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Argument Without End In Search Of Answers To The Vietnam Tragedy
Did the Vietnam War have to happen? And why couldn't it have ended earlier? These are among the questions that Robert McNamara and his collaborators ask in Argument Without End, a book that will stand as a major contribution to what we know about the Vietnam War. Drawing on a series of meetings that brought together, for the first time ever, senior American and Vietnamese officials who had served during the war, the book looks at the many instances in which one side, or both, made crucial mistakes that led to the war and its duration. Using Vietnamese and Chinese documents, many never before made public, McNamara reveals both American and Vietnamese blunders, and points out ways in which such mistakes can be avoided in the future. He also shows conclusively that war could not be won militarily by the United States.McNamara's last book on Vietnam was one of the most controversial books ever published in this country. This book will reignite the passionate debate about the war, about McNamara, and about the lessons we can take away from the tragedy.
512 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 1999
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167 people want to read
About the author
Robert S. McNamara
54 books42 followersRobert Strange McNamara (June 9, 1916 – July 6, 2009) was an American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, during which time he played a large role in escalating the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Following that, he served as President of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy analysis. McNamara consolidated intelligence and logistics functions of the Pentagon into two centralized agencies: the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense Supply Agency.
Prior to public service, McNamara was one of the "Whiz Kids" who helped rebuild Ford Motor Company after World War II, and briefly served as Ford's President before becoming Secretary of Defense. A group of advisors he brought to the Pentagon inherited the "Whiz Kids" moniker.
McNamara remains the longest serving Secretary of Defense at over seven years.
Prior to public service, McNamara was one of the "Whiz Kids" who helped rebuild Ford Motor Company after World War II, and briefly served as Ford's President before becoming Secretary of Defense. A group of advisors he brought to the Pentagon inherited the "Whiz Kids" moniker.
McNamara remains the longest serving Secretary of Defense at over seven years.
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September 16, 2021
The title of this book is taken from the quote of Pieter Geyl, the great Dutch historian, who said that "[h]istory is indeed an argument without an end." How true. No matter what course events take historians are faced with a thousand what-ifs, and when it comes to the Vietnam disaster, there seem to be a few hundred thousand what-ifs to plague us. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who became one of the most notorious hawks and architects of the American involvement in Vietnam, was haunted by those what-ifs in the aftermath of the war.
In this work, he sets out to argue that things might have been different, might have led to a better outcome, if Washington and Hanoi had not repeatedly missed opportunities to avoid the war or at least to terminate it before the devastation reached tragic dimensions. The aim of his study of the causes and consequences of the Vietnam tragedy is to help current policymakers avoid repeating the mistakes of their predecessors. Exactly for this reason, McNamara organizes his arguments according to the kind of failure committed by the United States and by North Vietnam.
First, he examines the dialogues between the American government and Hanoi, which reveal that the central failure was a failure of empathy. Each side fundamentally misjudged the perspective of the enemy. The fact that the two countries remained bitter enemies for so long demonstrates how profound this misunderstanding was, how unable were both Washington and Hanoi to comprehend the thoughts and emotions of those on the other side. This inability to think and feel like your enemy aborted all attempts at persuading each other until the disaster reached gigantic proportions.
From this failure of empathy stemmed the second crucial issue: the failure to understand each other. The level of ignorance that existed on both sides was astonishing. Americans "...did not know what we did not know [about Asia]. And that was one of our problems when we got involved in Vietnam." American ignorance of Vietnamese history, language, and culture was bottomless. Even President Diem acknowledged that weakness, telling American journalist Marguerite Higgins it was a delusion for the Americans to believe that blindly copying Western methods might work in Vietnam: "The Americans are breaking Vietnamese psychology and they don't even know they are doing it." Indeed, Americans in Vietnam and those concerned with the country's fate were armed to their teeth with good intentions and ignorance.
Of course, Vietnamese knowledge of the United States and its policymaking was just as – if not more – limited. American participants in the dialogues between the USA and North Vietnam soon found out that most of Hanoi's direct information about the United States during the 1950s and 1960s was acquired from international newspapers and weekly magazines – not from The New York Times, and certainly not from personal communication with American leaders and officials. Consequently, the government in Hanoi was never aware of the policy discussions on Vietnam in Washington and therefore could not affect American options in any desirable way.
