Tag Archives: Robert McNamara

military news

Guy with no experience to lead Pentagon? Oh … wait!

Donald Trump has decided that acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan should get the job on a more permanent basis.

Thus, he is nominating the former Boeing Co. executive to lead the world’s mightiest military apparatus.

Shanahan would seek to fill a huge void created by the resignation in late 2018 of former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who resigned over differences he had with the president’s defense policy.

OK, the critics are out already regarding Shanahan. They say that his lack of any defense experience does not commend him to this job.

I must say: Whoa! Wait a minute!

In 1961, another president, John F. Kennedy, named a Ford Inc., executive, Robert McNamara, to lead the Pentagon. McNamara had the same zero defense experience that Shanahan would bring to his new job.

Now, it’s a highly debatable point that McNamara did a good job as defense secretary. He did lie to the public about whether the nation was winning the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He kept the truth from us until the mid-1990s, when he wrote in a book that he knew as early as 1963 that Vietnam was essentially a lost cause.

His lack of experience, though, likely didn’t play a part in McNamara’s big-league deception.

Do I wish the president could find someone with the chops that James Mattis brought to the post? Sure. Then again, would another revered general-grade officer — such as Mattis — last any longer than the retired Marine did? Likely not.

Still, let’s not dismiss Patrick Shanahan just because he doesn’t have prior government experience.

national news

They work for us, however …

A woman confronted Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt yesterday while Pruitt was having a meal in a restaurant.

Kristin Mink teaches school in Washington, D.C., and said she had a “civil” discussion with Pruitt about EPA policies, which she says hurts her children.

“We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who actually does protect our environment, someone who believes in climate change and takes it seriously for the benefit of all us, including our children,” Mink said, “I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out.”

OK. Maybe it’s just me, but I happen to shrink from this kind of confrontation of public officials in that context. Do I detest the policies that Pruitt is enacting at EPA? Yes. Do I also detest the policies coming from the Oval Office? Again, yes.

This whole issue has come to the fore in recent days ever since White House press flack Sarah Hucakabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant. Then came U.S. Rep. Maxine Water, D-Calif., who has declared that it’s OK to harass Trump administration officials even when they’re on their own time with their own families.

Whoa! Again, I disagree.

Kristin Mink makes a valid point, which is that Pruitt and, indeed, Donald J. Trump all work for us. They are our employees. They owe it to us to be accountable for their actions and we have every right to confront them whenever we damn well feel like it, or so the belief goes.

I just don’t like the idea of confronting these individuals in that manner. I certainly understand that they work for me — and you! There happen to be plenty of ways to hold them accountable. I try to do that with this blog, for instance. You can write them. You can call their staffs and bitch at them.

Or … you can vote for officials who will select people to administer public policy more to your preference.

I’ve confronted a (former) public official only once in my life. It was early 1996. I was walking along a street in Washington, D.C., when I encountered former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who had just published a memoir in which he acknowledged that he knew as early as 1962 that the Vietnam War was a lost cause.

Well, I was one of the millions of young men who served for a time in that war. So … I told McNamara how angry I was to learn that my country sent me into harm’s way to participate in a war the former defense boss believed could not be won.

He thanked me for my comments. I thanked him for coming clean — finally! — and we parted ways. It was just him and me. McNamara is now deceased, so I’m the only party who can speak to what occurred that day in Washington.

I didn’t consider it in the moment to be a form of “harassment.” I do consider it harassment when you berate a public official who’s seeking to enjoy some private time.

At least they understand, however, that they work for us.

national news

Recalling a chance meeting with an architect of tragedy

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Watching the PBS documentary series “The Vietnam War” brings to mind a chance meeting I had in late 1995 with one of the villains of that national tragedy … Robert McNamara.

I like telling the story, so I’ll provide it here knowing, of course, that it involves only two people — and one of them is dead.

Morris Communications Corp. had convened a meeting of newspaper editors and publishers in Washington, D.C., to discuss how the group had planned to cover the upcoming 1996 presidential election. I was editorial page editor of the Amarillo Globe-News, so I got to attend the meeting.

One Sunday morning right after we arrived, we had a day off. I took the time to walk from the hotel to Arlington National Cemetery. The morning was quiet. Traffic was light. Streets had few pedestrians.

I waited at a corner for the light to turn green so I could cross. I noticed an elderly gentleman walking toward me from another corner. He was carrying a shopping bag full of groceries.

I looked and then looked more intently at the gentleman. It was Robert McNamara, secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He had just published a book, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.”

In the book, McNamara acknowledged that he knew as early as 1963 that the Vietnam War was a lost cause. He also admitted that he kept quiet about what he believed at the time. He continued to advise Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to keep sending young men to die in Vietnam.

