A Different Kaus
I met McNamara once, at a conference. He was self-effacing, and breathtakingly concise. I understand the charm. But there is something wrong with a culture in which a McNamara is feted for his “guts” while George McGovern and Gene McCarthy, who opposed McNamara’s mistakes, are regarded as nobodies. In one of the uglier passages of In Retrospect, McNamara sneers at the antiwar protesters who marched on the Pentagon in 1967. If they had been more “disciplined” and “Gandhi-like,” he says, “they could have achieved their objective of shutting us down.” Instead they were “troublemakers” who “threw mud balls” and “even unzipped [soldiers'] flies.” This is contrition? Shouldn’t McNamara be admitting that the mudball-throwers, after all, had been right?
That’s Mickey Kaus, being a liberal, back in 1995 writing for The New Republic. Way more surprisingly, though-provoking, and interesting than any quantity of tired “contrarianism” about how conservatives are always right about everything.
29 Responses to “A Different Kaus”
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July 6th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Ooh, you’ve done it now, you’ve invoked McGovern who Will Allen will tell you is the monster responsible for Pol Pot’s rise in Cambodia. Hell, to hear Will tell it you can hardly tell the difference between McGovern and Pol Pot.
July 6th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
The fact that the 100,000+ parents who lost children in Vietnam never cut McNamara’s throat some dark night — that McNamara died around age 93 — is why Dick Cheney felt emboldened to send 4500+ fathers, husbands and sons to their needless deaths for the sake of Big Oil.
July 6th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Speaking about “liberals” and war, Amanda Terkel is carrying the CAP flag high today. Excellent job, only problem now is coming up with wittier joke than all the obvious contenders.
July 6th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Also, McNamara and Lyndon Johnson died peacefully in their sleep –not screaming in agony for several hours.
Meanwhile, some asshole has killed several people in South Carolina — victims who appear innocent of any wrongdoing.
What was it Vin Diesel told the priest in “The Chronicles of Riddick”?
” Oh, there you would be wrong, Father…. I believe there is a God.
And i absolutely hate the sick motherfucker.”
July 6th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
this does give me a chance to recommend norman mailer’s the armies of the night….
July 6th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Interesting how some people thought Fog of War was “too easy” on McNamara. I thought it was devestating, in that it allowed him to indict himself with his own words.
It is, indeed, a sad, sad thing that he reached such an advanced age before dying. One would hope that there really is a hell for people like him. Though my personal wish is not that of Mr. Williams; I would have liked to have seen him tried for his crimes and hanged by the neck until dead. The rule of law and all of that.
July 6th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I agree with Kaus about the unfair DFH treatment of McGovern and McCarthy but I am with McNamara on the characterization of the actual dirty fucking hippies protesting in the 1960s. The mud thrower types were self indulgent assholes who were self defeating and outwardly destructive. They made no attempt to separate policymakers from the grunts carrying out bullshit policies (spitting on soldiers is a myth but routinely calling soldiers “babykillers” happened). They allowed the mass of antiwar people to be painted with the radical, violent brush and they made it more difficult for moderates and fence sitters to rally to their side.
July 6th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
McNamara was sorely, tragically in the wrong in advising on VN from the time LBJ took over, but as to the March on the Pentagon, to his credit he was one of those most responsible for ensuring it didn’t result in death or serious injury to either side, as he ordered that no guns be loaded. Unlike, say, Kent State.
I wouldn’t doubt the sincerity of those protesters that day. Just as I wouldn’t doubt that the FBI had planted a few bogies in the bunch and had them go to the front line to stir up trouble.
Also, I’m not sure McN didn’t make a fair point, assuming there was some troublemaking that day, in that had the march’s organizers been fully in control, they may well have been able to shut down the bldg that day with a massive sit down, given their numbers and given that (at least back then) the bldg was wide open on all four sides and that Lyndon had sent all the soldiers over to Nam.
As for Mickey’s whining about poor old Gene McC, the guy had his chance in 68, but after Kennedy was shot, he strangely went AWOL and failed to show up to back fellow Minnesotan Humphrey. And he mostly was quiet, if memory serves, for the time of Nixon’s tenure — except to pop up every four years in the 70s and 80s to mischievously run for president as an outsider, the job Ralph Nader has now taken.
July 6th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
please don’t mention or quote Mickey Kaus here again. please.
July 6th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Mickey Kaus’s article doesn’t strike me as thoughtful or correct. Sure McNamara didn’t resign after JFK was killed. Since the Cold Warriors seemed pretty intent on doing things likely to result in a nuclear war, which neither JFK nor McNamara thought highly of, McNamara apparently didn’t think quitting would be responsible. (You might recall, those were the times of Seven Days in May.) Anybody who thinks Vietnam was McNamara’s idea needs to do more reading and thinking. Hell, Vietnam wasn’t even LBJ’s idea (not that LBJ was admirable). The fact that McNamara didn’t quit so that the hawks could blow up the whole world strikes me as positive. I never heard McNamara claim to be a saint, and like JFK and most everybody else, he wasn’t. But unlike Rumsfeld and Cheney and either Bush, he certainly wasn’t a villain.