This profound mutual ignorance urged each side to assign to the other motives and goals that had little, if anything, to do with reality. In the post-Second-World-War years, the American government greatly feared the Soviet Union. Because they assumed that all Communist countries acted according to the same logic (and even received orders from Moscow), American leaders believed Hanoi must be acting as a pawn of World Communism. However, as Vietnamese scholar Luu Doan Hyunh pointed out to American officials: "If I may say so, you were not only wrong, but you had, so to speak, lost your minds. Vietnam a part of the Chinese expansionist game in Asia? For anyone who knows the history of Indochina this is incomprehensible." I agree with him.
McNamara argues that Hanoi never posed a strategic threat to Indochina and never intended to be a Chinese pawn, but US leaders tended to see Vietnam through the Cold-Warrior perspective of a much larger struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. "The stakes for the United States, therefore, appeared to be extremely high," continues the former Secretary of Defense. Vietnam was considered a Communist puppet, and the key importance of Vietnamese nationalism and the desire of the Vietnamese for reunification were disregarded.
Another wrong American idea about North Vietnam was that centralized control existed in Hanoi's decision-making process. The United States perceived the Hanoi government to be similar to the American government, which possessed modern technology and immense resources, while in reality the leaders in Hanoi and the National Liberation Front deep in the jungles made decisions in an entirely different situation.
Another great American mistake was the generally accepted belief in Washington that bombing the North would weaken the will of the Hanoi government to continue the war. McNamara compares these bombings to Nazi bombardment of London, which only fortified British resistance during the Second World War. As North Vietnamese colonel Quach Hai Luong told to American colonel Herbert Schandler, "[e]very time you bombed the North, we said, we know we are succeeding in the South."
For its part, Hanoi also misunderstood the United States, assigning to it colonial aspirations similar to those of the French, who had oppressed Indochina for over a century. But unlike France, the United States was ambivalent about its role of a global power. Had Hanoi made efforts to better understand American fears and motives, it could have appealed to American anti-colonialism. Alas, Hanoi did not understand. It did not understand that the United States was not keen to carry out a military intervention in Vietnam, that it had refused to intervene to save the French at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954.
The third major failure was the bewildering lack of high-level communication between the two adversaries. Instead of initiating direct contact, the United States overwhelmingly relied on intermediaries, and Hanoi did not initiate any contact whatsoever. That behavior was somewhat justified, of course. Washington could not figure out how to contact a secretive Communist country, and Hanoi, afraid of seeming too weak for the vast and powerful United States, waited for the bigger power to make the first step toward negotiations. American intermediaries, while well-intentioned, were unreliable; they often misinterpreted the views of the other side and eventually proved to be ineffective sources. Furthermore, they were not used fruitfully, but only as carriers of information; few were asked for their insights on how to negotiate or to deal with existing adversaries. For instance, Raymond Aubrac, a French Resistance leader in whose house Ho Chi Minh had once lived, was never asked by Washington or by Hanoi to do anything other than carry the mail between Ho and Pham Van Dong, in Hanoi, and Henry Kissinger, who at the time served as the American contact in Paris.
The fourth major failure was the overall US decision-making process. In the American government, decision-making was not at all organized to deal productively with the extraordinarily complex array of political and military issues involved. "Policymakers did not raise fundamental questions, did not address basic issues about policy choices, and did not recognize their failure to do so," states McNamara. He outlines four main issues that should have been explored much more carefully when the United States intervened in Vietnam: 1) the actual gravity of the threat to American security; 2) the requirements for building a stable South Vietnam and an effective South Vietnamese military effort, which were essential for successful American involvement; 3) the potential usefulness of American military intervention in a conflict for which it was not prepared (guerrilla warfare); and 4) the diplomatic course the United States should follow in case of military defeat. The lack of thought this four crucial issues were given by American policymakers were the primary reason why the United States ended neck-deep in the Vietnamese quagmire.
