July 6: A Tale of Two Cities
On July 6, 1947, the Soviet Union began production of the Avtomat Kalashnikova-47 (AK-47), one of the world’s first operational assault rifles, a simple yet durable weapon that the Soviets would, over the ensuing decades, distribute to their allies. Eventually tens of thousands would be supplied to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to fight Americans during the Vietnam War.
Exactly 21 years later, on July 6, 1968, one of these weapons would kill twenty-year-old Marine Lance Corporal Thomas Patrick Mahoney III, two shots through the heart at close range, according to eyewitness Nguyen Tien Thanh. His fellow Marines had been trying to snap Tom out of despondency about the abandonment of the Khe Sanh Combat Base and its outposts, scheduled for that very day, after so many had given their lives there—now seemingly for nothing. He had also just received a Dear John letter from his girlfriend. In midafternoon, shortly before helicopters were to arrive to take the Marines away, Tom walked, unarmed, beyond the defensive perimeter of the outpost right into an enemy ambush. He would be among the last Marines to die in the costly fifteen-month-long battle to maintain that remote and controversial garrison.
Less than three months earlier, on March 31, while the siege of Khe Sanh was still underway, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek a new term in office and offered to open negotiations with the DRV to end the conflict. After years of telling the American public that US forces were winning the war, the recent Tet Offensive, and the costly and protracted fighting at Khe Sanh, had irreparably damaged his credibility and re-election chances. A month before that, in February, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, chief architect of the war, had stepped down. The previous November, McNamara had informed the President privately that he no longer had confidence in America’s ability to win, but would publicly continue to support the war and defend his decisions rather than own up to his failure.
As someone who was at Khe Sanh at that time, still surrounded by thousands of enemy soldiers, I can vividly recall these two announcements, like a slap in the face to those of us risking our lives, and the beginning of a downward spiral in morale by those continuing the fight.
McNamara had begun his professional life in 1939 with the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse. After a stint in the military during World War II, he would move on to the Ford Motor Company. There, he cultivated a public persona as one of “The Whiz Kids” of American business, able to solve any problem. After becoming Secretary of Defense, he brought with him total confidence in his infallibility and absolute faith in data analysis and statistical models, attempting to successfully apply these tools in an area beyond his expertise—the complex and excruciating human enterprise of modern guerrilla warfare. His primary metric for determining success was the “body count, and in early 1968, the siege of Khe Sanh would present no greater opportunity in the war to multiply that body count by unleashing unparalleled concentrations of bombing and artillery fire on tens of thousands of exposed and relatively stationary besiegers.
McNamara’s planned war of attrition, and, in particular, its component of defending isolated and vulnerable Khe Sanh, had been greeted with resistance by several Marine Corps generals. One, Lieutenant General Victor Krulak, went over McNamara’s head to directly confront President Johnson about this in the Oval Office, committing career suicide in an effort to save American lives.
Decades later, in 1996, McNamara released his book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, in which he admitted not having been “sufficiently truthful” with the American public about the causes and conduct of the war. There were many occasions, he said, on which the Johnson Administration should have considered withdrawing from South Vietnam, but did not. The CIA, he wrote, believed “the North Vietnamese had much greater staying power than the Administration and Westy [General Westmoreland] believed. It turned out the CIA was correct.” He and the Administration “were wrong, terribly wrong.”[ii]
The book unleashed a firestorm of scorn from around the world. One of the most stinging reviews came from the former CIA Staff Chief for the Office of National Estimates in the mid-1960s, Harold Ford, who had drafted countless intelligence estimates about communist troop strength in South Vietnam. Ford called McNamara’s accounting of history ambiguous, debatable and skewed. Nor, he went on, did his confession satisfy anyone, including war veterans, the families of war casualties, those who opposed the war, or those who still believed it could have been won. [iii]
Others in government and the military during the war had summoned up the courage to remain faithful to their duty to the nation, despite career-ending implications. McNamara had the same opportunity to do what he knew to be right; but, as former CIA Vietnam chief-of-station, Peer DeSilva later explained, did not because he was “arrogant, prideful and dumb.”[iv] 
Robert McNamara had grown up in a house at 1036 Annerley Road in Oakland, California, less than a mile from 677 Fairmount Avenue where Patricia Waterman, and later her son Tom Mahoney, were raised. McNamara’s father, Robert, was a sales manager with a wholesale shoe company and his mother, Clara, a clerical employee at Piedmont High School. The nearby town of Piedmont was an upscale community, largely controlled by a number of extremely wealthy “old money” families.
In 1933, it was difficult for a young man without the right social connections to climb the ladder to success. Then, only about fifteen percent of Americans were able to attend college, almost all of them from upper-class families. It would not be until the creation of the G.I. Bill in 1944, that colleges, universities and technical schools expanded their admissions, a change that helped create the American middle class.
Despite the Annerley Road address technically leaving young Robert outside the Piedmont School District, and so bound for a more academically diluted, but more importantly, a less prestigious social climate, at Oakland High, he was admitted. Some have suggested that his mother “pulled strings” with her employer to get him in. This early foot in the door (albeit, the back door) changed the trajectory of Robert’s life. He would go on from there to attend the University of California, Berkeley, excelling in his studies and enjoying fraternity life in the company of the nation’s future movers and shakers. After graduating in 1937, he was accepted to study at the Harvard School of Business. Robert McNamara had arrived.
Patricia Waterman, while not attending the university, was at that time, according to the society page of the Oakland Tribune, active in the TNT Club helping organize dances and other events at the College Women’s Club of Berkeley. It is interesting to wonder whether Patricia and her “neighbor,” Robert, ever met socially.
However, there would eventually prove to be a strange and sad connection between her son Tom Mahoney and Robert McNamara. The latter, who, due to class distinctions at the time, was likely destined for a sales job like his father, caught a break in 1933 when school zoning restrictions were relaxed to allow him admission to Piedmont High. History is filled with such, seemingly, insignificant moments that change the course of world events. Perhaps with someone other than McNamara as Secretary of Defense; someone who’s ego might have allowed for greater receptiveness to the warnings of generals and the CIA that a “body count” strategy was destined to fail; American involvement in Vietnam might have been drawn down years before, avoiding the extraordinary bloodletting that ensued at places like Khe Sanh.
What we do know is that Robert McNamara, after being allowed to grasp that first rung on the social ladder, went on to enjoy a long life of prominence and “new money” wealth. He would die peacefully in his sleep at the age of ninety-three on July 6, 2009—exactly forty-one years to the day that Tom Mahoney, disconsolate about the tragic results of McNamara’s failed military strategy that he was witnessing first-hand, and having just received a Dear John letter (from, ironically, another Piedmont High School alumnus)—fell on Hill 881 South near Khe Sanh and has not yet been recovered.
[ii]Robert S, McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (Vintage Books 1996)
[iii]. Harold P. Ford, Revisiting Vietnam: Thoughts Engendered by Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/96unclass/ford.htmsigma.
[iv]. Peer DeSilva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978).
Source Note: Essay from Michael Archer’s Blog at https://khesanh-battle.com/f/july-6-a-tale-of-two-cities