uziq wrote:
i mean, if boomers have dead relatives who were killed in the vietnam war, they can be justifiably aggrieved by the architect of the war on a book tour.
Well, yes. That's sort of why I pointed out.
Although some also-affected boomers are still in awe of these guys like they're in the grips of some sort of weird Stockholm syndrome, and enjoy cheerfully relaying stories and quips from interviews and exchanges between officials to the tune of "what a guy!"
he is pretty lucid and honest, though. it's nice to see a frank and candid insight into the workings of power.
mcnamara seemed genuinely bothered and affected by the events of the century. which is more than can be said for kissinger. or rumsfeld.
It's very interesting to listen to, and I don't think some of the points as he presents them in stuff are necessarily wrong (the country is failing its people, and big execs/stockholders are failing their responsibility to society, bravo). But I think some of his reflections sort of come off as crocodile tears. Where was that when he was scraping up on occasion actually retarded people to go die for a social experiment.
From nearly the beginning of Project 100,000, McNamara’s critics accused him of disguising its true objective: using the poor instead of the middle class for combat in Vietnam. The truth was more complex. McNamara had proposed Project 100,000 two years earlier, seeing it as a way to contribute to the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. In fact, the idea had been kicking around Washington before McNamara arrived on the scene.
Its leading advocate was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist who in 1976 would be elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. The best way to alleviate poverty in America, Moynihan’s argument went, would be to draft the hundreds of thousands of young men and women being rejected annually as unfit for military service. Take these young men—mostly inner-city blacks and poor, rural whites—and put them into uniform. Instill discipline. Train them to bathe daily, salute, and take orders. Teach them a marketable skill. After a couple of years, lazy, unmotivated slackers would be transformed into hard-working, law-abiding citizens. Moreover, the new generation of military recruits could then teach their children to be solid middle-class citizens, thus breaking the generation-to-generation continuity of poverty.
Johnson and McNamara embraced Moynihan’s concept in 1964, two years before Project 100,000 was launched. Secret White House recordings captured a conversation in which Johnson said that he wished the military could be persuaded to take the “second-class fellow,” adding: “We’ll…teach him to get up at daylight and work till dark and shave and bathe.…And when we turn him out, we’ll have him prepared at least to drive a truck or bakery wagon or stand at a gate [as a guard].”
McNamara told LBJ that uniformed officers in the Defense Department were opposed to drafting such men because “they don’t want to be in the business of dealing with ‘morons.’ They call these ‘moron camps’ now, inside the [Pentagon]. The army doesn’t want to be thought of as a rehabilitation agency.”
https://www.historynet.com/mcnamaras-boys.htm“The young men of Project 100,000 couldn’t read,” Joseph Galloway, a war correspondent who was awarded a Bronze Star with Valor in Vietnam for carrying wounded men to safety in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, later recalled. “They had to be taught to tie their boots. They often failed [basic training] and were recycled over and over until they finally reached some low standard and were declared trained and ready. They could not be taught any more demanding job than trigger-pulling, [so most of them] went straight into combat, where the learning curve is steep and deadly.”
I guess sonypic forwarded some of the money from Fog of War to charity for vets? MacNamara's adjacent wikipedia page (I know, I know) doesn't have one mention of "charity" or "donate/tion." Did he for his '95 book? His stuff has seen some criticism as being patchwork for his reputation as much as a confessional soapbox, and making a few omissions (although there's a lot to talk about, so).
e:
Probably not my most articulate post, but anyway,
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/movi … sorry.htmlParaphrasing, "we were wrong, sorry that I made errors" isn't really much of an apology, but I guess better that than a forced one. I think some of the nuttier viewers took away what might not have been the whole, coalesced message. Instead, "yeah, sometimes you gotta get tough on them!"
Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2021-07-17 03:22:17)