Written by a knowledgeable insider – the same person who commissioned The Pentagon Papers – ARGUMENT WITHOUT END is undoubtedly an outstanding study. Secretary of Defense McNamara knows whereof he speaks when it comes to the Vietnam conflict and the American government's failures there. He had, after all, served two presidents associated with Vietnam – President John Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson. His analysis is clear and perceptive. Out of all the books on this subject I have read so far, McNamara's work is by far the most brilliant.
In this work, he sets out to argue that things might have been different, might have led to a better outcome, if Washington and Hanoi had not repeatedly missed opportunities to avoid the war or at least to terminate it before the devastation reached tragic dimensions. The aim of his study of the causes and consequences of the Vietnam tragedy is to help current policymakers avoid repeating the mistakes of their predecessors. Exactly for this reason, McNamara organizes his arguments according to the kind of failure committed by the United States and by North Vietnam.
First, he examines the dialogues between the American government and Hanoi, which reveal that the central failure was a failure of empathy. Each side fundamentally misjudged the perspective of the enemy. The fact that the two countries remained bitter enemies for so long demonstrates how profound this misunderstanding was, how unable were both Washington and Hanoi to comprehend the thoughts and emotions of those on the other side. This inability to think and feel like your enemy aborted all attempts at persuading each other until the disaster reached gigantic proportions.
From this failure of empathy stemmed the second crucial issue: the failure to understand each other. The level of ignorance that existed on both sides was astonishing. Americans "...did not know what we did not know [about Asia]. And that was one of our problems when we got involved in Vietnam." American ignorance of Vietnamese history, language, and culture was bottomless. Even President Diem acknowledged that weakness, telling American journalist Marguerite Higgins it was a delusion for the Americans to believe that blindly copying Western methods might work in Vietnam: "The Americans are breaking Vietnamese psychology and they don't even know they are doing it." Indeed, Americans in Vietnam and those concerned with the country's fate were armed to their teeth with good intentions and ignorance.
Of course, Vietnamese knowledge of the United States and its policymaking was just as – if not more – limited. American participants in the dialogues between the USA and North Vietnam soon found out that most of Hanoi's direct information about the United States during the 1950s and 1960s was acquired from international newspapers and weekly magazines – not from The New York Times, and certainly not from personal communication with American leaders and officials. Consequently, the government in Hanoi was never aware of the policy discussions on Vietnam in Washington and therefore could not affect American options in any desirable way.
This profound mutual ignorance urged each side to assign to the other motives and goals that had little, if anything, to do with reality. In the post-Second-World-War years, the American government greatly feared the Soviet Union. Because they assumed that all Communist countries acted according to the same logic (and even received orders from Moscow), American leaders believed Hanoi must be acting as a pawn of World Communism. However, as Vietnamese scholar Luu Doan Hyunh pointed out to American officials: "If I may say so, you were not only wrong, but you had, so to speak, lost your minds. Vietnam a part of the Chinese expansionist game in Asia? For anyone who knows the history of Indochina this is incomprehensible." I agree with him.
McNamara argues that Hanoi never posed a strategic threat to Indochina and never intended to be a Chinese pawn, but US leaders tended to see Vietnam through the Cold-Warrior perspective of a much larger struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. "The stakes for the United States, therefore, appeared to be extremely high," continues the former Secretary of Defense. Vietnam was considered a Communist puppet, and the key importance of Vietnamese nationalism and the desire of the Vietnamese for reunification were disregarded.
Another wrong American idea about North Vietnam was that centralized control existed in Hanoi's decision-making process. The United States perceived the Hanoi government to be similar to the American government, which possessed modern technology and immense resources, while in reality the leaders in Hanoi and the National Liberation Front deep in the jungles made decisions in an entirely different situation.
Another great American mistake was the generally accepted belief in Washington that bombing the North would weaken the will of the Hanoi government to continue the war. McNamara compares these bombings to Nazi bombardment of London, which only fortified British resistance during the Second World War. As North Vietnamese colonel Quach Hai Luong told to American colonel Herbert Schandler, "[e]very time you bombed the North, we said, we know we are succeeding in the South."
