Great Throughts Treasury

"One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action."

"A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage."

"After the action got under way, and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course ? we did not fully explain what was happening, and why we were doing what we did."

"All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly. . . . He draws blueprints for Utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand--his own part comic, part tragic, part cussed, but part glorious nature."

"Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he's speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He's killed people unnecessarily ? his own troops or other troops ? through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand. But, he hasn't destroyed nations. And the conventional wisdom is don't make the same mistake twice, learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the same mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five. There will be no learning period with nuclear weapons. You make one mistake and you're going to destroy nations."

"And the conventional wisdom is: don't make the same mistake twice. Learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five."

"At my age, 85, I?m at age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions. My rule has been try to learn, try to understand what happened. Develop the lessons and pass them on."

"But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

"Brains are like hearts - they go where they are appreciated"

"Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning."

"Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him."

"ELEVEN LESSONS OF WAR: (1) Empathize with your enemy (2) Rationality will not save us (3) There?s something beyond one?s self (4) Maximize efficiency (5) Proportionality should be a guideline in war (6) Get the data (7) Belief and seeing are often both wrong (8) Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning (9) In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil (10) Never say never (11) You can?t change human nature"

"I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today."

"How can we influence someone we don?t understand, except by force? What is war if not a failure to influence by any other means? Do you want to feel right and superior or do you want to improve the situation?"

"Had I responded, I would have said, "I know what many of you are thinking. You are thinking this man is duplicitous, you are thinking that he has held things close to his chest, you are thinking that he did not respond fully to the desires and wishes of the American people. And I want to tell you you're wrong. Of course he had personal idiosyncrasies, no question about it. He didn't accept all the advice he was given. On several occasions his associates advised him to be more forthcoming. He wasn't. People didn't understand at that time there were recommendations and pressures that would carry the risk of war with China. And carry the risk of nuclear war. And he was determined to prevent it. I am arguing that he had a reason, in his mind, for doing what he did.""

"I can?t tell you how powerfully the Agent Orange exhibition affects you at the War Remembrance Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, for two reasons. First, it affects the human body in grotesque ways. I found it difficult to stomach some of the deformities it created. It continues to deform babies for generations, so it affects people today. You can?t believe a person who knew what this stuff was capable of, even a fraction of it, could allow it to be created or used. Second, the shirking of responsibility by Dow, Monsanto, the U.S. military, and the U.S. government boggles the mind. These organization punished innocents with some of the worst poison and carcinogens and mangled unborn babies for generations and then hid behind their power and control of courts when their culpability became obvious."

"I said, "I must have got the translation wrong." So I asked him [Krushchev] 3 questions. One- did you know there were nuclear warheads in Cuba? Two- would you have recommended to Khrushchev to use nuclear missiles in the event of an American invasion of Cuba? And three- what would have happened to Cuba? He said, "One- I knew the missiles were there. Two- I would not *have* recommended it, I ?did? recommend it! And three- we would have been totally obliterated"."

"I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam."

"I don't object to its being called McNamara's war. I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it."

"I called the superintendent of Arlington Cemetery. And he and I walked over those grounds. They're hauntingly beautiful grounds, white crosses all in a row. And finally I thought I'd found the exact spot, the most beautiful spot in the cemetery. I called Jackie at the White House and asked her to come out there, and she immediately accepted. And that's where the President is buried today. A park service ranger came up to me and said that he had escorted President Kennedy on a tour of those grounds a few weeks before. And Kennedy said, "That was the most beautiful spot in Washington." That's where he's buried."

"I can still see it. There's a love seat, two armchairs with a lamp table in between. Jack Kennedy is sitting in one armchair and Bobby Kennedy's sitting in the other. "Mr. President, it's absurd, I'm not qualified." "Look, Bob," he said, "I don't think there's any school for Presidents either." [reaction to being offered position of Secretary of Defense]"

"I think the human race needs to think more about killing. How much evil must we do in order to do good?"

"If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merits of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning."

"I would rather have a wrong decision made than no decision at all."

"I'm not so naive or simplistic to believe we can eliminate war. We're not going to change human nature any time soon. It isn't that we aren't rational. We are rational. But reason has limits. There's a quote from T.S. Eliot that I just love: "We shall not cease from exploring, and at the end of our exploration, we will return to where we started, and know the place for the first time." Now that's in a sense where I'm beginning to be."

"In the first message, Khrushchev said this: "We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence.""

"In Thompson's mind was this thought: Khrushchev's gotten himself in a hell of a fix. He would then think to himself, "My God, if I can get out of this with a deal that I can say to the Russian people: 'Kennedy was going to destroy Castro and I prevented it.'" Thompson, knowing Khrushchev as he did, thought Khrushchev will accept that. And Thompson was right. That's what I call empathy. We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions."

