It would help if we stopped trying to make sense of things. Then we
might see
the world as it is. I always think of God as the one entity that never,
ever
tries to make sense of things. But being human we are addicts for
meaning.
Even those among us who say, “There is no meaning” mainlinethat meaning
– trying to make sense of things in spite of themselves. Last week
somebody
blew up a lot of children, women, and men in a federal building in
Oklahoma
City, and people were actually saying that it would make more sense if
it had
happened in New York or L.A. Or it would make more sense if it had been
an
abortion clinic. People say these things, and others listen, and
neither the
saying nor the listening makes any more sense than the explosion. All
of it,
the explosion and its aftermath, marks a desperation for meaning that
is,
itself, senseless.
If we can ascribe a meaning to it will we be less afraid? Or will
we have
again merely deadened, for however brief a moment, our sense of
senselessness?
A sensation of senselessness has been pervasive among us for some
time. Many
date its beginning, sentimentally, to the assassination of John
Kennedy. More
acute observers go back to Hiroshima or Auschwitz. But most agree that
a
nameless dread became unavoidable in daily life during the Vietnam War.
More
than guilt, it is this dread that has kept us from coming to terms with
that
war. We had plenty to be guilty about before Vietnam, but those things
didn’t
seem to bother us as much. They inspired rage in some, yet didn’t
invoke dread.
But sometime during that war we began to smell dread in the very air,
and
nothing since has cleansed us.
A man named Robert MacNamara, who 30 years ago was our Secretary of
Defense
and privy to the highest levels of information (or “intelligence,” as
it’s
called), recently published a memoir that performs at least one
service: It
assures, once and for all, that nobody’s ever going to make much sense
of
Vietnam. And also that, if our dread comes from a sensation of
senselessness,
then we’d better get used to it.
They called it “MacNamara’s War” because he, more than anyone, was
responsible
for its strategy. Now he says that “we [he and his fellow strategists]
were
wrong, terribly wrong.” They over-estimated the effectiveness of
high-tech
weapons, and wouldn’t admit, though proof mounted every day, that you
can’t
cripple an agrarian people by bombing. Their “domino theory,” that said
if one
country went “communist” many would follow, was a paranoid fantasy.
They
ignored 1,000 years of conflict between Vietnam and China, and couldn’t
see
that North Vietnam was China’s enemy, not its ally. Didn’t even
understand that
North Vietnam was fighting a nationalist, not a political, war.
Yet at the time, there were a lot of 18-year-olds demonstrating
against the
war who, it turns out, understood these issues quite well, and made
precisely
those points. The kids had no access to classified “intelligence,” but
read
books and newspapers that anyone could read. Dwell on this a moment. It
is an
extraordinary fact. Billions of dollars were spent gathering
Mac-Namara’s
“intelligence.” By comparison, the kids spent pennies for theirs. Yet
history
has proven that the kids got it right.
The Nineties bear a horror of those Sixties kids, usually explained
by the
social and sexual behavior of a small percentage called “hippies.” It
seems a
disproportionate amount of horror to be directed at what a very few did
for six
or seven years – especially when most of those kids grew to be such
solid
stalwarts of the middle class. But the horror makes more sense, if it’s
sense
you’re looking for, if it has more to do with the fear that on the
biggest
issue of their day (Vietnam), the enormous data-processing system that
was
called “the establishment” got it wrong, and the kids got it right.
This, far
more than LSD, is quite enough to unhinge a culture. It undermines
every
assumption about who-knows-what upon which culture is built.
For government derives its authority less from the consent of the
governed
than from a general consensus about who knows what and who knows best.
When
enough people begin to feel that their government not only doesn’t know
best,
but doesn’t know much, authority begins to fall apart.