For its part, Hanoi also misunderstood the United States, assigning to it colonial aspirations similar to those of the French, who had oppressed Indochina for over a century. But unlike France, the United States was ambivalent about its role of a global power. Had Hanoi made efforts to better understand American fears and motives, it could have appealed to American anti-colonialism. Alas, Hanoi did not understand. It did not understand that the United States was not keen to carry out a military intervention in Vietnam, that it had refused to intervene to save the French at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954.
The third major failure was the bewildering lack of high-level communication between the two adversaries. Instead of initiating direct contact, the United States overwhelmingly relied on intermediaries, and Hanoi did not initiate any contact whatsoever. That behavior was somewhat justified, of course. Washington could not figure out how to contact a secretive Communist country, and Hanoi, afraid of seeming too weak for the vast and powerful United States, waited for the bigger power to make the first step toward negotiations. American intermediaries, while well-intentioned, were unreliable; they often misinterpreted the views of the other side and eventually proved to be ineffective sources. Furthermore, they were not used fruitfully, but only as carriers of information; few were asked for their insights on how to negotiate or to deal with existing adversaries. For instance, Raymond Aubrac, a French Resistance leader in whose house Ho Chi Minh had once lived, was never asked by Washington or by Hanoi to do anything other than carry the mail between Ho and Pham Van Dong, in Hanoi, and Henry Kissinger, who at the time served as the American contact in Paris.
The fourth major failure was the overall US decision-making process. In the American government, decision-making was not at all organized to deal productively with the extraordinarily complex array of political and military issues involved. "Policymakers did not raise fundamental questions, did not address basic issues about policy choices, and did not recognize their failure to do so," states McNamara. He outlines four main issues that should have been explored much more carefully when the United States intervened in Vietnam: 1) the actual gravity of the threat to American security; 2) the requirements for building a stable South Vietnam and an effective South Vietnamese military effort, which were essential for successful American involvement; 3) the potential usefulness of American military intervention in a conflict for which it was not prepared (guerrilla warfare); and 4) the diplomatic course the United States should follow in case of military defeat. The lack of thought this four crucial issues were given by American policymakers were the primary reason why the United States ended neck-deep in the Vietnamese quagmire.
Written by a knowledgeable insider – the same person who commissioned The Pentagon Papers – ARGUMENT WITHOUT END is undoubtedly an outstanding study. Secretary of Defense McNamara knows whereof he speaks when it comes to the Vietnam conflict and the American government's failures there. He had, after all, served two presidents associated with Vietnam – President John Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson. His analysis is clear and perceptive. Out of all the books on this subject I have read so far, McNamara's work is by far the most brilliant.
November 30, 2013
When In Retrospect first came out, some of the people at the college where I teach came up to me and said: "Did you hear? McNamara's published a book and he says the Viet Nam War was all a mistake!" Whoa - talk about your late-breaking news! Still, I suppose hearing those sentiments from the highest levels imparts a certain power to them that us lowly grunts could never hope to possess - but I think I recall saying "this is a big mistake" on my first patrol (I served in 'Nam in '68-'69).
The rub, of course, comes when we try to figure out WHY it was a mistake, and it is here that McNamara can give us something truly significant. That is his stated intent in this book. Does he? I think he does, but what he has to give us has been dished up many times before.
In preparation for this book, McNamara instituted a series of conferences between policy makers active during the "McNamara Years", from the U.S. and North Viet Nam. McNamara's stated goal is to search for "lost opportunities". Were there ways to avoid U.S. entanglement; or, having become entangled, were there ways for the U.S. to disengage before so many lives were lost? McNamara's idea here is to find those lost opportunities and lay them before the public.
So, it was with excitement that I read this book - maybe, finally, McNamara will come clean. And come clean he does, though not in the way he intended.
