant incomes and declining industries.
Peter: So, do you think his hold is a unique and therefore fundamentally inexplicable reality?
Stan: Yes. And I don’t think he is replaceable. When he goes off the scene, I think many of his voters won’t stay engaged for the rest of the contenders.
A complete deck of slides from Greenberg’s survey in September can be found on the Democracy Corps website . They show Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris’s relative strength on issues with voters. Greenberg gives a slight edge to Harris in the outcome.
I do not rest easily.
Whatever the tally on November 5 and in what will almost certainly be a disputed result, the consequences of this era will take time to absorb and be properly defined. And it will also take time for civilization to recover.
In November 2020 PublicAffairs, in partnership with Harvard Business Review Press, published Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, with an introduction by Walter Isaacson. Our contract was with Bezos, personally. His royalties were to go to a nonprofit organization of his choice.
HBRP sold translation rights around the world, and Bezos’s royalties of $750,000 went to the New Orleans Public Library, at Isaacson’s request.
That is my only connection to Bezos.
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I spent eighteen years at the Washington Post, in the era of Katherine Graham’s ownership when Ben Bradlee was executive editor. Although I have been gone for decades, I still identify with the institution and its values.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Post from the Graham family in 2013 for $250 million (half of what his superyacht would cost), I was relieved that its financial problems would be over but apprehensive about what kind of proprietor he would be.
My private suspicion was that as an incomparably astute entrepreneur Bezos felt having the newspaper as an asset would reduce the likelihood that the Department of Justice would initiate antitrust action against Amazon, as had been done against Microsoft years earlier. Given the scale of Bezos’s businesses, this was a minor if very visible acquisition.
For a decade, Bezos’s ownership of the Post went well. My experience with him in working on his book was much the same as Marty Baron’s, the Post’s executive editor from 2013 to 2021, who offered a description in his memoir Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post.
Like Baron, I found that while Bezos was exceptionally busy, when you could finally get his attention the focus was impressive. The title of the book, its cover design, and every word in it, including Walter Isaacson’s introduction, was approved by Bezos.
So, what happened?
In recent years, the Post has started to lose money and subscribers. Leadership changes did not go smoothly to put it mildly. Bezos was active at Blue Origin, his space company, and his private life was transformed with a divorce; a new fiancée, Lauren Sanchez; and a new status as a Hollywood mogul. From a distance, I wondered whether Bezos was too distracted by other things, to think much about the Post, unless he had to.
After a weekend of criticism directed at him, Bezos posted a piece on the Post website Monday making the argument that he had become opposed to presidential endorsements on principle because they undermined public trust in the media. “You are, of course, free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years (he has owned the Post) where I have prevailed upon anyone at the Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.”
We now know it was Bezos’s decision for the Post not to make an endorsement so close to election day. The widespread belief will probaby remain that whatever his public assertions, he would want to avoid antagonism with a prospective Donald Trump administration.
The optics were very bad. So, Bezos will again have to prove his commitment to the newspaper, with additional resources or perhaps by naming a board of undisputed stature to share his oversight on both financial and editorial matters.
What is my guess about this episode?
Whatever argument he makes, I think Bezos understands that the Post is not the asset he thought he would have as an element of his reputation for civic engagement and a small part of his business empire where he could, among other things, test innovations in technology. In his piece he says that the Post is a “complexifier” for him, “but it turns out that I’m also a complexifier for the Post.”
When Bezos has a problem, he usually deals with it. He eliminated the Amazon bookstore chain, for example, and revamped Amazon Studios when its programming wasn’t working. There are reasons Bezos is one of the world’s richest people.
The Washington Post has become a problem for Jeff Bezos, which is why the endorsement controversy’s implications going forward will continue to be ominous.
Coming Thursday, as November 5 looms: Why? History Will Have to Decide
In the 1964 presidential campaign, in which Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert H. Humphrey ran against Barry M. Goldwater and William E. Miller (remember him?), the country was still coping with of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, less than a year earlier.
The shock reverberated for many reasons and marked one major change in American life. It ended a period of relative calm and stability, to be replaced by the decades of turmoil and division that are the case as we approach the 2024 presidential election on November 5.
American voters are fragmented, from the far left to the far right. Issues of inequality, race, and gender are prominent. Socialist, extremist, and terrorist are all epithets. There are distant wars in which Americans play significant roles, but with very few losses of life, yet.
Those are among the rhymes. The rhythms are of scale.
The population of the country in 1964 was approximately 190 million people. Johnson and Humphrey received 43.1 million votes, or 61.1 percent of the popular vote. Goldwater and Miller got 27.2 million or 38.5 percent, a singular landslide — as reflected by the electoral vote, which was 486-52 in favor of LBJ.
The U.S. population in 2024 stands at roughly 336 million people. At the last presidential election in 2020, the number of registered voters was in the neighborhood of 168 million. Joe Biden received 81.3 million votes or 51.3 percent of the popular vote. Donald Trump received 74.2 million or 46.9 percent, and Biden prevailed in the Electoral College (which Trump refuses to acknowledge).
Projections for 2024, less than a month out, suggest that the popular vote this time will be nearly evenly split, at 50-50, and certainly within the margin of error for most polls.
Expenditures on political campaigns in 1964 were more than $200 million, which was a record sum at the time. The forecast for this year is that at least $15.9 billion will be spent.
