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Paying Up: The Price of the Vietnam War1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Louis Galambos
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Extract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 8 , Special Issue 1: Integrating the Sixties: The Origins Structures, and Legitimacy of Public Policy in a Turbulent Decade , January 1996 , pp. 166 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1996

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References

Notes

2. McNamara, Robert S., with VanDeMark, Brian, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Viemam (New York, 1995).Google Scholar

3. See, for instance, the roundup in Gigot, Paul A., “McNamara Reopens the Liberals' War,” Wall Street Journal, 21 April 1995.Google Scholar

4. RobertS. McNamara, In Retrospect, 321–23.

5. Ibid., xv-xvi, 169–206, 216–25, 234, 243–44, 265–71, 280, 307, 319, 333.

6. Galambos, Louis, America at Middle Age: A New History of the U. S. in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1982), 120.Google Scholar

7. These figures and those that follow are available in Historical Statistics of the United States (1970) and in Statistical Abstract of the United States (1989).

8. I say informal to distinguish them from the elaborate and formal counterfactual analysis of the sort offered in Fogel, Robert William, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore, 1964).Google Scholar

9. See the perceptive analysis in Norman A. Graebner, “The Scholar's View of Vietnam, 1964–1992,” in Showalter and Albert, An American Dilemma, 13–52.

10. Kuznets, Simon, “Notes on the Pattern of U.S. Economic Growth,” in Edwards, Edgar O., ed., The Nation's Economic Objectives (Chicago, 1964), 15–34Google Scholar. Kendrick, John W., Productivity Trends in the United States (Princeton, 1961).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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27. “The Willing Hands on Japanese Watches,” Fortune, July 1965, 144–48. See also “The Coming Battle for the Color-TV Market,” Fortune, January 1966, 144–47, 188–91.

28. “A Decade of Dazzling Growth in the ‘World of the 200,’” Fortune, 15 September 1967, 128–35, 202.

29. Mayer, Lawrence A., “The Troubling Shift in the Trade Winds,” Fortune, 1 June 1968, 76–79, 140–44.Google Scholar

30. Louis, Arthur M., “What Business Thinks,” Fortune, September 1969, 93–96, 208.Google Scholar

31. “Business Around the Globe,” Fortune, May 1966, 69–70.

32. Ways, Max, “Why Japan's Growth Is Different,” Fortune, November 1967, 127–29Google Scholar, 246, 248, 250, 252, 257–58, 260, 262, 266; and “The ‘Living Treasures’ of Japan,” 130–35. I am indebted to Julie Kimmel for noting the importance of this sequence.

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.

34. Business Week, 7 February 1970, 23. On “smallsville,” see Rukeyser, William S., “Detroit's Reluctant Ride into Smallsville,” Fortune, March 1969, 110–13Google Scholar, 164, 167–68. Rukeyser was already gloomy: “The notion that there may be a legitimate, permanent demand in the U.S. for really small, really cheap automobilies is taking longer to establish itself in Detroit than the disk brake.”

35. Business Week, 31 January 1970, 83; and 3 October 1970, 86–87. See also 19 September 1970, 42.

36. Kraar, Louis, “How the Japanese Mount that Export Blitz,” Fortune, September 1970, 127–31Google Scholar, 170–71. “Studying the Competition,” Fortune, January 1971, 54.

37. Lessing, Lawrence, “Why the U.S. Lags in Technology,” Fortune, April 1972, 69–72Google Scholar, 148–50; Carol J. Loomis, “The New Questions About the U.S. Economy,” January 1974, 69–73, 163–64, 166–67; Lawrence A. Mayer, “Oil, Trade, and the Dollar,” June 1974, 193–99.

38. Nagao, Alvin T., “Rigid Institutions: Wages, Worker Loyalty, and the Downsizing of Corporate America” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1995).Google Scholar

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

42. McCraw, Thomas K., Prophets of Regulation (Cambridge, Mass., 1984)Google Scholar. Derthick, Martha and Quirk, Paul J., The Politics of Deregulation (Washington, D.C., 1985).Google Scholar

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.