I knew I would have a different reaction to this book when I read how shocked McNamara was to learn the North Vietnamese side of the argument wanted to start in 1945 in the search for missed opportunities. McNamara's original intent was to limit discussion to the years 1961 - 1967; his years as Secretary of Defense. Here we have a sense of the man's over-arching ego; nothing important could have occurred before or after those dates. It is simply beyond my comprehension how the so-called "best and brightest" could be surprised at the date of 1945. For those of you who don't know, that's the date when the Vietnamese, under Ho Chi Minh, declared themselves independent of France, using words from the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration on the Rights of Man. That is the date that Bao Dai, the last emperor of Viet Nam, formally abdicated his throne and anointed Ho Chi Minh as his successor. That is the date when Ho Chi Minh made direct appeals to President Truman to ensure the rights of the Vietnamese were respected. It is a date that is no secret now, and wasn't then.
How, then, could the chief architect of American policy towards Viet Nam be so awesomely ignorant of such an important starting point? The answer to that question is one of the lessons one might draw from the war: U.S. policy makers had no interest in Viet Nam per se. It was merely a stage, upon which the righteous Americans would meet and defeat the forces of "the Evil Empire". The McNamaras and the Rusks and the Rostows felt no need to learn anything about their potential adversary - to our ultimate sorrow. Know Thy Enemy. That lesson is nothing new; applied to this specific war, one can find it in Fire in the Lake, Frances FitzGerald's excellent work about the war published in 1971. What is new is McNamara's bald admission that he really had no interest in learning about the Vietnamese, nor did anyone else in the American administrations.
Another interesting part of the book is McNamara's complete lack of understanding at the refusal of the North Vietnamese to negotiate while we were bombing them. Despite the numerous lessons about the failure of strategic bombing to shorten wars and "force" the enemy to the negotiating table, America pursued the continued bombing of North Viet Nam in order to accomplish those self-same goals. All of this was known to McNamara and his cronies, and yet they allowed the strategic bombing of North Viet Nam to be one of the major foci of American policy. And now, thirty years after McNamara's involvement in the war, he still doesn't get it.
I wish to touch on just one more facet of Argument Without End. It includes a chapter by Col. Herbert Schandler and McNamara, entitled "U.S. Military Victory in Vietnam: A Dangerous Illusion?" Most of the chapter was written by Schandler, who did his time in 'Nam in the infantry. The answer to the rhetorical question posed in the title is, Yes - a U.S. military victory in Viet Nam is and was a dangerous illusion. I strongly agree with that answer, and I'm glad this chapter is in the book. But, dollars to doughnuts, this chapter won't shut up those deluded folks who think "we could've won if only the military had been allowed to win". This is because Schandler never really answers those critics who contend that the military had its hands tied in Viet Nam. This is too bad, because the answer is not all that difficult to comprehend. If the military had done exactly as it pleased in Viet Nam, we still would have lost. Without the support of the people we were supposed to help, there was no hope. Herein lies another lesson from the war: if we aren't true to our democratic principles in our foreign policy, our foreign policy will fail. We pontificate at great length about "self-determination", but we sure didn't allow it in Viet Nam.
In the end, these two books show Robert Strange McNamara to be not very bright - certainly not the best. They show a man steeped in his own arrogance, and that arrogance in him and those around him cost thousands of American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives. But give the man credit, he doesn't flinch from laying it all before us - even if he doesn't completely understand exactly what it is he's telling us.
The rub, of course, comes when we try to figure out WHY it was a mistake, and it is here that McNamara can give us something truly significant. That is his stated intent in this book. Does he? I think he does, but what he has to give us has been dished up many times before.
In preparation for this book, McNamara instituted a series of conferences between policy makers active during the "McNamara Years", from the U.S. and North Viet Nam. McNamara's stated goal is to search for "lost opportunities". Were there ways to avoid U.S. entanglement; or, having become entangled, were there ways for the U.S. to disengage before so many lives were lost? McNamara's idea here is to find those lost opportunities and lay them before the public.
So, it was with excitement that I read this book - maybe, finally, McNamara will come clean. And come clean he does, though not in the way he intended.