Robert MacNamara’s memoirs have been so disturbing because they
demonstrate
that, at the highest levels of government, powerful people felt they
were
making disastrous mistakes, yet couldn’t stop themselves. MacNamara
could not
bring himself to change policy, resign, or speak out. The violent
deaths of
58,000 Americans and three to four million Vietnamese are horrifying no
matter
why they died. But what deepens the dread beyond measure is that the
people
implementing these decisions didn’t even think they were right; rather,
though
MacNamara and others knew they were wrong, they simply couldn’t stop
themselves
– couldn’t control themselves.
When the inability to control oneself causes the death of even one
other
person, it’s often defined clinically as insanity. Nobody knows how to
define
it when it causes deaths in the millions.
In a search for sense, commentators have been blaming MacNamara
personally,
buying into the idea that it really was “MacNamara’s War.” They cherish
the
notion that if he had spoken out in 1966 or ’67, when he’d come to the
conclusion that America’s policy was doomed, everything would have been
different.
As Hemingway once said, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” But it’s easy
to forget
two factors: first, that before the Watergate coverage of 1973-74, most
American journalists parroted the official government line so
faithfully that
now we’d hardly call it “reporting.” From The New York Times on
down,
they felt it was their patriotic duty to print government hand-outs
that they
knew were inaccurate, when it involved issues of “national
security.”
(As the Gulf War proved, many still feel this way.) Second: in 1966,
the vast
majority of Americans not only were solidly pro-war, but had a deep
faith that
their government told the truth. It is difficult now to comprehend what
contempt middle America had for the anti-war movement then. President
Lyndon
Johnson was already circulating rumors to the press that Robert
MacNamara was
having a “nervous breakdown.” If, in fact, MacNamara had gone public
with his
doubts, Johnson was preparing an “official line” that MacNamara had
gone crazy.
The press would have parroted Johnson’s line, and most Americans would
have
believed it. Would basic policy have changed? Maybe, but not much, and
not
quickly.
This doesn’t clear MacNamara in any way. He’s a coward and a war
criminal. He
was having serious doubts before the war escalated in 1964, and
that was
the time to make his move. But, alas, as he fails to mention: ’64 was
an
election year. Thereafter, his policy killed many more children, women,
and men
every day than terrorists in Oklahoma City did last week. The
same is
true of Walt Rostow, Lyndon Johnson, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon,
and all
who wreaked horror on Vietnam from the sanctuary of their protected
offices.
But blaming them, and blaming MacNamara, is just another pathetic stab
at
making sense of the senseless.
For it wasn’t MacNamara’s War, or theirs. It was ours.
Tolstoy said in War and Peace, “the activity of the millions
who
migrate, burn houses, abandon agriculture [and industry], and slaughter
one
another, is never expressed in the account of the activity of some
dozen men
who did not burn houses, abandon their fields [and factories], or slay
their
fellow creatures.”
Vietnam was the war of every taxpayer who consented to pay for it,
as much as
it was the war of every young soldier who was “just following orders.”
It was
the war of every protester who loved protesting so much that they
regretted
when there was no more war to protest. It was the war of every laborer
and
union leader who defended the “defense industry,” and the war of every
entrepreneur who profited. It was the war of every teacher who taught
our
history as a cartoon of pretty lies, and the war of every minister so
blasphemous as to invoke God as our spiritual A-bomb. It was the war of
every
person who didn’t care how their comforts were “defended,” so long as
they
didn’t have to think too much.
Unlike MacNamara, the rest of us can say that Vietnam wasn’t our
idea. But
when you consider the carnage, that’s not much to hide behind. It took
the
entire country to make that war – not just a few crazies in the White
House.
It was ugly then, and no amount of lies and revision will make it
less ugly.
MacNamara can be thanked, at least, for reminding us just how ugly and
pointless it really was, and for making the lies harder to tell.
(Notice how
silent Newt and his crew have been about him?) But we’re just going to
have to
live with the dread of its meaninglessness, because it didn’t make
sense then,
and it’s never going to.
This article appears in April 28 • 1995 and April 28 • 1995 (Cover).