...thinking about McNamara, history, and language

There are two movies that seem very dry, very boring, almost clinical but which I will watch almost every time they are on TV. One is a dramatization of a historical event where the script is mostly a direct transcription of recordings and memos from the event. The other is a documentary featuring a man in his 80s staring at a camera and talking about his life and what he's learned from it.

The films are Thirteen Days and The Fog of War, the first featuring a fictional portrayal of, and the second featuring a very real, Robert Strange McNamara. McNamara was Secretary of Defence under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and is considered the architect of Vietnam War. He died on July 6th, 2009. (It was more important to carry a dancer's funeral, but I come not to praise Ceasar....)

McNamara ranks up there with Nixon's White House Counsel John Dean and Mark "Deep Throat" Felt as the more interesting and divisive people in US History. All three were men who worked for presidents on matters that caused them great strife, whose names became linked with those controversial events, and whose attacks of conscience at different points in their lives caused them to re-evaluate their stances. In McNamara's case, it led to a complete reversal regarding Vietnam, though far too late to do any good.

McNamara is know for bringing the concept of "Systems Analysis" to the Department of Defence. It's hard to understate how revolutionary this was at the time, even more so with the constant spectre of nuclear war hanging over the world. (To this day, my parents won't talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis. They just won't.). He and Kennedy not only changed the way the military would react to a situation, but also how the deployment of the military could be used to actually communicate with other leaders.

One of the reasons I love Thirteen Days so much, other than being a vision of the Cuban Missile Crisis that isn't talked about all that often, is that it shows how much of communication is not so much in the things we say but in emphasizing with all parties that are involved. One scene of the movie is JFK and RFK puzzling over two telegrams from Moscow, one very belligerent and one almost conciliatory. By wondering what was the mindset behind those communiques they determine that one was sent by an inner cabal of party members trying to usurp Khrushchev and that the more conciliatory one was probably the true intention. They choose to ignore the first one and reply to the second one, anticipating that the Soviet Union would understand that the message was that the US was no more interested in war than the USSR was, and they are willing to talk. We're here today, so we know how that ended.

But one scene even more than that shows the effect that McNamara had on geopolitics. It may be fictionalized, the the intention is there. It also shows what would be his undoing.

He is in the war room where they are tracking the movement of Soviet ships around the US blockade of Cuba. One makes a move and a general starts to grab a phone to order a strike. McNamara emphatically stops him and utters a line that I fell in love with instantly. If I were ever to tattoo words on my body, there is a better than average chance that those bolded words would be them:

This is not a blockade. This is language. A new vocabulary, the likes of which the world has never seen! This is President Kennedy communicating with Secretary Khrushchev!

Think about that. It's chess. A boat moving over to this side is not a boat moving into position. It's a feint, it's a dare, it's a way of talking without saying anything. It's a way of raising the stakes without having to make a wager. You move your boat and we fire, there is only one way that conversation can end, and it's not pretty. You move your boat here, but we move ours here, we say that we see what you're doing, and are willing to make sure that you don't get away with it. Now, what do YOU want to do about that? It's parrying. It's dodging. It's a DEBATE. And the reason the debate works is not because you're looking at superior forces. It works because you're thinking that there's someone telling that boat what to do, and that person is You.

Now, imagine that Robert McNamara is the head of a European nation at the start of World War I. While it's folly to reduce the causes of that war to a couple of simple things, most will say that one of the major factors that led to the escalation of the conflict was the system of alliances, and that once those countries started mobilizing everyone went to the mattresses.

Now, imagine someone using McNamara's logic...we deploy a few troops here and here, we don't occupy territory, but we prevent them from doing so, and everyone can soon retreat with honour. (The Franco-American war of the late 1790s was pretty much that). Think how different history would have been.

It's also the reason for his later failures in Vietnam. He forgot about the empathy, and while he did pressure Kennedy and Johnson to get out of Vietnam in the end he failed, and I think at that moment he started seeing it as a chess game again, only he didn't think there was another person controlling the pieces' movements. The second you take empathy and rationality out of any conflict/discussion/moment, that is the moment you have lost.

There is so much more to McNamara, and so much we will never understand. But there is something that he understood that has stuck with me my entire life: All interactions are language, and language has meaning, intent and nuance. It also has a person behind it, and attention must be paid to that.

This is language.