I knew I would have a different reaction to this book when I read how shocked McNamara was to learn the North Vietnamese side of the argument wanted to start in 1945 in the search for missed opportunities. McNamara's original intent was to limit discussion to the years 1961 - 1967; his years as Secretary of Defense. Here we have a sense of the man's over-arching ego; nothing important could have occurred before or after those dates. It is simply beyond my comprehension how the so-called "best and brightest" could be surprised at the date of 1945. For those of you who don't know, that's the date when the Vietnamese, under Ho Chi Minh, declared themselves independent of France, using words from the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration on the Rights of Man. That is the date that Bao Dai, the last emperor of Viet Nam, formally abdicated his throne and anointed Ho Chi Minh as his successor. That is the date when Ho Chi Minh made direct appeals to President Truman to ensure the rights of the Vietnamese were respected. It is a date that is no secret now, and wasn't then.
How, then, could the chief architect of American policy towards Viet Nam be so awesomely ignorant of such an important starting point? The answer to that question is one of the lessons one might draw from the war: U.S. policy makers had no interest in Viet Nam per se. It was merely a stage, upon which the righteous Americans would meet and defeat the forces of "the Evil Empire". The McNamaras and the Rusks and the Rostows felt no need to learn anything about their potential adversary - to our ultimate sorrow. Know Thy Enemy. That lesson is nothing new; applied to this specific war, one can find it in Fire in the Lake, Frances FitzGerald's excellent work about the war published in 1971. What is new is McNamara's bald admission that he really had no interest in learning about the Vietnamese, nor did anyone else in the American administrations.
Another interesting part of the book is McNamara's complete lack of understanding at the refusal of the North Vietnamese to negotiate while we were bombing them. Despite the numerous lessons about the failure of strategic bombing to shorten wars and "force" the enemy to the negotiating table, America pursued the continued bombing of North Viet Nam in order to accomplish those self-same goals. All of this was known to McNamara and his cronies, and yet they allowed the strategic bombing of North Viet Nam to be one of the major foci of American policy. And now, thirty years after McNamara's involvement in the war, he still doesn't get it.
I wish to touch on just one more facet of Argument Without End. It includes a chapter by Col. Herbert Schandler and McNamara, entitled "U.S. Military Victory in Vietnam: A Dangerous Illusion?" Most of the chapter was written by Schandler, who did his time in 'Nam in the infantry. The answer to the rhetorical question posed in the title is, Yes - a U.S. military victory in Viet Nam is and was a dangerous illusion. I strongly agree with that answer, and I'm glad this chapter is in the book. But, dollars to doughnuts, this chapter won't shut up those deluded folks who think "we could've won if only the military had been allowed to win". This is because Schandler never really answers those critics who contend that the military had its hands tied in Viet Nam. This is too bad, because the answer is not all that difficult to comprehend. If the military had done exactly as it pleased in Viet Nam, we still would have lost. Without the support of the people we were supposed to help, there was no hope. Herein lies another lesson from the war: if we aren't true to our democratic principles in our foreign policy, our foreign policy will fail. We pontificate at great length about "self-determination", but we sure didn't allow it in Viet Nam.
In the end, these two books show Robert Strange McNamara to be not very bright - certainly not the best. They show a man steeped in his own arrogance, and that arrogance in him and those around him cost thousands of American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives. But give the man credit, he doesn't flinch from laying it all before us - even if he doesn't completely understand exactly what it is he's telling us.
Want to read
April 20, 2017
Mc Namara told us about "lessons to learn" from military history; one, most important, was/is "don't destroy nations". About the Vietnam war, he wrote: "we were wrong, terribly wrong". In 1995 (and afterwards on other occasions) he went to Vietnam to meet with Vietnamese officials and wondered about not having understood his past opponent. This book approaches those meetings. Views on both sides of the war are presented. An independent, neutral, South Vietnam was just an illusion.
As the rumbles of war in the Korean peninsula get louder, one cannot not escape wondering: did we understand North Korea?
