Bucks County Herald – July 23, 2009

Robert McNamara, Michael Jackson, Dr. Ox Johnson

Dear Friends,

Good morning. Before I reflect upon the deaths of Michael Jackson and Robert McNamara, here’s a funny story about one of my college friends who played a trick on his older neighbors in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

A few weeks ago, Eric “Dr. Ox” Johnson decided to get the attention of his fellow, frugal retirees. He glued a shiny dime to the concrete slab at the base of 12 mailboxes. Using “Liquid Nails,” a fast drying, very strong glue, Dr. Ox waited until after the Saturday mail was delivered. He figured that no one would visit the mailboxes until the following Monday so the glue would have time to anchor the dime to the slab.

“The dime’s still there,” Dr. Ox reported triumphantly. He obviously enjoyed watching his neighbors trying to pick up the ten-cent piece. Bravo! Dr. Ox. Good work.

And now to something serious.

Did you watch the three-hour memorial service for Michael Jackson? Mighty Betsy and I did. As 20,000 people in the Staples Center joined in with his song, “We Are the World,” I thought about our trip to Japan 25 years ago.

In 1985, MB and I represented the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association, which was meeting with our Asian counterparts in Tokyo. It was a fascinating trip, filled with tours of Japanese newspaper plants, lectures and face-to-face sessions with Japanese political leaders. Fortunately, there was time for sightseeing too.

One day, our bus lined up among hundreds in Deer Park, near Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital of Japan. The buses were parked parallel, so close that you could touch the windows of the adjacent buses. To conserve fuel and reduce emissions, all the bus windows were rolled down.

Betsy looked to her left and inches away were the cute faces of Japanese school children. They were about ten years old. When the kids spied us, they made “V” signs and sang…guess what? Michael Jackson’s’ hit song, “We Are the World.”

It was a moment that we’ll never forget.

Turning to the death of the former Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, I do not have words of praise for him. It was he that led the build up of American soldiers in the Vietnam War…a civil war that the United States should never had fought.

In the McNamara article (July 7), the Inquirer reported that 58,000 U. S. service men and women lost their lives during the 10 years of that war. Three million Vietnamese on both sides died as well.

I remember our son Ty telling us about a college course on the Vietnam War that he was taking at Penn. His professor reminded the class that after the Korean War ended in a stalemate in 1953, the natural ally for America was North Vietnam. Why? Because the North Vietnamese hated China, its neighbor to the north. It was the Chinese who sent troops in support of North Korea against South Korea.

How did America get involved with the Vietnam civil war and land on the side of the South Vietnamese? It began during President Eisenhower’s administration, which wanted to help France retain its colonial empire in South Indochina.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) convinced the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations that the fall of South Vietnam to communism would cause a “domino effect.” So America began its involvement by sending war material to aid the French (President Eisenhower) followed by the Green Berets and Special Forces (President Kennedy) and more than 500,000 American soldiers (Presidents Johnson and Nixon).

Incidentally, Vietnam was not McNamara’s only failing. During his tenure as Defense Secretary, McNamara was the architect of the disastrous Bay of Pigs adventure.

Before I leave you today, I think about the CIA and how its record of advise to eleven presidents has turned out so badly. You readers should read “Legacy of Ashes.”

Written by Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize author, “Legacy of Ashes” is the hidden history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Its book cover explains: “Why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world? Why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it? And how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security?

“For the last 60 years, the CIA has buried its blunders in top secret archives,” Weiner wrote. “Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed America, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”

In McNamara’s retirement, he listed four reasons why America could not win the war in Vietnam: “A failure to understand the enemy; failure to see the limits of high-tech weapons; failure to tell the truth to the American people; and a failure to grasp the nature of the threat of communism.”

Three decades after the war in Vietnam, McNamara confessed that he was wrong. He gave a reassessment of his decisions in a 1995 memoir and in the 2004 Oscar-winning documentary “The Fog of War.” Worse, he knew he was wrong in Vietnam but did nothing to change America’s ill-fated involvement. That confession was 40 years too late.

It’s so frustrating. We keep making the same mistakes because we don’t pay attention to history.

Sincerely,

Charles Meredith

PS. This week’s question is: Should the U. S. Senate confirm Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court? Send your answer to my email address- MeredithIII@comcast.net

The answers which readers gave to last week’s question, “Should Congress repeal the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and allow openly gay military personnel to serve?” varied by age. Older readers responded “NO,” (openly homosexual troops cause morale problems) while younger readers said “YES” (there’s no harm in them serving).

That’s no surprise. The Associated Press reported (June 29) that eighty percent of Americans believe there is a major difference in the point of view of younger people and older people. That’s the highest spread since 1969. The generations differ most on social values and morality.