On Contrition

Robert McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense who was responsible for dragging the U.S. into the Vietnam War, died this morning at the age of 93.

The well-researched Times obituary is definitely worth reading -- all six online pages of it.

One interesting part of McNamara's story is his public apology, decades after the fact, for his part in the Vietnam War:

In 1995, 14 years after leaving public life, he published his denunciation of the Vietnam War and his role in it, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam” (Times Books/Random House), for which he was denounced in turn.

Unlike any other secretary of defense, Mr. McNamara struggled in public with the morality of war and the uses of American power.

I've been doing some reading recently on the Manhattan Project and the scientists involved in developing the atomic bomb. Many of them, like McNamara with Vietnam, have expressed public contrition for their role in creating a weapon which destroyed tens of thousands of lives and continues to destabalize areas of the world.

For many, this contrition came much faster than it did for McNamara. In their excellent biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin note that on the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, many of the scientists at Los Alamos wept or became sick while the uniformed military security forces at the research facility celebrated. Some of the scientists had left the project once Germany surrendered, stating that they had only agreed to work on the bomb because they had believed that the Germans intended to develop one to use against the U.S. An even larger group of Los Alamos scientists had requested that they be allowed to demonstrate the power of the bomb for the benefit of Japanese observers, who presumably would then agree to surrender instead of facing nuclear destruction.

Many of these scientists, including Oppenheimer, began pushing for a ban on nuclear development after World War II. It took McNamara longer to come around, although his denunciation of the Vietnam War was timed to coincide with the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

It's difficult to imagine any of our recent leaders expressing contrition for military decisions they may have made in office. President Bush, after all, has refused to say that he would have done anything differently about Iraq, or any other aspect of his presidency, if given the opportunity.

Some of the Democratic presidential candidates for the 2008 nomination had voted in favor of invading Iraq, and several of them stated that they regretted their votes, but we get the impression that it isn't something which keeps them up at night.

It's inconceivable that, decades from now, Donald Rumsfeld or Condoleeza Rice or anyone else will come forward and apologize for the role they played in dragging the U.S. into Iraq in 2003. Nor are we likely to see contrition from executives of Halliburton or other corporations which have profited nicely from the conflict.

Then again, I don't think many people would have expected the same from McNamara when he left the Pentagon in 1967. Sometimes the passage of time can help us see our errors.