July 6th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Interesting how your approval of Kaus coincides with his ability to predict the precise thesis of a book you would write 10 years later……
July 6th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Interesting how your approval of Kaus coincides with his ability to predict the precise thesis of a book you would write 10 years later……
Huh. Does this mean that Yglesias is five years away from blowing goats?
July 6th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
McNamara is a good Exhibit A when the debate turns to Smarts vs Temperament/Character.
Is the best leader first and foremost smart or is s/he of good temperament/character?
And should all candidates for office be required to take IQ and Personality tests?
July 6th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
While I am sure there is a place for the same old discussion as to what a horrible person McNamara was, the point of this post was to provide some insight into the morphing of Kaus.
I am completely unable to determine still whether Kaus really is the conservative he seems to play or whether it was merely his yearning for contrary thought to incite hits on his site.
Although, the more interesting thesis is that initially he was trying to take the “devil’s advocate” approach toward arguments and eventually started believing his own bull.
Either way, Kaus is no longer relevant to any debate, because in his attempts to become unpredictable, his position on any issue has become predictable.
July 6th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Nobody should forget that McNamara was also the prophet of record for pretty much all primary nuclear warfighting strategies — from Mutual Assured Destruction to flexible response, from the need for anti-missile defense to the imperative NOT to develop it. Bad as any sensible person has to consider the whole terrifying theology of it, those WERE the doctrines — and in truth, they must have worked cuz we didn’t blow up the world.
At least, not yet.
McNamara took over the Defense Department in 1961 when it was clear that the Soviets would soon finally be able to directly attack the United States (not to mention Cuba in 1962). That was arguably the scariest moment in world history — including right before Pickett’s charge, Hitler’s rise or any other moment anybody can name.
1961 was the heyday of MAD — if Krushchev took out NY, we’d blow up the world. Honest, that was the plan. Then the nukes became more accurate, and reaction time nearly disappeared.
So by the mid-60s, that calculus wasn’t enough — the idea was that if either side could take out the other’s accurate nuclear weapons first (that is, the counterforce weapons that could destroy the other side’s accurate nukes), they could ‘win’ a nuclear exchange because the only possible retaliation left would be counter-value. That is, if the Soviets took out our accurate nuclear missiles in a first strike, we’d have to surrender — or blow up the world by attacking their cities, which would mean they would attack OUR cities, which they’d have spared in the first strike.
So McNamara (who had earlier insisted defending against a nuclear attack was not possible) put us on the missile defense path. We stepped off it later with the ABM Treaty — and back on, with Reagan’s High Frontier stuff. But that’s all elaboration: the real crisis was roughly 61-73, most of it prepared by, or actually part of McNamara’s work.
I agree with Kaus, and everybody else who notes McNamara did a profoundly irresponsible thing in going along on Vietnam — knowing, as he did, that the Vietnam protestors were right and LBJ was wrong. I’ve even taken my share of shots at McNamara, who could be said (only somewhat unfairly) to have gone from developing the carpet bombing of the Strategic Air Command in WW2, to helping Ford market the Edsel, to the nuclear theology of the Cold War, to Vietnam, and finally went to the World Bank where he gave us Third World Debt. Ya gotta admit, it’s a helluva record.
But in the end, this was a guy who had a decisive job in making sure that the first two atomic weapons used in war would also be the last two: so say this for him — he kept his watch.
July 6th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Recognizably Kaus. Yes much more thought provoking (which is like saying larger than a polio virus). However, the key word in the paragraph is “sneers.” Kaus quotes McNamara asserting things which are true and of some historical interest. He criticizes McNamara for his tone of voice “sneering” without demonstrating that there was any such tone. Kaus’s argument is, as usual, an unsupported assertion.
Now the question of whether McNamara ever admitted that he was wrong wrong wrong about Vietnam might be worth discussing (I’m not sure he ever admitted it explicitly but he did resign as secretary of defense against Johnson’s wishes). It does not follow that McNamara should never say anything about anti Vietnam war protestors except that he McNamara was wrong on the central issue.
I’m sure that what is going on is that Kaus was a loudmouthed anti war protester (he must have been given his age, claim to be a liberal and the fact that he is a loud mouth). Kaus deeply resents any implicit criticism of Kaus. While I’m sure he was right about the US involvement in the war in Vietnam, I don’t find his self love much more interesting when it focuses on M Kaus circa 1967 than when it focuses on M Kaus circa 2009.