"Interviewer: After you left the Johnson administration, why didn't you speak out against the Vietnam War? Robert McNamara: I'm not going to say any more than I have. These are the kinds of questions that get me into trouble. You don't know what I know about how inflammatory my words can appear. A lot of people misunderstand the war, misunderstand me. A lot of people think I'm a son of a bitch."

"In the end, it was luck. We were ?this? close to nuclear war, and luck prevented it."

"If you went to the C.I.A. and said "How is the situation today in South Vietnam?" I think they would say it's worse. You see it in the desertion rate, you see it in the morale. You see it in the difficulty to recruit people. You see it in the gradual loss of population control. Many of us in private would say that things are not good, they've gotten worse. Now while we say this in private and not public, there are facts available that find their way in the press. If we're going to stay in there, if we're going to go up the escalating chain, we're going to have to educate the people, Mr. President. We haven't done so yet. I'm not sure now is exactly the right time."

"In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil."

"In my seven years as Secretary, we came within a hair's breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three different occasions! Twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred sixty-five days a year, for seven years as Secretary of Defense, I lived the Cold War! During the Kennedy Administration, they designed a one-hundred Megaton bomb! It was tested in the atmosphere; I remember this."

"Interviewer: Is it the feeling that you're damned if you do, and if you don't, no matter what? Robert McNamara: Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I'd rather be damned if I don't."

"It's almost impossible for our people today to put themselves back into that period [the Cold War]."

"KENNEDY: The advantage to taking them out is? MCNAMARA: We can say to the Congress and people that we do have a plan for reducing the exposure of U.S. combat personnel. KENNEDY: My only reservation about it is if the war doesn't continue to go well, it will look like we were overly optimistic. MCNAMARA: We need a way to get out of Vietnam, and this is a way of doing it."

"LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost."

"It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives."

"Kennedy was trying to keep us out of war. I was trying to help him keep us out of war. And General Curtis LeMay, whom I served under as a matter of fact in World War II, was saying "Let's go in, let's totally destroy Cuba.""

"Let me go back one moment. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the end, I think we did put ourselves in the skin of the Soviets. In the case of Vietnam, we didn't know them well enough to empathize. And there was total misunderstanding as a result. They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil war."

"Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong. Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. Lesson #10: Never say never. Lesson #11: You can't change human nature."

"LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

"Lesson #2: The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations."

"MORRIS: When you talk about the responsibility for something like the Vietnam War, whose responsibility is it? MCNAMARA: It's the president's responsibility. I don't want to fail to recognize the tremendous contribution I think Johnson made to the country. I don't want to put the responsibility for Vietnam on his shoulders alone, but I do ? I am inclined to believe that if Kennedy had lived, he would have made a difference. I don't think we would have had 500,000 men there."

"Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you."

"MCNAMARA: I was on the island of Guam in his command in March of 1945. In that single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children. MORRIS: Were you aware this was going to happen? MCNAMARA: Well, I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it. I analyzed bombing operations, and how to make them more efficient. i.e. Not more efficient in the sense of killing more, but more efficient in weakening the adversary. I wrote one report analyzing the efficiency of the B?29 operations. The B?29 could get above the fighter aircraft and above the air defense, so the loss rate would be much less. The problem was the accuracy was also much less. Now I don't want to suggest that it was my report that led to, I'll call it, the firebombing. It isn't that I'm trying to absolve myself of blame. I don't want to suggest that it was I who put in LeMay's mind that his operations were totally inefficient and had to be drastically changed. But, anyhow, that's what he did. He took the B?29s down to 5,000 feet and he decided to bomb with firebombs."

"MCNAMARA: It was just confusion, and events afterwards showed that our judgment that we'd been attacked that day was wrong. It didn't happen. And the judgment that we'd been attacked on August 2nd was right. We had been, although that was disputed at the time. So we were right once and wrong once. Ultimately, President Johnson authorized bombing in response to what he thought had been the second attack; it hadn't occurred but that's irrelevant to the point I'm making here. He authorized the attack on the assumption it had occurred, and his belief that it was a conscious decision on the part of the North Vietnamese political and military leaders to escalate the conflict and an indication they would not stop short of winning. We were wrong, but we had in our minds a mindset that led to that action. And it carried such heavy costs. We see incorrectly or we see only half of the story at times. MORRIS: We see what we want to believe. MCNAMARA: You're absolutely right. Belief and seeing, they're both often wrong."

"Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused through society."

"Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders."

"Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, should or could be the global gendarme."

"Norman Morrison was a Quaker. He was opposed to war, the violence of war, the killing. He came to the Pentagon, doused himself with gasoline. Burned himself to death below my office. He held a child in his arms, his daughter. Passersby shouted, "Save the child!" He threw the child out of his arms, and the child lived and is alive today. His wife issued a very moving statement: 'Human beings must stop killing other human beings.' And that's a belief that I shared. I shared it then and I believe it even more strongly today. How much evil must we do in order to do good? We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities. Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil, but minimize it."