And for all that spending, the outcome of the presidential contest is expected to be decided by a few hundred thousand voters in seven battleground states. With America’s deep political divisions even wider than they were in 1964, the margin is astonishingly close.
Another difference in scale is the style, ferocity, and noise of the campaigns. The World Book Encyclopedia called the process in 1964 “Public Relations,” which seems descriptively staid compared to this year in which Donald Trump and J. D. Vance have abandoned all rhetorical boundaries in attacking Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
The most memorable moment of the Goldwater campaign was the assertion in his convention acceptance speech that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. . . . Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” which by modern standards has a semblance of eloquence. And whatever the worst thing Goldwater may have said about Johnson, historians record that the two men agreed not to use racial biases against each other in speeches or ads.
The dramatic highlight of LBJ’s campaign was a television ad that became famous as “Daisy,” the image of a little girl picking flowers which morph into a nuclear explosion, intended to portray Goldwater as a danger to the world because of his opposition to nuclear treaties with the Soviet Union and all-out support for the still incipient war in Vietnam — which Johnson insisted he would not escalate, but then did. This ad was considered so provocative that it aired only once, weeks before the election.
As for scandals that fall, the one that rattled the Democrats was the arrest in a YMCA near the White House of Johnson’s close aide Walter Jenkins, for having sex with another man. It was just weeks before the election. Jenkins immediately resigned, and there is no sense that I found that the episode had any significant effect on the election.
As for Trump, felony convictions, impeachments, sexual assault cases and the rest – if polls and commentary are to be believed — do not matter greatly to the Republican constituency or to the candidates at every level who have endorsed Trump. In these sixty years since 1964, Americans seem to have become inured to what once would have seemed unfathomable.
Perhaps the biggest change — and it is positive — since 1964 has to do with racial progress and the composition of the electorate.
At the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, led by Fannie Lou Hamer, sought recognition instead of the all-white official state delegation. The issue was contentious, and the MFDP and civil rights activists protested on the boardwalk. In the end, the MFDP (grudgingly) received just two delegates.
With Kamala Harris at the head of the Democrats’ 2024 ticket, combined with the composition of delegates at the convention, down-ballot candidates, and crowds at rallies, the extent of the country’s evolution on what to expect in their office seekers when it comes to race, gender and sexual orientation is profound — and deeply impressive.
So, whatever rhyme and rhythm similarities there may be, the differences ultimately are vast, especially in one respect. When the clichés about the future of the country are deployed, there is no doubt that this time they deserve to be taken as seriously as they sound.
* Rep. William E. Miller (R/NY) This is a correction. Previous version had him in Pennsylvania, not surprising I guess.
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The first book review for “LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail” comes from Kirkus with a star: “Insightful and Informative…benefits from Osnos’ unique insights”
Michigan gets extra attention in presidential election years. Donald Trump won the state in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020; they were close contests, and Trump unsuccessfully sought to overturn his loss. When it comes to attention, being in a swing state has advantages.
As a state, Michigan has it all, the rustic Upper Peninsula, the urban sprawl in and around Detroit, productive farmland, and of course the Big Three — General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis (aka Chrysler).
But there is another big three as well: 827 cannabis outlets; twenty-seven casinos, nearly all controlled by Native American tribes; and breweries, distilleries, and vineyards too numerous really to count. Signs for all three venues dominate highways and byways.
In an era when so much focus is on social peril, I wondered why the pervasive presence of drugs, gambling, and alcohol as popular pastimes doesn’t much register as a problem intended to rile the bases, both right and left. These are interpretations of what I heard, in a considered but definitely informal survey.
Revenue: State taxes on cannabis sales and on casinos, breweries, and distilleries amount to hundreds of millions of dollars to augment the revenue declines from industry as Michigan’s mainstay. Cannabis money is returned to the communities, and the casinos commit to philanthropic assistance for neighboring libraries, schools, and other quality-of-life assets. All those pubs of various sizes provide employment.
The parking lots of all these venues are impressively full whenever they are open. In the case of the casinos, that is 24/7.
Leisure: Time off from most work schedules has increased. Michigan’s unemployment numbers, as in the rest of the country, are low. For all the attention on screen immersion, it turns out that when people relax — in all their own ways — they want places to go for fun. Nearly as I can tell, “smoking” is the activity that takes place outside public establishments by accepted order.
Democracy: The main qualification for entry is money to spend. The formerly modest country club near our house in Southwest Michigan now has an initiation fee of $45,000, plus the annual dues and a dress code. In our exceptionally divided times, I wonder how welcome I’d be where Legionnaires, Shriners, et al. gather, if my political opinions departed from their consensus. I did go to a MAGA Marathon for local candidates, but signed in under a bogus name to avoid being relentllessly fundraised.
The other state qualification for admission is age, twenty-one for cannabis and drinking, eighteen to gamble.
So, what do we make of activities that in the past — in the case of cannabis, the recent past — were illicit and are now everywhere? One of the things we have re-learned in the twenty-first century is that the upside of progress — take the internet — invariably has downsides. The state requires prominent notices about the dangers of addiction. My guess is that the people who would benefit from the warnings mostly ignore them.
The most striking example of how social patterns can change is cigarette smoking. From a majority of Americans adults in the mid-twentieth century who smoked regularly, the percentage nationally now is about 11 percent and lowest among the young, those aged eighteen to twenty-four. I remember when a quarter in the vending machine was enough to get a pack of twenty. A pack now costs an average of around $8, with a heavy percentage going to taxes.
