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Robert Scheer is on the dot. What the administration and McNamara did was evil. And the title suggests accurately: the "Evil Lives On." I don't think that in this particular case a nuanced critique of evil is necessary.

Twenty years was too late for McNamara to say "sorry." He should have asked forgiveness from the people of Vietnam and the USA. He harmed the Vietnamese people beyond harm. He gave many young courageous people of the US in the late 1960s troubled sleep. I am beholden to these great people for their support to the Vietnamese cause.

Very useful piece, Mr Scheer. You highlight the difference between the New York Times and The Nation so well!

Web Letter

Sometime during the Bush administration, there was a brief discussion of Nixon and Watergate on MSNBC, and a young female newscaster remarked that it was interesting to learn a little history. Bush's last press representative, when ask a question that brought up the Cuban missile crisis, only knew that something involving missiles and Cuba had happened in the past. Except in the minds of people who were alive during the Vietnam War, very few people have a clue about McNamara.

General LeMay decided where, when and how any incendiary bombs would be dropped on Japan. McNamara's job was to determine how many targets were destroyed during various missions. According to Wikipedia, McNamara, as secretary of defense, often clashed with LeMay. I don't have enough facts to determine if McNamara was totally evil. Convince me, it would make a hell of a good book!

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As someone who actively protested against the Vietnam War and McNamara's policies, I nevertheless find Mr. Scheer's Manichaean analysis depressingly simple-minded, It is possible to despise Mr. McNamara's policies and still recognize the complexities of the situation, tbe atrocities on both sides or the reasons for paranoia (some of them legitimate) that gripped the country.

Instead, we are offered a one-dimensional cartoon, reminiscent of the Reagan/Limbaugh "evil empire" view of the world. Without a more nuanced understanding of what motivates human beings and governments, we will never escape the destructive cycle we are in.

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There are deeper questions that the nation and the culture need to reckon with upon the passing of Robert McNamara.

Complicity and rationalization with genocide... what other term can we use for the evils of the US war against Vietnam?

McNamara and almost all of the political leaders of that day regret only their strategy, tactics and results... never the immorality of their project.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans resisted the war in so many ways. (My story is here)

We owe it to future generations to let a national moral dialogue begin.

Web Letter

What I would like to read is a compelling argument that someone else would have acted in a significantly different manner than did McNamara.

The term "evil" for me is knowingly causing harm to someone else for one's own selfish purposes. This definition implies that most others, in a similar situation, would have done differently--that is, that the actions were not the result of ignorance or accident or context, but were, instead, the result of a single person's internal causation of harm.

I think this is important, because when we say that horrible actions were evil, we let everyone else off of the hook for those actions. And this, in and of itself, can perpetuate harm.

I just don't know enough about McNamara's situation to be willing to classify what he did was evil. The Vietnam War was horrible. There were an awful lot of people in our country who were in favor of it. Who, given this, was evil? McNamara?

Web Letter

I get the impression that Robert Scheer believes that for a perpetrator of evil to be culpable he must understand that it is evil. In "McNamara's Evil Lives On," he sure piles it on. But in assessing blame, I prefer to go back--way back. First I look at presidents, then Congress, then their henchmen. Seven US presidents in a row each did something monstrously stupid in regard to Indochina. Roosevelt wanted to give Indochina to Chiang Kai Shek. Chiang declined. France had its war and was defeated. The war was over. Truman started the Vietnam War. And on and on.

I agree with Mr. Scheer; the evil does go on. American presidents seem hellbent on evil. Truman's successor unleashed evil in Iran that persists to this day.