McNamara, Vietnam, the Baby Boom and the ethics of unkind obits

July 7, 10:49 AMDC Ethical Issues ExaminerLaura Harrison McBride

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Dean Rusk, Pres. Johnson, McNamara (l-r) (Wikipedia Commons)

Most human beings follow some sort of culturally prescribed course of action when someone dies. This includes saying nice things about the dearly departed to his or her relatives and friends, and often putting in an appearance at whatever “leaving planet earth” ceremony the family and friends have chosen, with any luck, based on the decedent’s wishes.

When the decedent is famous -- Michael Jackson comes immediately to mind, and of course, the well-loved Natasha Richardson died suddenly last winter -- often there are spontaneous outpourings of grief by those who knew only the work of the decedent, and were not personal friends.

Robert S. McNamara died this week. Joseph L. Galloway of McClatchy Newspapers, wrote the most unflattering obit I have ever read in my life. And I have read plenty and written more; like so many journalists who joined the profession back in the days of Remington standards and long reams of yellow paper, my first job was writing obits. As it happened, a few people died during that time, including Dean Rusk, the son of James Brown, and Bruce Lee. None of those individuals engendered the sort of obit Galloway honored us with post-McNamara. Nor would I have written such an obit; the revelation of truths in that situation, such as Galloway offered, is best left to seasoned journalists, and more especially, to those who actually knew the decedent.

On both counts, regarding McNamara, Galloway qualifies. And, as a qualified acquaintance of the decedent, he penned the most scathing obit imaginable, but a true one. No beating about the bush with saccharine phrases about what good things McNamara had done; to Galloway, McNamara had done no good at all.

As a member of the generation whose lives were forever shaped by Vietnam, McNamara’s baby in so many ways, I completely agree with Galloway, and was, furthermore, interested to learn from Galloway’s most informative obit that an enraged artist tried to kill McNamara on the Martha’s Vineyard ferry in a storm. And that David Halberstam once followed McNamara around the country on McNamara’s book-launch speaking tour, a one-man Greek chorus that made McNamara give up the tour and crawl back into his cave.

Ah, for a Dick Cheney book tour! But Halberstam died, sadly, more than two years ago, and I’m not sure I have the stomach for it, even if I had the money to do such a thing.

My stomach turned when I read about George W. Bush and his buddies cramming lighted firecrackers down frogs’ throats and watching them explode. I can imagine that McNamara did similar things in his youth. Certainly, he did similar things to a number of young men I knew in the steamy jungles of Vietnam. As Wikipedia notes, McNamara, “was a prime architect of the Vietnam War and repeatedly overruled the JCS on strategic matters.” (Before the “Greatest Generation” gets started, here’s a statistic for you from a Vietnam veteran's group: “The average infantryman in the South Pacific during World War II saw about 40 days of combat in four years. The average infantryman in Vietnam saw about 240 days of combat in one year thanks to the mobility of the helicopter.” The genius who figured out how to send them there and sell the idea to the American administration, the Democratic administration of John F. Kennedy initially, was Robert S. McNamara.)

But what, finally, are the ethics of writing an obituary that exposes all of the decedent’s worst qualities and dubious achievements? Surely, McNamara was loved by someone -- a wife, children, significant other. What ethical line is crossed by exposing them to a tough and truthful obit? As it happens, his wife died in 1981, his daughter is a forester (admittedly, for one of Dad’s old employers, the World Bank) and his son, who protested Vietnam, grows walnuts in California. One doubts they are unfamiliar with Dad’s legacy. One assumes they have grappled with that fallout all their lives.

In the end, the ethical lapse would likely be to pen platitudes about the decedent, any decedent, that are not truthful. Most people, both the ones who are happy and those living lives of quiet desperation, do nothing so horrific and nothing so saintly that anyone wants to write much of anything except “He loved the baseball season and knew all the stats back to 1936,” or “She was such good cook, she donated her skills to the Homeless Ball every year for three decades” and so on. The sort of 1950s obits one still sees.

But if one acts upon the global stage, then one must expect a world-class obit. If one is Mother Theresa -- or even Diana Spencer, late Duchess of York -- then one’s good deeds far outweigh one’s various lapses in judgment and one’s human failings. If one is a Ted Bundy, disguised and offing young women for kicks, or Robert S. McNamara, in a designer suit offing young men from afar in the ungodly name of a war even more unnecessary than most…well, one might just as well expect one’s obit to reflect one’s life.

So be it. No ethical problem.

Rest in peace, Vietnam soldiers, sailors, fliers and marines!