Decades of pressure on the tobacco industry, stringent regulations, and the unequivocal health consequences of smoking have worked. Safety belts in cars are overwhelmingly used, and children’s car seats have reduced traffic fatalities — another upside of enforceable regulation.
The internet and its omnipresent social media platforms arrived so fast and were a combination of technology, entertainment, and profit baffling enough to overcome whatever efforts were made to control their impact. Now it is artificial intelligence that is either an enormous and positive addition to civilization or yet another contribution to its demise.
That gets us back to cannabis, casinos, and booze as a fact of life. The likelihood of doing away with these is zero, and of course too much of what is on offer can be devastating to the vulnerable. In the very long list of election-year issues — the economy, immigration, abortion, crime, heath care, disinformation — I see no indication of widespread concern about them.
Which leaves me with this fundamentally banal thought: Go ahead, enjoy what’s available — and to the extent possible don’t overdo it. We have definitely decided that prohibition made matters worse making us (whatever our political affiliation) libertarians in choosing how to enjoy our own time.
Ted Gioia, who writes a Substack called The Honest Broker, won the jackpot in commentary when a post of his became the basis for a David Brooks column in the New York Times called “The Junkification of America.”
This is Brooks’s observation about the topic at hand:
“The phenomenon Gioia describes isn’t happening just to culture; it recurs across American life. We have access to wonderful things. But they require effort, so we settle for the junky things that provide the quick dopamine hits. We could all be eating a Mediterranean diet, but instead it’s potato chips and cherry Coke. We could enjoy the richness of full awareness, but booze, weed and other drugs provide that quick reward. Think of all the things in American life that seem to offer that burst of stimulation but threaten to be addictive — gambling, porn, video games, checking email. “
Good. Bad. As we head into the November election, the reassuring mantra in our twenty-first-century nation is still “You Decide.”
Jake Sullivan, now the White House National Security Adviser, desribes “The Loop of imperfection” in U.S. policy making over the decades.
The minute you walk into the White House Situation Room, you immediately recognize that you have a collection of imperfect people with imperfect information about what is going on, facing imperfect choices and in an imperfect process where it is actually hard to draw in the right people to contribute to the decision. It shouldn’t come as any surprise you end up getting imperfect results. Every solution you propose or pursue inevitably creates almost necessarily new problems. So even when you think you have done the right thing, you have generated a whole new set of additional decisions that put you right back into this loop of imperfection.”
—Jake Sullivan, in the opening of the final installment of the BBC documentary series The Corridors of Power
Jake Sullivan’s soliloquy in The Corridors of Power summarizes more succinctly and more persuasively than anything else I have read how “the Best and the Brightest” messed up so tragically in the era of America’s war in Vietnam.
I was sent a link to the eight-part series by a producer as I finished posting on Substack my own eighteen-part series LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail (to be released as a book in November). The BBC series’ portrayal of U.S. decision making in Iraq, the Balkans, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur, Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria illustrates with powerful documentation the recurring pattern that defined what went so wrong in Vietnam — the reality of “this loop of imperfection.”
The series was broadcast on the BBC last spring, and I’m told that a two-hour version will appear on PBS soon. The full series had been scheduled to air on Showtime, but the network has cancelled all of its documentaries. The producers apparently have not found a new U.S. distributor. (Welcome to the commodification of content in our age.)
The series, brilliantly directed by Dror Moreh, must have been filmed some time ago since a number of the most prominent people interviewed have died: Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger.
Jake Sullivan and Samantha Power, who wrote “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide and has served in senior positions in the Obama and Biden administrations, are exceptionally eloquent in framing the portrait of mishaps that have become timeless.
The decades since the end of the Cold War have been notable because of crises that were marked by massacres or characterized as genocides, when one national or ethnic group sets out to destroy another. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (and the enduring military conflict that followed) was different because it was a restoration of traditional warfare in which one country seeks territorial control of another.
It would be misleading to characterize the U.S. response to all these challenges in the same way, but there is a thread that the series makes indelible: hesitation, confusion, policy reversals, and a failure to understand how to deploy what the United Nations calls the Responsibility to Protect, “a global political commitment to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity,” adopted by the General Assembly in 2005.
In every case, the president, who is the ultimate decision maker, is influenced by domestic political calculations or a shortfall in developing alliances with friends and partners to share the risks and costs of action. Another factor, which was so relevant in Vietnam, is ignorance of the countries in question — their history, culture, or language.
For example, in the aftermath of what became known as the Arab Spring, which in 2011 had led to regional upheaval and regime change (leaving matters in most respects worse off than they were), the Obama administration intervened in Libya, advocating for the downfall of the eccentric leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was assassinated in a coup.
In 2012, a coordinated attack by an Islamic militant group on two U.S. government facilities in the Libyan city of Benghazi, leading to the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, became so politicized in Washington that the real issues in play were lost and never recovered. Republicans in Congress went after President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and National Security Adviser Susan Rice in relentless investigations that obscured whatever had happened so thoroughly that any further action to restore order in Libya was meaningless. The civil war in Libya continues to this day.
As I watched the Libya installment, in particular, I recognized the elements of mistakes, confusion, and political constraints that were so present in my account of President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the 1960s, both of whom recognized that they were pursuing an essentially hopeless outcome yet felt compelled not to change course.
In the crises of recent decades, American military casualties have been much lower than they were in Vietnam, but civilians in vast numbers — millions — have suffered and died.
