Mr. McNamara Meets Mr. Maladroit

2 years ago

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Senior Correspondent

The death of 93-year-old Robert McNamara – 34 years after the fall of Saigon – reminded me of my lone encounter with the defense secretary who embodied the Vietnam War during my college years.

It was on Martha's Vineyard during the summer of 2000, and I had moved on from the marching-on-the-Pentagon phase of my political adolescence. Still, my wife Meryl and I were startled by the call from the host of a small upcoming dinner party: "This is a little awkward. Kay Graham insists on bringing Robert McNamara – and nobody wants to sit at his table. Meryl, as a favor, would you sit next to him?"

Meryl and I are journalistically curious – and we realized that shunning McNamara now would not have changed history. And McNamara had, at least, spent decades radiating stiff-lipped remorse over his pivotal role in the 1960s march of folly. That was why the remnants of my anti-Vietnam ire were directed in laser-beam fashion at a certain unapologetic German-accented national security adviser.

On the night in question, as we drove through a maze of Vineyard dirt roads to get to the dinner, we came across an elderly couple driving at about 3 miles an hour because they were painfully lost. Intuiting that it was McNamara (behind the wheel) and Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham, we pulled ahead of them and signaled that they should follow us. When we successfully arrived, there were greetings all around as I heard myself saying, "I'm so glad that I could provide the light at the end of the tunnel."

That was how it started. All through the evening I was afflicted with the Vietnam War version of Tourette Syndrome. No matter how benign the topic, I inadvertently blurted out another Vietnam catch phrase. The guest of honor, DNA co-discoverer James Watson, was telling an elaborate tale drawn from a just-completed memoir about how the love of his life had dumped him on Christmas Eve. With McNamara standing next to me, I broke in to say, "Ah, the Christmas Eve massacre."

This was not some exquisitely calibrated anti-war revenge. I simply could not help myself – everything pointed back to Vietnam. Speaking of the flowers at the West Tisbury farmers market, I think I described them as "the best and the brightest." It is quite possible that in the midst of a conversation about beach erosion, I even volunteered, "We had to destroy the beach in order to save it."

The entire evening was a personal debacle as I hurtled from one ill-conceived crack to another. As a dinner companion, Meryl recalls, McNamara was ingratiating but oddly detached as he mostly wistfully reminisced about his late wife Margaret, who had died in 1981.

Vietnam, of course, was a taboo topic. McNamara's life-time burden was that he not only was an arrogant apostle of a tragic war, but also a man with enough self-awareness to be haunted eternally by the human consequences of his mistakes.

As for me, I look back at the McNamara evening and realize that my behavior could have been worse. There was, after all, the Halloween costume party back in 1998 where I thought I was making fatwa jokes to an ersatz Salmon Rushdie only to slowly and ruefully discover that I was talking to the Indian-born novelist himself. At least McNamara deserved his fate.

(For connoisseurs of social humiliation, here is a contemporaneous account of my maladroit rush-to-judgment with Rushdie).

Tagged: robert mcnamara, RobertMcnamara, vietnam, vietnam war, VietnamWar

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