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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2011
Robert S. McNamara recently raised a stir about America's involvement in the Vietnam War. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, his personal apology for his role as Secretary of Defense (1961–68) during the first phase of the war, shot to the top of the best-seller lists. But the author was surely more interested in uncovering some forgiveness, some sympathy for his plight, than he was in royalties. If so, he certainly must be disappointed. What McNamara uncovered beneath the surface of current events were several generations of Americans who still have powerful emotions about the war and still hate the leaders—McNamara included—who guided the nation into that debacle.
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3. See, for instance, the roundup in Gigot, Paul A., “McNamara Reopens the Liberals' War,” Wall Street Journal, 21 April 1995.Google Scholar
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23. What is being analyzed here is not the collapse of the American economy. The subject is our declining relative position and the fact that our response to that situation was delayed by ten to fifteen years by public policies that were damaging to the businesses trying to cope with this difficult transition.
24. I explore this subject at greater length in “The Authority and Responsibility of the Chief Executive Officer: Shifting Patterns in Large U.S. Enterprises in the Twentieth Century,” Industrial and Corporate Change 4, no. 1 (1975): 187–203.Google Scholar
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33. The followup piece (103–8) was entitled “A 1,600-Year Memory in a Nation's Art,” and it referred to the Japanese as “insular.” Fortune, August 1969, 101–2, 116–19, 120; and 103–8.
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39. The repercussions of the war were actually being felt for some years after 1975. It was at least 1981 before serious efforts began to reorient our political economy with this central problem in mind.
40. See, for instance, Lewis Beman, “How to Tell Where the U.S. Is Competitive,” Fortune, July 1972, 54–59, 98, 102.
41. Magaziner, Ira C. and Reich, Robert B., Minding America's Business: The Decline and Rise of the American Economy (New York, 1983)Google Scholar. Johnson, Chalmers, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford, 1982).Google Scholar
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43. McNamara, In Retrospect, xv-xvi.
44. I realize of course that there was no single moment of “decision” as such. Like most such policy decisions, it was incremental, and that is always the perception that participants have of the events they experienced. From the perspective of the policy historian, however, the cumulative effect of these complex, incremental choices is to make a “decision” for the nation.