July 6th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Matt,
You definitely have a bad case of Kaus-envy.
July 6th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
“Way more surprisingly, though-provoking, and interesting than any quantity of tired “contrarianism” about how conservatives are always right about everything.”
Isn’t the only reason you think it is “interesting” and thought-provoking is because it seems so, well, contrary to what Mickey might write now?
Cuz it’s just boilerplate leftie stuff, anyone could come up with it. So it piqued your interest now because it was contrary to what you expected to hear him say, thereby proving the efficacy of the contrarian style as strategy.
July 6th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Mickey is definitely “though [sic] – provoking.”
July 6th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Mickey Kaus is a fucking genius.
He doesn’t know anything about politics, but he’s a genius as fucking.
July 6th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
robert waldmann, surely you don’t mean to suggest that robert mcnamara was on solid ground when he suggested that the purpose of the march on the pentagon was to actually shut the place down?
of course they didn’t suceed in shutting the place down; that wasn’t the intent. the intent was agitprop theatre.
now, we can call that self-indulgent; we can recognize that was helping (in its own small way) to create the right-wing backlash; we can see that going a little crazy in public was no way to build a long-term movement.
but that doesn’t mean we have to take robert mcnamara’s analysis as legitimate and meaningful, ’cause it ain’t.
July 6th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
I’m with bdbd @9. While Kaus used to produce some material worth reading, his current and recent output is such that he should simply be ignored until he retires. Same goes for Megan McArdle.
July 6th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Re theAmericanist at 15: “So by the mid-60s, that calculus wasn’t enough — the idea was that if either side could take out the other’s accurate nuclear weapons first (that is, the counterforce weapons that could destroy the other side’s accurate nukes), they could ‘win’ a nuclear exchange because the only possible retaliation left would be counter-value. That is, if the Soviets took out our accurate nuclear missiles in a first strike, we’d have to surrender — or blow up the world by attacking their cities, which would mean they would attack OUR cities, which they’d have spared in the first strike.
So McNamara (who had earlier insisted defending against a nuclear attack was not possible) put us on the missile defense path.”
—————-
1) The thing which prevented the Soviets from taking out our Minuteman missiles was the spacing of the silos — a little over 3 nautical miles. That ensured that a strike on ICBM silo 1 would not disable silo 2. At the same time, the closeness of silo 2 to silo 1 made it likely that a warhead flung at silo 2 –AT THE SAME TIME as the attack on silo 1 — would likely be destroyed in the fireball from the silo 1 warhead (fratercide). Hence, that silo 2 would survive and would be able to launch before it could be attacked.
Minuteman I was developed well before McNamara entered office — although it was starting to be deployed around the start of his term — around 1961.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Proposed_Minuteman_basing.png
July 7th, 2009 at 8:13 am
“The thing which prevented the Soviets from taking out our Minuteman missiles was the spacing of the silos…”
Um, not quite. The thing that INITIALLY prevented the Soviets from taking out our Minuteman missiles is that they had no way to deliver bombs on the targets: Soviet aircraft would never get that far in an attack on the US. It was McNamara who, realizing that the US was a long step ahead of the Russians when he took office, kept us several steps ahead — even at the cost of the infamous (and yet effective) nuclear arms race.
When the Soviets finally developed missiles with sufficient range, they still lacked accuracy. As they got more accurate missiles (and MIRV’d ‘em), the whole 2 to 1 plus 1 stuff evolved right along with more and better nukes. That added an exponentially more complex layer of contingent warplanning — the Bolt Out of the Blue (BOOB!), Launch on Warning, Launch Under Attack, etc, stuff that was laid on top of McNamara;s basic counterforce/countervalue planning.
Virtually all of that theology was developed into doctrine under McNamara. Give him credit — or blame, if you prefer: but bear in mind that we’re all still here to bitch about it.
As most of his biographies have pointed out, when McNamara took office at DoD, he was shocked to learn that Curtis LeMay’s warplan for the Soviets was — they invade West Berlin, we immediately fire ALL of our nukes (something like 7,000 warheads), killing about 300 million people… and settling the matter.
Not exactly subtle — and who knows how reliable it would have been, as the weapons and the warfighting potential evolved? All we do know is that they did — and we didn’t blow ourselves up.
What is happening with McNamara now that he’s dead calls for a Dante, so I won’t even try. But I will say again, that, not to minimize Vietnam, but it really was his most important job to hold off thermonuclear war for seven critical years — and he stood his watch well.
July 7th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
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July 7th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
we marched for peace and equality in the sixties – these came eventually – we marched not for honor to ourselves but for justice – okay let those who fought not be judged honor them if you must – but those who led them? – no cross country ski trip in aspen could ever escape that dark stain mr. secretary -
July 7th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
“honor them if you must…”????
Ew. What an insufferable prick.
July 7th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
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