The Lesson Is Simple: Don’t Lie

“We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.” - Robert S. McNamara former secretary of defense, speaking of the Vietnam War

There it is. Thank you, Mr. McNamara.

“Stop the presses!” is the way we in the newspaper bidness say, “This is REALLY important.” I wish there were some way to stop all the presses - to get all the spin doctors and O.J. media hypesters and smug Republicans and back-pedaling Democrats and busy moms and teens who read only about Madonna to sit down, be quiet and listen to Robert McNamara for a little while.

Odd but appropriate that as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of our victory in the Good War, we also should be reminded of the one we mucked up. Important, so important, for everyone holding public office, everyone, to consider the possibility that 20 years hence they too may have to sit down and write: “We were wrong, terribly wrong.”

And for those of us who were outside the Pentagon, on the other side of all those fences and police lines, trying to scream truth to power, we, too, have something to learn from McNamara’s confession.

Much as I like to make fun of the Decline of Absolutely Everything Gang, it does worry me that “history,” in contemporary American usage, is a synonym for “toast.” Because unless we understand how we got from the end of World War II - when we were the good guys, when we liked ourselves and stood for the right stuff, not to mention free chewing gum for foreign kids - to the end of the Vietnam War, then we cannot understand how we got from the end of Nam to where we are now. All this distrust and dislike that Americans now have for one another - all this cynicism. How did we get from GI Joe and “Kilroy Was Here” to fragging and FTA? From raising the flag at Iwo Jima to My Lai? How many lies did our government tell us before no one believed it anymore?

No one person can wholly understand a tragedy like Vietnam, but I plan to put McNamara’s book on the small shelf of indispensable books, along with Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” and Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie.” McNamara, ever the numbers-cruncher, offers us Reasons 1 Through 11, rather in the style of H&R Block, for why millions of people died in vain. Lying is one of them. Anything new? Wrong time, wrong place, wrong side equal wrong war. McNamara says John F. Kennedy was ready, in the fall of 1963, “to bug out,” as Lyndon B. Johnson later put it. There was a lot on the line in Dallas that Nov. 22.

McNamara’s subtitle is “Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.” Funny - people have been writing, and living, tragedies at least since the ancient Greeks, but are the lessons ever really new? The Greeks used to blame tragedy on hubris, the Greek word for a kind of poisonous pride, the pride of the just man who, because his intentions are noble, does not question himself or permit others to do so. In other languages, there are separate words for good-pride and bad-pride (for example, in French, fierte and orgueil). McNamara painfully details all the times they could have listened, should have listened to those who disagreed. John Kenneth Galbraith, whose dissenting opinions on Vietnam got him labeled “not useful,” believes McNamara’s book is one of the most important of our time.

What are we to learn, then, aside from the modest assessment I made years ago: You cannot prop up a government that does not have the support of its own people. McNamara concurs. And we should have learned that from Chiang Kaishek.

Part of the poison of Vietnam is that we ended it as badly as we fought it, and for that, I blame Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Lies, lies, lies, right through the end. It has taken us years, while the poison has spread, to lance the wound and let the pus out. By now, we believe all politicians are liars. Last week in Washington, speaking to a group of journalists, I vigorously insisted that it is a far more important obligation of ours to root out official lies than it is to report on the private behavior of public officials. Came the question: “Do you really think lying is worse than adultery? Than breaking a vow made before God and company?”

I don’t know. I do know that it ain’t my job to know. All a journalist can do is cover the public realm; judgment of private lives is left to biographers, spouses and God. In the public realm, lying is the original sin. And the only antidote for it is the truth told as unsparingly as Robert McNamara has done. God knows, we certainly need still more of it; all the files of the CIA, the most hubris-driven organization on Earth, must be made public.

So our lessons are: Don’t lie. Certitude is the enemy. Self-doubt is good. Particularly difficult lessons in a nervous age, when the search for certainty compels so many.

This column is dedicated to one of the 58,000-plus names on The Wall.

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