McNamara and Morrison: Lives of a Lost War

 

McNamara and Morrison: Lives of a Lost War

Peter Schultz

 

                  Robert Strange McNamara and Norman Morrison shared a common fate because both affirmed the political as it appeared in the war in Vietnam. McNamara, of course, was the Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations. He had concluded, toward the end of 1965 but certainly by 1966 that the war could not be won militarily. Nonetheless, for the next two years he pursued the war: “He would grow more darkly pessimistic, and he would stay. He would serve up the hard truth on the inside, sometimes, and he would nonetheless go on, agreeing to and designing further escalations, sending more platoons of the low-echelon into the high elephant grass.” [The Living and the Dead, p. 231] “’McNamara was still providing the president with an enormous amount of detailed, optimistic information … that the thing was working.’” [ibid] As George Ball put it: “He couldn’t face the implications of his own logic.” [ibid] That is, he was committed to affirming the political and his affirmations led him into a futile savagery.

 

                  Norman Morrison, on November 2, 1965, set himself on fire at the Pentagon, close to McNamara’s office, where he was, for a while, holding his baby daughter, Emily. Emily survived while Norman did not, dying amid kerosene induced flames as his way of protesting the war in Vietnam. Morrison was a Quaker and a pacifist, and left behind a wife, another daughter and a son. It is thought he brought his daughter with him to let Americans see what it looked like when children are incinerated, as was happening in Vietnam. He, too, was affirming the political, thinking that his actions would bring an end to Vietnam war.

 

                  Both men couldn’t let go of the Vietnam war and, I believe, they couldn’t because they both were affirming the political, seeking to win or end the war politically. Even though he knew the war couldn’t be won militarily, McNamara persisted in waging it. McNamara could not just walk away from the war. He was compelled to wage it and that compulsion was a reflection of his affirmation of the political. And Morrison, who knew the war was obscene, inhuman, and futile could not let it go. He too could not walk away from it and, in fact, he was prepared to sacrifice his baby daughter on the altar of that war. Like McNamara, he could not walk away from it, thereby affirming it.

 

                  If this is what comes from affirming the political, then it is fair to say that affirming the political leads to a willingness to incinerate children, as illustrated by the policies of McNamara and the actions of Norman Morrison. And the Pentagon, the five-sided monstrosity called the Department of Defense, visibly represents our affirmation of the political as do the actions that are authorized in it and actions like Morrison’s outside it. The Pentagon is modernity’s disguise for savagery.

 

[The citations are from The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War, by Paul Hendrickson, 1996]