The new U.S. secretary of defense should know about all minefields, including the political kind that lurk within the bowels of the Pentagon and Washington itself.
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick is Pete Hegseth, a combat vet and Fox News broadcaster. He should read Robert McNamara’s book, “In Retrospect, The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.” He was secretary under Presidents JFK and LBJ.
So many lessons learned too late.
It began with his job interview with President Kennedy when McNamara was president of Ford Motor Co. He said, “I am not qualified.”
“Who is?” the president replied.
“He rejected my claim that I was not qualified, pointing out dryly that there were no schools for defense secretaries, as far as he knew, and no schools for presidents either.”
Of course, Trump was elected to his first term in 2016, and experience is the best teacher.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the new, incoming president that if South Vietnam fell to the Communists other Southeast Asia governments would “fall like dominos.”
McNamara, in his 1995 book candidly lays out terrible decisions based on lack of analysis, perspective, and input from regional experts. Nor did they have any idea about what the people in South Vietnam wanted and whether aggression from North Vietnam could be stopped militarily with or without U.S. support. And what would that support look like? It quickly went from a few advisors to taking an active military role.
Failure would bring a fall of dominos anyway.
Of course, there was political infighting, people overstepping their authority, arrogance and disastrous blundering, including some support for a coup against South Vietnam’s controversial, repressive president.
At one point the U.S. military Chiefs of Staff endorsed air attacks on North Vietnam, even at the risk of igniting a nuclear strike response from China. McNamara admitted that it “had not entered my mind.”
Kennedy, of course, was president during the disastrous failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost triggered nuclear war.
Then, there is the issue of transparency.
After visiting South Vietnam he said he “was less than candid when I reported to the press.”
He remarked: “It is a profound, enduring, and universal ethical and moral dilemma: how, in times of war and crisis, can senior government officials be completely frank to their own people without giving aid and comfort to the enemy?”
LBJ himself was “less than candid,” a lot less, as records would later show.
U.S. Sen. Hiram W. Johnson said it best in 1918: “The first casualty of war is truth.”
Step carefully future secretary of defense. Step carefully.