April 9, 2012
Argument Without End* may as well be a tongue in cheek McNamara self-deprecation. The book is a slog. McNamara puts it to his readers this way: The subject of the Vietnam War can be handled in book-length or "capsule" length (i.e. as a scholarly paper). Scholarly papers are good: They're direct and decisive. But they can easily be challenged (and I imagine a lot of people willing to challenge anything Robert McNamara has to say). So McNamara gives the reader both. The book reinforces few enough points to be covered by a paper, but defends them doggedly from every possible approach to be sure its thesis is definitively watertight. Redundancy be damned.
McNamara likes order. Argument is partitioned into tidy columns to enumerate the many points - most of which are impeccably salient. But McNamara leaves us with one that's especially choice: Americans always think of Vietnam as though it revolved entirely around us. Conventional wisdom tells us the "domino theory" was false - and it certainly was. But knowing the domino theory is false is not the equivalent of learning from the many mistakes that characterize Vietnam. The biggest mistake - the lament McNamara made the mantra of his old age - was that neither side understood the other. Understanding the Vietnam War, in fact, is an impossibility if approached from only one side.
Argument Without End is the culmination of a series of workshops held in the late 1990s among government officials, high ranking military personnel, and scholars from both sides. The lesson learned in these forums can be easily summarized: oblivious dysfunction. The US felt the Vietnamese's beef was with the US and prescribed completely fantastic motives to a player who was actually just playing for time and little more. The Vietnamese were - as unkind as it sounds to say - geopolitical flotsam (not dominoes!) - stuck between the toughest kids in the neighborhood and lacking the confidence to stick up for themselves. Hell, they didn't even know how to start a conversation.
As McNamara points out with agonizing thoroughness, a million things went chronically wrong in the years between Dien Bien Phu and the eventual American withdrawal. His phrase that stuck with me - so characteristically analytical - is that in those eight years of heavy fighting, both sides were consistently wrong about everything at a rate of 100%. A 100% percent foreign policy trend, doubled, over a prolonged interval is quite an anomaly. That example really casts the surreal light needed to capture the atmospherics of the Vietnam tragedy.
..................
*I can't figure out how to do HTML on the GoodReads app, using my iPhone to type this review. After this initial use of italics I give up. Please excuse the bad style.
McNamara likes order. Argument is partitioned into tidy columns to enumerate the many points - most of which are impeccably salient. But McNamara leaves us with one that's especially choice: Americans always think of Vietnam as though it revolved entirely around us. Conventional wisdom tells us the "domino theory" was false - and it certainly was. But knowing the domino theory is false is not the equivalent of learning from the many mistakes that characterize Vietnam. The biggest mistake - the lament McNamara made the mantra of his old age - was that neither side understood the other. Understanding the Vietnam War, in fact, is an impossibility if approached from only one side.
Argument Without End is the culmination of a series of workshops held in the late 1990s among government officials, high ranking military personnel, and scholars from both sides. The lesson learned in these forums can be easily summarized: oblivious dysfunction. The US felt the Vietnamese's beef was with the US and prescribed completely fantastic motives to a player who was actually just playing for time and little more. The Vietnamese were - as unkind as it sounds to say - geopolitical flotsam (not dominoes!) - stuck between the toughest kids in the neighborhood and lacking the confidence to stick up for themselves. Hell, they didn't even know how to start a conversation.
As McNamara points out with agonizing thoroughness, a million things went chronically wrong in the years between Dien Bien Phu and the eventual American withdrawal. His phrase that stuck with me - so characteristically analytical - is that in those eight years of heavy fighting, both sides were consistently wrong about everything at a rate of 100%. A 100% percent foreign policy trend, doubled, over a prolonged interval is quite an anomaly. That example really casts the surreal light needed to capture the atmospherics of the Vietnam tragedy.
..................
*I can't figure out how to do HTML on the GoodReads app, using my iPhone to type this review. After this initial use of italics I give up. Please excuse the bad style.
December 12, 2014
It would be easy to dismiss this book as Robert McNamara's attempt to salvage his place in history - but it's so much more than that. Based on four different conferences between Vietnamese and American political, foreign service and military leaders from the period, the book takes a hard look at what McNamara calls "missed opportunities." McNamara starts from the point of view that "we know we got it wrong" and attempts to answer the question "why we got it wrong."
