McNamara Retrospective

Errol Morris offers a brief but poignant retrospective of the recently deceased Secretary of Defense. If you've never seen it, The Fog of War, a documentary by Morris, is a fantastic examination of America's Vietnam War policy, of which McNamara was a primary architect.

In a 1966 speech in Montreal (delivered while he was still secretary of defense), he returned to the theme of rationality:

“Who is man? Is he a rational animal? If he is, then the goals can ultimately be achieved. If he is not, then there is little point in making the effort. All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal but with a near infinite capacity for folly. His history seems largely a halting, but persistent, effort to raise his reason above his animality. He draws blueprints for utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand: his own part-comic, part-tragic, part-cussed, but part-glorious nature.”

History certainly hasn't exonerated LBJ and the rest of the folks at the helm of America's incursion in Vietnam, but it's refreshing to see McNamara, a true statesman, offer a thoughtful perspective.

I doubt Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney will ever get to this point. They probably still think that they're doing God's work. How convenient and intellectually lazy of them.