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Paul Hendrickson
from "PART ONE: At the Open Noon of His Pride"
The Living
and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost
War
In the Winter of 1955
His wife wasn't drinking milk with her Scotch in the hope her stomach
might hurt a little less - not then. A man bearing a child hadn't set
himself on fire below his Pentagon window - not yet. A wigged-out woman
hadn't stolen up behind his seat in an outdoor cafe in the Kodak winter
sun of Aspen to begin shrieking there was blood on his hands. (He was
applying ketchup to his hamburger.) A Viet Cong agent - his name was
Nguyen Van Troi -- hadn't been found stringing fuses beneath a Saigon
bridge he was due to pass over. Odd metaphors and strange turns of
phrase weren't seeping from him like moons of dark ink. His pressed
white shirts weren't hanging loose at his neck. He wasn't reading Homer
late at night in an effort to compose himself. His dyslexic and
ulcerated son hadn't been shown in a national newsmagazine with his
ropes of long hair and kindly face reading aloud a list of war dead at
the San Francisco airport. Reputed members of an organization called the
Symbionese Liberation Army didn't have stored in a Berkeley garage some
crudely drawn but surprisingly detailed descriptions of the interior and
exterior of his resort home in Snowmass, along with thumb-nail sketches
of members of his family. (WIFE: name unknown to me. She is small, not
outstanding in appearance & probably not aggressive. . .") He hadn't
stood in the Pentagon briefing room in front of his graphs and
bar-charts to say with perfect seriousness, "So it is fifteen percent of
ten percent of thirteen-thirtieths that have been in dispute here. . ."
He hadn't stood on the tarmac at Andrews, at the rollaway steps of his
blue-tailed C-135, before winging to a high-level CINCPAC meeting in
Honolulu, and told another tangle of lies into a tangle of microphones,
made more artfully disingenuous statements to the press boys, this time
about the kind of forces - which is to say, combat forces - soon to be
shipped to the secretly escalated war. ("No, uh, principally logistical
support -- arms, munitions, training, assistance.") He hadn't hunched
forward in his field fatigues at a news conference in Saigon and said,
as though trying to hug himself, and with only the slightest belying
stammers, "The military operations have progressed very satisfactorily
during the past year. The rate of progress has exceeded our
expectations. The pressure on the Viet Cong, measured in terms of the
casualties they have suffered, the destruction of their units, the
measurable effect on their morale, have all been greater than we
anticipated" -- when, in fact, the nations chrome-hard secretary of
defense had already given up believing, in private, a long while ago,
that the thing was winnable in any military sense. The president of the
United States hadn't called him up to yell, "How can I hit them in the
nuts, Bob? Tell me how I can hit them in the nuts!" -- the them being
little men in black pajamas in a skinny curve of an unfathomable country
10,000 miles distant. He hadn't yet gone to this same president and told
him he was afraid of breaking down. The expressions "body count" and
"kill ratio" and "pacification" and "incursion" hadn't come into the
language in the way snow -- to use Orwell's image -- falls on an obscene
landscape. The casualty figures of U.S. dead and missing and wounded
hadn't spumed, like crimson geysers, past the once unthinkable 100,000
mark. Nor had this man risen at a luncheon in Dean Rusk's private dining
room at the state department (it happened on February 27, 1968,
forty-eight hours before he left office) and, without warning, begun
coming apart before Rusk and dark Clifford and Bill Bundy and Walt
Rostow and Joe Califano and Harry McPherson, telling them between
stifled sobs, between what sounded like small asphixiating noises,
between the bitter rivers of his cursing, that the goddamned Air Force,
they're dropping tonnage on Vietnam at a higher rate than we dropped on
Germany in the last part of World War II, we've practically leveled the
place, and what's it done, nothing, a goddamned nothing, and Christ
here's Westmoreland asking for another 205,000 troops, ifs madness,
can't anybody see, this thing has to be gotten hold of, it's out of
control I tell you. . .
No.
None of this.
Not yet.
It all lay waiting in the decades up ahead.
Because in the winter of 1955, Robert Strange McNamara was
making cars in Dearborn, Michigan. And his soul seemed his own. And America
had barely heard his name.
Paul Hendrickson has written for magazines and newspapers for more than
thirty years. He was a staff feature writer in the Style section
of The Washington Post from 1977 to January 2001. Now he
has a full-time appointment in the creative writing program
at Penn. He teaches advanced nonfiction and a workshop in
the documentary tradition. At The Washington Post he was
nominated for the Pulitzer Prize six times. He has published
three books, two of which were finalists for the National
Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The most recent of these three nonfiction works, The Living
and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost
War (1996); earned many distinctions, including a New
York Times Notable Book of the Year and Publisher's
Weekly Best Books of the Year. The book was published in
several foreign countries. Hendrickson has been awarded
various fellowships and numerous journalism honors and
awards. In 1999 he was named a Guggenheim Foundation
Fellow for his current nonfiction work-in-progress, which
concerns studying the legacy of racism in the families of
seven Mississippi sheriffs of the 1960s. The entire narrative
derives from a single black and white photograph. For the
last four years Hendrickson has been traveling in the South
researching and writing the book, which is under contract to
Alfred A. Knop at Random House, where his previous
books were published. Hendrickson was partially educated
in the South, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in a seminary
for the Catholic missionary priesthood. He has degrees in
American literature from St. Louis University and
Pennsylvania State University. He is married and lives with
his family in Takoma Park, Maryland. Oh; yes: He's batty
about teaching at Penn. He came relatively late in his life to
this wonderful institution and these wonderful students.
Photo by Joyve Ravid.
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