Michael Swanson - Why The Vietnam War?: Nuclear Bombs and Nation Building in Southeast Asia, 1945-1961

September 29, 1972, is a date that Robert McNamara never forgot for the rest of his life, because on that evening someone tried to murder him. By that time, the former Secretary of Defense for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had been out of government for over four years, after leaving on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Now he was fifty-six years old. That night he traveled on the V.M Islander, a little steamboat that hustled passengers back and forth from Massachusetts to Martha's Vineyard, an island south of Cape Cod that served as a yuppie colony and vacation getaway for the rich. McNamara had bought a house on the island and loved it. He enjoyed lounging around its restaurants and soaking in its peaceful seaside environment.

McNamara stood on the deck of the steamer talking with a friend until a walking interruption appeared. A twenty-seven year old short bearded man wearing tennis shoes went up to tell him, "Mr. McNamara, there's a phone call for you. Please follow me." McNamara nodded and said to his companion, "Excuse me a minute, I'll get this and be right back." He followed behind this messenger.

"I led him around the wheelhouse," the strange man retold what happened, "he was right behind me. I felt very much in control. I think we were about a mile or two out of Woods Hole. It was very dark. Those can be pretty rough waters out there. Now the pilothouse on the Islander, if you've ever been on the boat, comes around like this, in a kind of hard oval. There's a very narrow walkway on both sides. You're right at the edge of the ferry. All you've got protecting you from the sea is a four-foot railing with a metal grate in it that runs down to the floor of the deck."

"So we're out there on the walkway now, just the two of us, and he thinks I'm leading him to the pilothouse for this nonexistent phone call, and, well, I just turned on him. I was scared as hell, but I think I was pretty calm, too. I didn't say a word, you know, here's to Rolling Thunder, sir, or, this one's for the Gulf of Tonkin, you lying sack of crap. Nope, nothing like that. I just grabbed him. I got him by the belt and his shirt collar, right below his throat. I had him over, too. He was halfway over the side. He would have gone, another couple of seconds. He was just kind of hanging there in the dark, clawing for the railing. I remember he screamed, 'Oh, my God, no.' But only once. Those may have been the only words between us. I'm pretty sure his glasses came off. I suppose the whole thing didn't last a minute," the bearded man said, "he was amazingly strong, I'll give him that."

McNamara had been pushed just inches away from death. "I don't think they would have had a prayer of saving him. We were on the back side of the boat, since we were headed toward the island, so there was a good chance he was going to get sucked underneath, and in that case the propeller probably would have gotten him if he hadn't drowned first," his attacker said.

At that moment the assailant felt someone grab him from behind his neck. People spilled out of the boat's lunchroom. More hands grasped on to him. Robert McNamara broke free from his attack. The man traveled the boat himself a lot and had friends of his own on it who stowed him away. After the ferry reached its destination, the police came on board trying to find him, but they found nothing. Robert McNamara told the police he didn't want them to try to find him or press charges against him. He wanted it all to go away. He seemed to understand why a random stranger could come out of nowhere and try to kill him.

Why did this man try to kill someone he never had met before? One word - Vietnam. The Vietnam War brought the deaths of over 58,000 American soldiers and over two million Vietnamese. Three-hundred thousand Americans came back from the war wounded. My father joined the army and served as a medical intern at Walter Reed for a few of them. It was a fight that the United States did not win and a war that divided the country. It was a disaster and Robert McNamara was one of the men who helped to create it. Some blamed him for not letting the military do what it needed to do in order to win, while others saw him as helping place the United States into a conflict that it could never win and should never have gotten into in the first place. Men like Robert McNamara were responsible.

The man who attacked him on the ferry was an artist who lived in Martha's Vineyard. He had never engaged in an act of violence before that night. Nor did he serve in Vietnam. Journalist Paul Hendrickson found out who he was and got his story. The man didn't plan to seek out Robert McNamara and kill him. He just happened upon him and then the feelings he had about the war welled up inside of him to possess him to act. The attacker had two brothers who served in Vietnam. "My mother's brother was an admiral in World War II. He even won the Medal of Honor. A cousin in our family was a major in the Marine Corps. One of my own brothers, the one who went to Vietnam twice, is now a general. There were all these family ghosts in me, that's what I'm trying to say. I saw him there and something happened," he explained.

He said that he just wanted to "confront him on Vietnam. I know it sounds extremist now. But tell me, what good would screaming in his face have done? What I felt about Vietnam was a lot deeper than that. I suppose this arrogance thing came back pretty hard. Here he was, starting out his long privileged weekend on the Vineyard, stretched out against the counter like that, talking loud, laughing, obviously enjoying himself a great deal. It was as if he owned the lousy steamship authority or something. I mean, why isn't he at least sitting down in his car with a ski mask over his face? I guess I began to feel crazy inside. This won't make any sense to you, but it may have been his posture as much as anything that really did it to me."

The Vietnam War made many Americans distrust their government. Over and over again, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, President Lyndon Johnson, and the generals that ran the war made statements to the effect that they were winning, that they saw "light at the end of the tunnel," only to be hit by events that proved their statements wrong time and time again. As a result, many Americans came to conclude that they were either liars or had no idea what they were doing. The war destroyed Lyndon Johnsons presidency and caused him to announce that he would not run for re-election.