Jake Sullivan is right about the “loop of imperfection” in policy making. The deeper and probably immutable reason for mayhem is the human race’s capacity for devastating violence and destruction.
As the LBJ and McNamara series has evolved over the past eighteen weeks, readers were engaged, but time being what it is, I had the sense that they were mainly reading each entry as an excerpt.
For this and other reasons, there is now a book version available for pre-order. The publisher is Rivertowns Books in New York (https://tinyurl.com/2jc6ctf9). The book is also for sale at Bookshop.org, Amazon, or BN.com, and it is (or will soon be) available at practically all online bookselling sites. It can be ordered at bookstores with the ISBN 978-1-953943-55-2 for the print book at $17.95 and the ISBN 978-1-953943-57-5 for the ebook at $8.99. The book will be released November 12.
Having been thinking about this project for so long, I continue – really – to be surprised that in the vast array of books about the American decade in Vietnam, relatively little has been written about how so many people in leadership, especially President Johnson and Robert McNamara, the men most responsible for policy decisions, got those decisions so wrong.
This explanation is what the book is about.
Next week’s Substack is called “The Crucible of Choice,” about a recent BBC series “The Corridors of Power,” which contains a remarkable soliloquy from Jake Sullivan, now the national security adviser, apparently filmed several years ago.
Decision making, he says, is “an imperfect loop” of choices made by imperfect people faced with immensely complicated problems. This was the case in the Vietnam era, and it is still true in our time.
The war in Vietnam ended formally for the United States with the signing of what was called the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam, signed in Paris on January 27, 1973. In April with the last prisoners of war released, the remaining American troops left, leaving behind only a contingent of Marines at the U.S. embassy in Saigon.
The wars in Indochina did not actually end until the spring of 1975, with victories in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos for exactly the forces and ideologies that the United States had been there to defeat.
Whatever power and influence the USSR and the People’s Republic of China would have in Indochina thereafter, the countries of the region largely evolved according to historical patterns set long before the U.S. military was deployed to the region.
A united Vietnam is authoritarian, nationalist, and generally pragmatic when it comes to its economic development and alliances.
Cambodia no longer has a royal family. But it has a ruler in Hun Sen who came to power in 1985 and has now turned over the role of prime minister to his son Hun Manet. The population exceeds sixteen million – which means that it has recovered from the massacres of two million or more in the Khmer Rouge era, after the U.S.-supported regime was ousted in 1975.
And Laos is a one-party state on the margins of global awareness, notable for the mist-covered mountains where the CIA flew in support of the tribal people in the losing side of the conflict, many of whom have found a home in, among other places, Minnesota, where frigid winters must be a challenge.
As for the United States, the impact of our decade in Vietnam was profound and lasting. The United States had lost a war in which the country’s vaunted eminence had failed, for all the expended effort it was able to make – and notable afterward that the men responsible for it never expressed regret until Robert McNamara did. “Vietnam” is now a synonym for the limitations of American power and the rise of meaningful citizen advocacy for political and social change.
Lyndon Johnson went home to the Pedernales and to the chagrin of Lady Bird and his daughters resumed unhealthy habits for a man with heart problems that doubtless contributed to his death at the age of sixty-four in the same week that the Peace Accords in Paris were signed.
Bob McNamara was a vigorous fifty-one years old when he left the Pentagon. He spent thirteen years at the World Bank. It was in the early 1990s that we started to work together first on his memoirs and then on two other books, Argument Without End and Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing and Catastrophe in the 21st Century, a peroration on conflict that summarized McNamara’s considered beliefs on war.
It was around that time that McNamara called me to say that the filmmaker Errol Morris wanted to make a film with him to explore his views on war. My reaction was to warn my friend Bob (as he was to me) that Morris’s film would probably put him once again in the limelight of vituperation, just as the publication of In Retrospect had in 1995.
But that was not what happened.
In The New York Times, Stephen Holden’s review said:
“If there’s one movie that ought to be studied by military and civilian leaders around the world at this treacherous historical moment, it is ‘The Fog of War,’ Errol Morris’s sober, beautifully edited documentary portrait of the former United States defense secretary Robert S. McNamara…
“Stocky and slick haired, with rimless glasses and a grand corporate manner, Mr. McNamara appears to be an exceptionally articulate, self-confident man who came to this project prepared to deflect embarrassing questions about his personal responsibility for the debacle. While he readily confesses to having made serious mistakes of judgment, he will not admit to any grave moral failures.”
The film posters presented McNamara in his raincoat, a solitary figure — an image that I very much recalled myself.
In his 1995 national book tour for In Retrospect, McNamara appeared at a packed event in the atrium of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He was holding his own until near the end, when a Vietnam vet began to harangue him, and the audience seemed to approve of the protest. With cameras clicking and rolling, McNamara blurted, “Shut up!” There was a gasp in the room, including from me.
The next morning, at about 7 AM, McNamara knocked on my hotel room door and wearing that tan raincoat he so often wore and gray New Balance running shoes, and he told me he was going to hike (his word) along the Charles River. “I know what makes people so angry,” he said, “But I have to do this. I need to talk about the war and its lessons so we can prevent anything like it from happening again.”
He continued on his book tour, traveling alone, lugging a small suitcase and wearing that raincoat. We offered him security, but he declined.