I was one of the young men he allowed to go to Vietnam; I got my orders in the spring of 1969 and reported for duty at Marble Mountain, Da Nang, to work on Army surveillance aircraft.

I was filled at the time of the book’s publication with anger that McNamara would have kept those thoughts so damn private, that he wouldn’t have spoken out in real time about what he believed about the future of that tragic conflict.

He approached me on that quite D.C. street that Sunday morning. “Mr. Secretary,” I said, “I want to introduce myself. My name is John Kanelis. I live in Amarillo, Texas and I just want to tell you how pissed off I am at you after learning about what you wrote in that book you just published. I was one of those men you sent to Vietnam.”

McNamara smiled and said, simply, “You are a very observant young man.” I smiled back at him and offered a conciliatory follow-up. “I am glad that you finally came clean,” I said.

He thanked me. We shook hands and he walked away.

I continued on to Arlington National Cemetery and paid my respects to President Kennedy and his brother, Robert Kennedy.

And I felt better for getting those thoughts off my chest.

national news, political news

It wasn’t just a ‘war on drugs’

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I’m still trying to process this bit of news from our nation’s past.

John Ehrlichmann, one of President Nixon’s chief aides, reportedly told an author that the president’s “war on drugs” had a more insidious meaning within the walls of the West Wing.

Erhlichmann supposedly said the drug war was meant as a way to shore up Nixon’s “southern strategy” that curried favor with white voters while targeting African-Americans and hippies who were opposed to the Vietnam War in particular and to Richard Nixon’s presidency in general.

A lot of Americans remember Ehrlichmann. He was the president’s chief domestic adviser and a leading figure in the cover-up of the Watergate scandal that eventually brought down the Nixon presidency.

He died in 1999, so he isn’t around to defend himself against the remarks that are just now being published in Harper’s magazine.

A part of me believes that President Nixon was quite capable of concocting such a nefarious strategy. Another part of me wishes and hopes it isn’t true.

Ehrlichmann’s five children have said the statements attributed to their father are false. They stand behind his character and say they weren’t raised that way.

According to reporter Dan Baum, writing in Harper’s, Erhlichmann said: “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The war on drugs is still being waged. It produced mandatory sentencing policies that federal judges have to follow. It was supposed to get tough on those who produce, buy, sell and consume the hard drugs such as heroin and various hallucinogens.

Has it worked? Well, drug use hasn’t abated in the nearly 50 years since the feds declared war on it. Moreover, I’ve seen the studies that suggest that African-Americans have been imprisoned at far greater rates than the rest of the U.S. population.

As for the motives behind the declaration in the first place, it saddens me beyond belief — if they are true.

The late president’s views on minorities, anti-war protesters and anyone who didn’t support his foreign and domestic policies are well-known to historians. They have been revealed in those infamous recordings of the president speaking to his top aides.

And what about John Erhlichmann’s personal motives? Did he buy into a hideous effort to fight back against the president’s enemies?

My own hunch is that he was loyal to the boss — Richard Nixon. When the boss told him to do something, then he followed orders. Does that make Erhlicmann a racist? We can’t ask him directly, so we’re left to speculate.

This isn’t the first time Americans have heard from officials seeking to atone for their mistakes. The late secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, revealed in the mid-1990s that he thought the Vietnam War was doomed to failure, even as he counseled two presidents to keep escalating the fight.

If only Ehrlichmann was around to clear the air about these revelations …

Many of us who are, sadly, are left to think the worst.

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Glenn Beck sorry? Now he owns up to it

Glenn Beck told the Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly that he is sorry for all the division and partisan rancor he has caused since the start of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Now he says he’s sorry? Now?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2014/01/22/glenn-beck-admits-divisive-role.html

It’s a bit late in the game for Beck, the talk-show radio host and one-time TV superstar on Fox to say he’s sorry for all the divisiveness he has contributed to the country.

Fox signed him on in 2009 and seemed to give him a single task: Trash the news president often and with extreme prejudice. Beck did all of that with apparent glee.

He made things up. He embellished his version of what he said was wrong with the country. He stoked the fire of anger from those on the right and the far right over the nation electing its first African-American president. You’ll recall that Beck once said famously — or infamously — on the Fox channel that the president of the United States hated white people.

Now he’s sorry for saying all those angry things about the president.

It reminds me of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara writing in his memoir, published in early 1996, that he believed the United States shouldn’t have fought the Vietnam War, that we were engaged in a futile endeavor. He was about 30 years late in offering that mea culpa, after more than 58,000 Americans were killed in that tragic war.

I recall the reaction then was that McNamara, too, was a bit late.

It pains me to say it, Glenn, but you can’t unhonk the horn.