In Retrospect

A detailed Summary of In Retrospect


Robert McNamara In Retrospect Random House New York, 1995

Vietnam had long since been a place of controversy, and where our government focused

it's fear of communism for many years. Throughout the Kennedy and Johnson administrations

the government maintained that the war between the Communist north and the south can only be

won by the South Vietnamese, and that our military cannot win it for them. It stressed that the

fall of South Vietnam to communism would threaten the rest of the western world.

Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson

administrations, wrote In Retrospect because he wanted to "Put Vietnam in context,"(xx).

McNamara wanted to explain why the mistakes of Vietnam were made, not to justify them, but

to help the American public understand them. He relies not only upon his memories, but upon

People have often called Vietnam, McNamara's war, because he made it his

responsibility. As he learned more and more about south Vietnam, he became well acquainted

with it's leader Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem portrayed himself as a man who shared our western

values. Though as our government would soon realize he was not the man we had


that the bombing and the expansion of the ground war would not do the job. He proposed a list

McNamara poses many questions as to whether the war would have continued on the same route

innocent lives. Johnson did not agree so he purposely left McNamara's views out of discussions

leniency when it came to its actions in Vietnam, it seems as if the Congress was misled on all

think of consequences before they reacted to a situation. McNamara is not only to blame for this

inexperience of the state department, though they were extremely intelligent, they were not

175,000. McNamara in hindsight looks back and wonders, why? Why did they escalate and not



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Approximate Word count = 1270
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels

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