Another notable moment took place at Time magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration at Radio City Music Hall in March 1998. Certain guests were asked to pay tribute to someone they greatly admired. John F. Kennedy Jr. chose McNamara and made this remarkable statement:
“After leaving public life and keeping his own counsel for many years, Robert McNamara did what few others have done. He took full responsibility for his decisions and admitted he was wrong. Judging from the reception he got, I doubt many public servants would be brave enough to follow his example. So tonight, I would like to toast someone I’ve known my whole life not as a symbol of pain we can’t forget, but as a man. And I would like to thank him for teaching me something about bearing great adversity with great dignity.”
McNamara was not present. In July the following year, Kennedy and his wife were killed in a crash of a small plane he was piloting.
On July 6, 2009, McNamara died. He was ninety-three. His family sent a note to those who had offered condolences, saying that in accordance with McNamara’s wishes, “there will be no funeral or memorial service and his ashes will be placed in Snowmass, Colorado, and Martha’s Vineyard.” McNamara’s widow from his second marriage, Diana Masieri McNamara, eventually interred a portion of the ashes under a large headstone in Arlington National Cemetery.
I wrote at the time, “I can hear McNamara’s gravelly voice and picture him waving his hand to lend emphasis to his determination not to be extolled – or denounced by a protestor – at a posthumous event. In different circumstances he might have been persuaded otherwise…But it would be inconceivable, I suppose, for his survivors to overrule McNamara’s fiat that the scattering of his remains be the only ceremonial recognition of his very full, very long, and very controversial life.”
Reconsidering McNamara all these years later, in the transcripts of his sessions with his editors, and all the other material in histories, memoirs, and tapes, especially Johnson’s, the judgment remains as McNamara himself recognized, that he could never be forgiven for what happened in the Vietnam war, but by facing it so personally and ultimately so openly, he could make a contribution toward preventing it from happening again. Even so, in Afghanistan and Iraq in the twenty-first century, the United States again waged wars with endings that resembled those in Indochina, especially in Afghanistan, and today confronts in China and Russia two great nations that each in its own way are dangerously determined adversaries.
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This is the final installment of the series. Thanks to all who read it — numbering by Substack count in the thousands. A book version is in preparation with details on where and how to order it coming soon.
Here’s the link for the website page where people can watch the C-SPAN interview online : www.c-span.org/video/?536661-1/author-peter-osnos-lbj-robert-mcnamara-vietnam-war.
In an early morning phone call with Robert McNamara on January 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson commented about observing his defense secretary the day before. “I looked at you…I thought you were so damn tired, you better go home to your wife,” the president said.
The Tet offensive was underway across Vietnam. The seizure of the Pueblo had happened, and a potential crisis involving possible nuclear leakage from a damaged naval vessel had been resolved,
“The result is, Mr. President, I’m really not up to date on Southeast Asia, I can’t tell you anything,” McNamara contended.
To which LBJ said, “The closer you get to leaving, the more I miss you and I just…there’s not anybody in this government that can say as much in as little time as you can.”
McNamara then went on to characterize what he thought of the Tet assaults:
“I think it shows two things, Mr. President. First, that they have more power than some credit them with. I don’t think it’s a last gasp action. I do think it represents a maximum effort in the sense of, they’ve poured on all of their assets, both in terms of personnel and materiel and this will set them back some, but after they absorb the losses, they will remain a substantial force…it probably relates to negotiations in some way. I would expect that they were successful here, then they’d move more forcefully on the negotiation front and that thinking that have a stronger position from which to bargain.”
The gist of the call was that McNamara was still clinging to the hope that negotiations to end the war in Vietnam might be started before he left office, and Johnson wanted McNamara to know how very much he thought and cared for him.
The cascade of events in Asia were leading to two significant dates: February 29, when McNamara would be formally replaced by Clark Clifford; and March 31, when LBJ would declare that he would no longer run for reelection. The emotional toll for both men had been profound, but unlike other political breaks based on policy failure, there was no acrimony or assignments of blame for what had gone wrong, at least to each other.
Reaching the end of In Retrospect, McNamara again seeks to justify why he had gone along with – or not gone publicly against – policies he strongly suspected would not succeed:
“Many friends, then and since, have told me I was wrong not to have resigned in protest over the president’s policy. Let me explain why I did not. The president (with the exception of the vice president) is the only elected official of the executive branch. He appoints each cabinet officer, who should have no constituency other than him…A cabinet officer’s authority and legitimacy derives from the president. It is also true, however, that, because of their frequent public exposure, some cabinet officers develop power independent of the president.
“To a degree, I held such power, and some said I should have used it by resigning, challenging the president’s Vietnam policy, and leading those who sought to force a change.
“I believe that would have been a violation of my responsibility to the president and my oath to uphold the Constitution…
“Simply put, despite my deep differences with Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, I was loyal to the presidency and loyal to him, and I sensed his equally strong feelings toward me. Moreover, until the day I left, I believed I could influence his decisions. I therefore felt I had a responsibility to stay at my post.”
Lyndon Baines Johnson was as political as a man could be. Every move had a purpose behind it. The sincerity of Johnson’s commitments to his domestic policies, and the progress he was able to make, have meant over time that his presidency is regularly reevaluated for its positives — while always requiring that the Vietnam war offset any praise and render him in the end as broken.
Robert Strange McNamara was unsophisticated in his political judgments – which for LBJ meant that his word could be taken at face value rather than as a reflection of self-interest. McGeorge Bundy, by contrast, had just enough cynicism based on his years in and around the Kennedys and the Harvard elite culture to avoid the public aura of infallibility that was McNamara’s problem.
