How I Almost Pitched McNamara Into the Sea

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/farago07082009.html


Incident at Buzzard's Bay

In the end, Robert McNamara said his mea culpas for the Vietnam War. He had been Secretary of Defense; his demeanor and bearing not unlike Donald Rumsfeld's -- utterly convinced he was right even when overwhelming evidence had proven him wrong.

I almost met McNamara, once. I had just finished my first year as an undergraduate at Yale where, like other Ivy League schools, the surefire, wrong logic of the Domino Theory held a sturdy grip. On a blustery, late spring day, I took a ferry from Wood's Hole to Martha's Vineyard looking for as summer job. The year was 1972. The season had not yet started and the vessel was nearly empty. In the middle of Buzzards Bay, I went outside to the walkway in the lee of the wind. I passed behind a solitary man leaning against the rail, staring into the sea and the ferry's surging wake. It was Robert McNamara.

I was young and strong as a bull. He already seemed a faded mimeograph. We leaned against the rail on forearms, captured by thoughts turning like waves and set free in the wash fading without any record. After a while, he returned to the ferry cabin. A few months later, on that same passage, a stranger-- furious at McNamara for his prosecution of the war-- would try to throw him overboard. The obituary said he had been ill for a long time. Robert McNamara lived to the ripe age of 93.
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[WI_DEM]

1. McNamara in my opinion was a piece of work--he tried to play it both ways

he would privately tell his Georgetown liberal friends at cocktail parties about his "reservations" about the war and then the next morning go into the oval office and egg on LBJ, who as the WH tapes indicate did have genuine concerns about the war but "the best and brightest" McNamara and Bundy pushed him on. The interesting thing is that when LBJ finally did get rid of McNamara and got Clark Clifford in as Defense Secretary in early 1968, Johnson did finally begin to try and de-escalate the war. Everybody remembers the 3/31/68 speech by LBJ as the speech where he withdrew from the race for president, but most of the speech dealt with Vietnam and a bombing halt.

[camera obscura]

2. Bragging about almost killing a guy. Charming.

[JVS]

4. It's no shotgun to the sternum of John Warner either!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x232535#233373

[Canuckistanian]

3. That seems to be the whole story

I read about this on HuffPo yesterday. The guy spotted McNamara in the bar and posed as a crewmember and lured McNamara away to "answer a telephone call".

Then Farago grabbed McNamara by the belt and collar and tried to heave him overboard. There was a struggle and Mcnamara ended up clinging to a grille on the side of the ship. Others intervened and saved McNamara.

Strangely enough, McNamara refused to press charges and Farago got off the boat.

And even stranger, this event wasn't reported in the media.

[izzybeans]

5. Makes me wish my encounter with Rumsfield had gone differently.

chronicled here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=283x415