A Mile In My Moccasins

The Cold War was fueled by Russian paranoia and American ignorance. Russia was rightly paranoid, having lost 30 million citizens in a war against a former western ally. America was inevitably ignorant, having the great gift of World War II being fought everywhere in the World except the Americas.

To put 30 million Russian dead in perspective, it is 100 times as many Americans that died fighting the same Nazi enemy. It is 30 times as many Americans than have died in all of America's wars from 1776-2011. Combined.

The Russians were paranoid because they knew that 30 million people could be killed in war; after all, it had already happened once. The Americans were ignorant to that possibility, never mind that reality, because they had thankfully never endured it.

Robert McNamara was the architect of many Cold War policies. Like most powerful Americans of his day, he serially misunderstood our rivals, to the point where potential allies instead became blood enemies. The Russians. The Chinese. The Cubans. The Vietnamese.

Each of these adversaries simply refused to behave "rationally" or "American", thereby confounding the "best and the brightest" among us.

The Fog of War is one of the best documentaries ever made, to put it simply. In it, the octogenarian McNamara looks back at his career and makes stunningly honest assessments of his own conduct. At the end of his life, McNamara made profound admissions of that universal truth that life is lived forwards and understood backwards.

Examples of McNamara's late-found honesty: "I behaved as a war criminal" "What makes something immoral if you lose, but not immoral if you win?" Both of those thoughts were spoken by McNamara regarding his role in planning the saturation bombing of Japanese cities in World War II.

Unfortunately, the humility and wisdom of these quotes came to McNamara in his 70's and 80's rather than in his 30's or 40's or 50's. For those interim decades, McNamara persisted in his inability to walk in any other man's moccasins.

I came across a beautifully written anecdote that articulates this blindness perfectly and is worth quoting at length:

McNamara has just been told by a subordinate that the Soviet Union was not following what McNamara considered the "logical" strategy regarding nuclear weapons.

"That was too much. McNamara ripped the pointer from Foster's hands and slammed it against the charts. 'No, no, no!' he shouted, coloring dangerously. 'As a Red marshal, I'm going to put them all on the cities!' "

"A stunned silence followed, in which no one said, 'Well, Mr. Secretary, but you're not a Red marshal.' To McNamara, nuclear war was the end of his world, to be treated with fitting millenarianism."

"To real Red marshals--Sokolovsky, Malinovsky, and others--who had fought from Stalingrad to Berlin against the best army in the world, twenty million to forty million dead was an experienced historical fact."

"This did not make them aggressive. It might indeed give them second thoughts. But it did make them grimly confident of enduring in ways that the civilized secretary was fortunate in not being able to imagine."

When powerful men lack imagination, the unimaginable is often just the push of a button away.