MISSOURI COMMENTARY: MCNAMARA'S VIEWS: 25 YEARS LATER

Cabinet ministers in Great Britain are expected to resign when a policy issue so offends their judgment as to give them no choice but to depart. Both of the great Churchills, Lord Randolph and Sir Winston, left government over conscience and constituency: "conscience" In that they could not continue as a matter of intellectual integrity; "constituency" in that they owed the citizenry their candor and forthrightness.

In the United States, it hasn't been that way. Year after year, Robert McNamara, first John Kennedy's and later Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense, became increasingly disenchanted with the policies he was asked to execute in Vietnam. Yet he stayed in office while the war escalated until his presence at the Pentagon finally became untenable. As McNamara puts it in his new book, "A cabinet officer's authority and legitimacy derives from the president. ... I believe that (to resign) would have been a violation of my responsibility to the president and my oath to uphold the Constitution. ... I was loyal to the presidency and loyal to him. ... I believed I could influence (a change in) his decisions."

A tormented quarter of a century after he resigned as secretary of Defense, McNamara makes perhaps the most exhaustive confession of gross error in judgment of any major public figure within memory. He had more to do with the day-to-day operation of the Vietnam War then any other official in Washington. In a sense, it was his war, "McNamara's War," and he now says that it was "wrong, terribly wrong."

It's an incredible story of "mostly honest" (McNamara's words) mistakes based on misjudgment, miscalculation, misinterpretation and misinformation. At all levels of the State Department and the Pentagon, every decision flowed from the three irrefutable premises. First, if South Vietnam surrendered to Ho Chi Minh, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Malaysia would "fall like dominoes." India, Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia and maybe even Japan would be in jeopardy.

Second, the U.S. must "contain" communism wherever it reared its ugly head. Ho Chi Minh's nationalistic fervor to unite Vietnam was, pure and simple, just another phase of monolithic communism on its incessant march.

Third, in the words of Secretary of State Dean Rusk's repeated pronouncement, "If our commitment to Vietnam becomes unreliable, the communist world will draw conclusions that would lead to our ruin and almost certainly to a catastrophic war."

It is difficult now to comprehend how "the best and the brightest" could so tenaciously cling rock solid to these assumptions as to be to beyond challenge or debate.

Sprinkled throughout the book's accounts of the period from the time Lyndon Johnson became president in 1963 to the day McNamara left as secretary of Defense in 1968, are quotations from memos, conversations or observations with words such as these: "The situation in South Vietnam is steadily worsening ... the overall situation is fragile ... there is a tide of deterioration ... conditions have worsened steadily ... South Vietnam isn't going well ... the SV government is unraveling ... there is a growing realization that the bombing is ineffective ... the SV Army, plagued by poor leadership and desertions, is racing toward collapse ... SV is crumbling ... we remained in constant turmoil over Vietnam ... our basic assumptions provide incorrect ... a corrupt Saigon bureaucracy and poor coordination between South Vietnamese and Americans dogged our efforts. ..."

Much of this devastating bad news McNamara kept away from the president because he was "loyal" to the president. Walt Rostow, Johnson's National Security adviser, was, according to McNamara, "optimistic by nature and tended to be skeptical of any report that failed to indicate we were making progress." Rostow only told Johnson only "good news." As far as the president himself, he always wanted "to paint a rosy picture of the war," fearing the truth would have a negative impact on his domestic programs. Lies compounded lies. Fantasy built on fantasy. The American people were deemed incapable of handling the truth.

McNamara's book may resolve the war for him, but not for everyone else. If his disclosures had come more contemporaneously with the events, perhaps he could have contributed to an earlier termination of that wrong-headed war.

President Bill Clinton views the McNamara book as some sort of vindication for his draft avoidance. Vice President Dan Quayle and Sen. Phil Gramm, both of whom have been silent on the McNamara book, likewise skirted the draft. The death toll in Vietnam was 58,000. We have no way of knowing how many of these men and women wished they might have been somewhere else.

~Tom Eagleton is a former U.S. senator from Missouri and a columnist for the Pulitzer Publishing Co.