The United States, according to McNamara, saw Vietnam as a pawn in the larger geopolitical battle between the Communist and Non-Communist world. In short, we believed that Vietnam was a "domino" that if allowed to fall would have large implications in the over-all struggle to contain communist expansion. The Vietnamese saw the United States as a colonial power in the mold of the French that sought to subjugate Vietnam for its own economic and political ends. Both these assumptions, McNamara writes, were tragically wrong. In reality, the Vietnamese feared China because they had been a occupying power that had historically dominated Vietnam. Furthermore, they distrusted the Soviet Union whom they believed had forced them into an impossible political situation at the Geneva Conference. Likewise, the United States had no desire to exploit Vietnam in the way the French did, but rather wanted to create an environment in which a friendly Democratic government, along the lines of the one we'd help create in the Philippines after WWII, could grow and prosper.
The United States, according to McNamara, saw Vietnam as a pawn in the larger geopolitical battle between the Communist and Non-Communist world. In short, we believed that Vietnam was a "domino" that if allowed to fall would have large implications in the over-all struggle to contain communist expansion. The Vietnamese saw the United States as a colonial power in the mold of the French that sought to subjugate Vietnam for its own economic and political ends. Both these assumptions, McNamara writes, were tragically wrong. In reality, the Vietnamese feared China because they had been a occupying power that had historically dominated Vietnam. Furthermore, they distrusted the Soviet Union whom they believed had forced them into an impossible political situation at the Geneva Conference. Likewise, the United States had no desire to exploit Vietnam in the way the French did, but rather wanted to create an environment in which a friendly Democratic government, along the lines of the one we'd help create in the Philippines after WWII, could grow and prosper.
August 28, 2012
How grey is life really? Robert McNamara, who I thought the devil incarnate while at university, has an epiphany. This startling book is one of the manifestations of that epiphany. It is a ringing affirmation that once the gloves come off, for whatever reason, and someone shouts "Game On!" life changes. I have not been in combat. Men I know who have say that it is a chaos beyond expectation, training and understanding. This book details the folly of considering that I know what motives lie beneath the actions of another. It details a fundamental misunderstanding between nations so profound as to be ludicrous. The participants that R. McNamara draws together are stunned at what they discover. And so was I, and I was close to the center of the anti war movement. I didn't really get what had happened. This is a supreme eye opener to be followed only by, imo, a spiritual grounding which can assuage my bitterness, betrayal, disappointment, antagonism and animosity. I cannot overcome what I know. I can only surrender.
April 25, 2008
Very interesting and unique format in which 20-30 years after the events in question, many of the leading scholars and decision makers on both sides of what Americans call the Vietnam War gathered together to discuss their perspecetives on the events in question. The results are fascinating and challenge many of the assumptions typically held by Western studenst of the war. My rating is not higher because I think McNamara at times is tendencious in interepreting the fatcs to support his overarching theory that there were many opportunities to avoid completely or greatly mitigate the violence and damage inflicted by the war that were missed based on mutual misunderdstandings of the motives and interests of the other side. I think this point has merits but M pushes it too far and I think fails to be sufficiently skeptical regarding the motives and intentions that his North Vietamese counterparts claim to have had at the time.
October 6, 2014
Incredible, and sad. Everything you need to know about What Happened in Vietnam, from the perspective of both US and Vietnam office holders in power at the time.
So much more to say about this book but...there's really no point in more platitudes. It's just fantastic to have so much info in one volume.
Could it happen again? Absolutely. Rarely do the people in power learn from past mistakes in past administrations. No one ever thinks it could happen to them...that they know better...
So much more to say about this book but...there's really no point in more platitudes. It's just fantastic to have so much info in one volume.
Could it happen again? Absolutely. Rarely do the people in power learn from past mistakes in past administrations. No one ever thinks it could happen to them...that they know better...
February 21, 2015
It was a long slog to get through it. It was not as good as In Retrospect. I am convinced that the US could not have won militarily in Vietnam, however once I floated this idea by a friend he said that of course we could have won militarily.
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October 3, 2007Phenomenal ... Angering ... War is preventable.
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