The Vietnam partnership destined to fail was a mismatch of personalities – earnestness to a fault for McNamara and a brew of insecurities and political calculations for Johnson.
On February 28, Johnson awarded McNamara the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House.
McNamara’s description of the occasion is poignant.
“For a person whose image is one of cool efficiency, I become very emotional at times, and so it was this day. When my turn came to speak, I looked at the president and began, ‘I cannot find words to express what lies in my heart today,’ then could say nothing more as I choked back conflicting feelings of pride, gratitude, frustration, sadness, and failure. Had I been able to speak, this is what I might have said:
“‘Today, I end 1,558 days of the most intimate association with the most complex individual I have ever known. Many in this room believe Lyndon Johnson is crude, mean, vindictive, scheming, untruthful. Perhaps at times he has shown each of these characteristics. But he is much, much more. I believe that in the decades ahead, history will judge him to have done more – for example, through such legislation as the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Great Society legislation – to alert us all to our responsibility toward the poor, the disadvantaged, and the victims of racial prejudice than any other political leader of our time. But for Vietnam, a war which he inherited – and which admittedly neither he nor we managed wisely – we would have been much further along in solving those problems.’”
The irony of McNamara’s feelings about American social distress and Johnson’s compassion was that the Vietnamese people’s lives and livelihoods were always considered much less important than U.S. objectives to defeat a determined enemy, communists whose elimination was worth whatever the cost.
McNamara’s emotional behavior at the White House ceremony was interpreted as a measure of how close he had come to a collapse – the suicide of one of his predecessors as secretary of defense, James Forrestal, in 1949 was invariably cited as a precedent. In the years to come, McNamara’s displays of emotion when with friends and at the time his book was published were seen as self-pity for his policy failure rather than remorse for the losses and injuries for so many American GIs and millions of Vietnamese.
Having spent so much time with him as an interlocutor, editor, media counselor and now a biographer of sorts, I think McNamara’s regrets were deep and genuine – for the war’s pointless violence and his role in them, which undid his belief in his abilities as a person who could manage, lead, and dispassionately advise. And it had hurt his family, especially Marg.
To end his narrative in In Retrospect, McNamara quotes LBJ’s letter to Marg: “Though our lives will change…we will not. Lady Bird and I will never change our feelings for both of you. They are lasting in admiration and gratitude. With love.”
And so Clark Clifford was handed the chalice. As an adviser to Johnson without portfolio, he had traversed from arguing against escalation in 1965 to supporting the build-up and bombing of 1966 and 1967. He came to the Pentagon at the moment the Joint Chiefs and General Westmoreland were making a case for increasing the U.S. commitment rather than capping it – and accepting it would most likely never succeed, as McNamara had come to believe.
Within a week, Clifford was with Johnson. To Brian VanDeMark and his editors for Counsel to the President, he would recount how soon he realized the inevitable, that the goal had to be to bring “this to an end on the best terms we can get”:
It was after listening to the generals in his first days on the job that Clifford thought: “Oh my God, this is hopeless. It is absolute folly for us to go on…I felt so strongly about it that I was not sleeping very well at night.”
On March 4, Clifford made the argument to the president, very much the same one that McNamara had made in the months leading to his departure. Johnson had him make the presentation to a group of senior advisers the next day. As VanDeMark writes: “Johnson, tellingly, did not challenge any part of Clifford’s analysis, but instead let him make his case without interruption.”
On March 31, at the close of a speech about Vietnam, LBJ announced that under no circumstances would he continue to run for another term as president. Instead, he would devote himself to the cause of a negotiated peace. Yet the war went on.
McNamara wondered:
“Why didn’t he, when he decided not to run, shift [policy]. Damned if I know. Except that he was the kind of a person that never wanted to say he was wrong. Maybe that was an explanation of it.
“But Jesus, I’d a hell of a lot rather than said I was wrong than go down in history as a guy that was totally wrong and refused to admit it. And if I had a few months left as president and I could shift course and I’d decided not to run and I was willing to pay the price of being charged with failures and having caused all these fatalities on this, at least I would begin to correct my error before I left…
“He and I had no conversation after I left. We had conversations after I left, but I never discussed that with him. So far as I know, he’s never discussed it with anyone.”
On January 16, 1981, the McNamaras returned to the White House, when President Jimmy Carter awarded Marg the Medal of Freedom for her work in founding the organization Reading Is Fundamental, a program to encourage disadvantaged youth to read. Marg was at the end of a long battle with cancer and died seventeen days later.
The Vietnam war was long over. Lyndon Johnson had died in 1973. On his first day as president in 1977, Carter had pardoned draft dodgers. Bob McNamara would carry on until he died in 2009, trying to explain himself and also serving causes to restrain the spread of nuclear weapons, deal with global poverty, and engage with his former Vietnamese enemies and U.S. colleagues to understand why the war had been such a disaster.
He traveled the world and arranged meetings in Hanoi and other locales with historians, journalists, former colleagues, and former enemies. He went to Cuba to revisit the Cuban missile crisis with Fidel Castro, among others. He attended conferences and wrote articles for magazines and journals like Foreign Affairs. The objective was always the same: to reconsider every strand in order to reckon how all that happened came to pass, convinced that if the history was rendered correctly – the collection of data in its way – better or safer outcomes could be managed.
Here’s the link for the website page where people can watch the C-SPAN interview online : www.c-span.org/video/?536661-1/author-peter-osnos-lbj-robert-mcnamara-vietnam-war.
I have now heard from a number of people who have listened to the audio that they find it extraordinary. To hear McNamara explaining in detail and under my questioning why he believed Kennedy would have withdrawn and LBJ used 1964 to stall on making decisions about the war among other matters is, the word all use, is “fascinating.” So below is a direct link to the audio. A click will connect you and a second click will download it.
Lyndon Johnson sent Robert McNamara back to Vietnam in July 1967 to assess General Westmoreland’s request for another huge deployment of troops – which McNamara had already said that he opposed in the May 19 memo. In their briefings, Westmoreland and his fellow generals insisted that American strength was turning around the conflict.
Brian VanDeMark writes that McNamara was, if not persuaded, then willing to reconsider the options one more time. The debate over additional deployment ended with a decision to add 45,000 troops. But that moment of optimism collided with demands in Congress for additional bombing, along with criticism, particularly of McNamara, for opposing the increase.
But even as McNamara was subject to criticism from the hawks in Congress and within the Johnson administration, he also had to contend with a growing anti-war movement among younger Americans, during what became known as the “Summer of Love” in 1967. This was followed in the fall by massive anti-war demonstrations at the Pentagon. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, McNamara was being subjected to personal attacks from all sides as congressional demands for more air power and other hawkish criticisms were offset by increasingly vocal criticism from doves like Senator William Fulbright.
President Johnson also saw himself as a victim and complained to Rostow’s dovish deputy Francis Bator, as recounted by VanDeMark: “You doves think the pressures on me come from you…you are all wrong, The real pressures on me are on coming from people who want me to go North, mine the harbors, bomb Hanoi, get into a war with the Chinese – they’re crazies. That is where the real pressures are. I am the boy with his finger in the dike protecting you doves from the crazies.”
VanDeMark continued: “After he finished, Johnson walked around his desk, picked up a bumper sticker, and showed it to Bator, almost with tears in his eyes. The bumper sticker read: ‘All the Way with LeMay,” a reference to the now-retired Air Force chief of staff (and McNamara’s World War II commanding officer) Curtis LeMay, who advocated bombing North Vietnam “back to the stone age.” LeMay was extreme but far from alone in urging ferocity.
Policy confusion, work fatigue, family-related distress, and denunciations from Congress and anti-war activists were all grinding on McNamara. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, chaired by Senator John Stennis, held hearings in August 1967 that McNamara described as “one of the most stressful episodes in my life.”
How stress so depletes the body and judgment is one of the main – obvious perhaps but nonetheless central — takeaways from the Vietnam-era record of McNamara and Johnson, the only two men responsible with a documented record that can be fully excavated.
In Road to Disaster, VanDeMark describes the mood as McNamara readied himself for the Stennis testimony: “McNamara’s opposition to intensifying the aerial assault…worsened the growing split between him and Johnson. During a Tuesday Lunch on August 8, McNamara opposed the Chiefs’ recommendation for increased air attacks around Hanoi and Haiphong, saying such actions risked Chinese intervention, threatened to kill hundreds of civilians, undercut the prospect of sparking negotiations, and were certain to inflame domestic protests.”
“It doesn’t look as though we have we have escalated enough to win,” Johnson insisted.
McNamara replied that the heavier bombing “would not necessarily mean that we would win.”
Johnson retorted: “We have got to do something to win.”
The president, growing impatient, told McNamara that he would face heat at the hearings.
“I am not worried about the heat,” McNamara replied, “as long as I know what we are doing is right.”
VanDeMark writes: “‘It was quite a scene,’ a White House aide recalled, both men going back and forth, tempers rising. Finally, Johnson told McNamara, in effect, you are on your own – I won’t pull the rug out from under you, but I am not accepting your argument, in just that way, right now.”
Describing his testimony, McNamara writes in In Retrospect, “I spent all day patiently and systematically … explaining the inherent limitations of bombing. I said we had learned that no amount of it … would allow us to win” — except on a scale of destruction and death that would have exceeded Hiroshima and Nagasaki – though he did not say so explicitly.
“The subcommittee issued a unanimous report severely criticizing me for micromanaging the war,” McNamara writes.
The committee said: “We cannot, in good conscience, ask our ground forces to continue that fight in South Vietnam unless we are prepared to press the air war in the North in the most effective way possible…Logic and prudence requires that the decision be with the unanimous weight of professional military judgment.”
Immediately after McNamara finished his testimony, VanDeMark continues, Johnson called him and gave him “a full blast of presidential anger,” an aide recalled, and Johnson remarked to another aide, “I forgot he had only been president of Ford for one week” before Kennedy had appointed him defense secretary — an exaggeration, although McNamara had only served a month in that post.
Johnson’s anger was less about the position McNamara had taken than that he had done it publicly. McNamara had never done that before. And the breach was serious.
McNamara disputes an account years later asserting that the Joint Chiefs had decided to protest McNamara’s position by resigning en masse. But, as contentious and divided as the air war debate had become, the record indicates that the major consequence of all the differences was that ultimately it was Johnson who would have had to resolve them in a way that his political instincts and insecurity about being commander-in-chief prevented him from doing.
As VanDeMark writes, “The accumulated anguish, frustration, and pressure on Robert McNamara reached the tipping point in early November 1967. After years of grappling with Vietnam and struggling to make American policy there work – a policy that he, more than anyone else had crafted and managed – the proud, self-assured man who had come to Washington… believing every problem had a solution, “finally bit the bullet,” as he later put it, and concluded that the massive American military effort in Vietnam could not succeed.”
This was the background for another memo from McNamara to the president on November 1, which went well beyond the May 19 memo in establishing that McNamara no longer could be in a leadership role for the war. He advocated capping troop deployments; stopping the bombing in hopes, at last, of getting into meaningful negotiations with Hanoi; and turning the fighting over to the South Vietnamese – which the Nixon administration would later call “Vietnamization.”
In the editorial sessions for the book, McNamara castigated himself for not taking his advocacy to its logical conclusion: a U.S. withdrawal and full acceptance of the reality that had been John F. Kennedy’s belief and, at core, McNamara’s as well. The United States could not win a war that the South Vietnamese were unable or unwilling to wage themselves. The Stennis hearings in August and the massive demonstrations at the Pentagon in October (which surprisingly went off without serious violence) framed the situation: Hawks demanding more war, protestors demanding the end.
In the vortex were the president, privately in such despair that Lady Bird’s hopes that he would not run again were foremost in her diaries, and McNamara, who could no longer reconcile his role as an adviser to the president with whom he was at a breaking point on Vietnam – the singular link the two men had.
By continuing to present American military force in Vietnam as essential to defeating communism, the fact that vast numbers of civilians and soldiers were being killed was not an argument for accepting defeat. Disputes over tactics and strategy are the narrative texts of memos and the reflections contained in McNamara’s memoir, which is why his remorse was interpreted so widely as regret for himself rather than for the war’s victims.
So why did McNamara initiate the moves which led to his departure from the Johnson administration?
“What was in my mind…I felt that [Johnson] was not prepared to accept my conclusions which were that we could not achieve our objective militarily, that we would have to change our objective…I can no longer have influence on him and I no longer, therefore, need to feel that for me to leave is walking away from my responsibility. If I can’t be influential and I can’t change my judgment on what to do and I can’t get him to do it, then I should leave. I mean it’s that cycle of judgment.”
No American officials were publicly advocating an end to the war for the sake of the lives of Vietnamese people. The case for victory was to preserve the credibility of American power and resistance to communism.
The publication of In Retrospect ignited rage because McNamara had revealed that he had reached his judgment on the war in 1966 and 1967 but he would never say so in public, remaining silent about the war until his book was released in 1995.
After leaving the administration, McNamara acknowledged, “I just turned off.” He rationalized this with the position that he could not publicly challenge his successors on policies that he had been so involved in devising. He could not and would not turn on Johnson personally, nor would he openly dispute the strategies of General Westmoreland and the Joint Chiefs. As Julia Sweig relates in her book on Lady Bird’s diaries: “McNamara was being eased out by the president even as the defense secretary felt a growing pull to resign. Still, the Johnsons adored him. Lady Bird had ‘seldom felt as sorry for’ Lyndon, and McNamara’s departure caused ‘great loneliness and separation’ for them both.”
Johnson never responded to McNamara’s November 1 memo. He did again convene the Wise Men – the outside advisers including Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford, and now McGeorge Bundy, who, not aware how far McNamara’s disillusion had extended, after consideration endorsed staying the course in the war.
But the endgame was proceeding.
Several unseen maneuvers intersected. McNamara showed interest in the presidency of the World Bank, a position that the American president could fill. Johnson, deploying his political touch, brokered the appointment, successfully avoiding the need to confront McNamara directly.
Clark Clifford was then identified as McNamara’s successor at the Pentagon, with the handover to happen in the first quarter of 1968.
McNamara’s resignation as secretary of defense was announced on November 29, 1967, and he would officially leave the job at the end of February.
In the meantime, all hell broke loose in Asia during January 1968. North Korea seized the USS Pueblo spy ship on January 23 and held the crew for eleven months, an excruciating embarrassment.
On January 30, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army launched the Tet offensive across the South, which in the tumult seemed an enormous show of force and a display of U.S. and South Vietnamese weakness. That is not actually what it turned out to be — the offensive was repulsed — but that was certainly the way it looked at the time. At this time of turmoil, the Pentagon was in transition.
The outgoing secretary of defense was widely considered at the edge or beyond a mental and physical breakdown, and LBJ was equally an emotional mess, which he would reveal in taped conversations and in the misery that Lady Bird witnessed nightly.
It was in a February 5 phone call with the Washington Star’s Jack Horner that Johnson vented his frustrations:
“I don’t admit this is a communist victory and I don’t think anybody but a goddamn communist admits it. That’s what I think. And I think they’re just using us, just playing games around us. And nearly everybody I talk to tries to find out what’s wrong with our boys, our country, our leadership, our men. Our president’s a liar, Westmoreland’s no good, anybody that differs with them. When McNamara leaves, why he becomes a hero! He was the goddamnnest screwball as long as he’s in there.”
Here’s the link for the website page where people can watch the C-SPANinterview online : www.c-span.org/video/?536661-1/author-peter-8osnos-lbj-robert-mcnamara-vietnam-war.
I have now heard from a number of people who have listened to the audio that they find it extraordinary. To hear McNamara explaining in detail and under my questioning why he believed Kennedy would have withdrawn and LBJ used 1964 to stall on making decisions about the war among other matters is, the word all use, is “fascinating.” So below is a direct link to the audio. A click will connect you and a second click will download it.