Cakes and Ale

August 17, 2022 – Davy Crockett was born 236 years today.

His birthday was the first historical date I committed to memory, thanks entirely to Walt Disney’s 1954 miniseries, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.

The historical Crockett was a bigger-than-life, self-aggrandizing windbag who lied about his exploits to make money and win votes.

Disney’s Crockett was literally bigger. Fess Parker, at six feet-six, would have been a head taller than the coonskin Congressman. And a lot about the TV Davy was also fabricated. If eight-year-old viewers didn’t already know it, it was easy to miss the fact that Davy died at the Alamo. The last scene shows Fess swinging his musket like a fan blade to propel dozens of hapless Mexicans like unfeathered shuttlecocks off the smoking ramparts. When I finally realized, at 9, that Davy died, it was my first sortie into historical reinterpretation.

It was many years later that I realized Disney also hid the reality that the Mexican army was defending its legitimate territory against “Texian” interlopers.

Whatever its shortcomings, however, Disney’s reanimation of the Davy Crockett legend ignited my lifelong love of history. Most of the credit goes to actor Fess Parker, whose laconic portrayal made Davy seem both decent and heroic. Fess played less memorable roles when he was under contract to Disney, and viewers a few years younger than me knew him as TV’s Daniel Boone. I remained a fan of Fess until his death in 2010, and when his grandson created a Facebook account for him, I was one of the first to sign on. (Read more about My Friend Fess here.)

Between Davy and Dan’l, Fess made a career of creating images of historical figures that were more attractive than the real deals. I will go so far as to say Fess exceeded the accomplishments of his historic alter-egos. A Santa Barbara clergy friend of mine remembers him as a genial white-haired giant who stayed faithful to his wife, was generous to the Methodist Church (perhaps to encourage their acceptance of his wine producing business) and was a Ronald Reagan Republican (which, as we learned after the election of 2016, is not the worse thing you can be).

Davy, on the other hand, was a chronic self-promoter. He was a politician who believed elections are not lost by underestimating the intelligence of the American voter.

His image as an Indian fighter, for example, was largely made up. During the famous Creek uprising of 1813 (immortalized in The Ballad of Davy Crockett), historian Michael Wallis said Davy hunted and foraged food for the troops and saw little action (David Crockett: The Lion of the West). Davy left for home before the Creek war was over and hired a substitute to fight for him.

Back home, Davy set his sights on politics in 1821. He entertained crowds with his tall tales and homespun humor and was elected to the Tennessee Legislature and later to Congress.

In Congress he introduced a bill to close the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which he considered free education for the sons of the rich. Davy’s real claim to historic immortality was being the sole member of the Tennessee delegation to vote against President Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act. This singular act of courage further damaged Davy’s dubious reputation as an Indian fighter and he was defeated for reelection in 1835.

From that time on, Davy Crockett devoted his time to promoting A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, Written by Himself, actually a collaboration with Kentucky Representative Thomas Chilton. It was during a book tour that newspapers quoted Davy’s famous message to his constituents, that “they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas.”

That declaration sealed his fate. It seems he had every intention, as The Ballad of Davy Crockett puts it, of “follerin’ his legend into the West.” According to historian Manley F. Cobia, Jr., Davy was followed by large crowds on his way to Texas and he regaled them with speeches about Washington politics and his commitment to Texas Independence.

When he arrived in Nacogdoces, Texas, in January 1836, he enlisted as a Texian volunteer in exchange for a promise of 4600 acres of Texas land. Davy arrived at the Alamo in February, 1836. As is now well known, the little San Antonio mission was placed under siege by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. All we really know is that when the smoke cleared, Davy was dead along with every other Texian.

However, some accounts say a half dozen Texians surrendered to the Mexicans before the fighting was over. And some reports suggest Davy was among those who surrendered.

We will never know the truth, but I’m open to the possibility that Davy tried to quit the battle. He was in Texas to promote a book, himself, and his future as a landowner. He could have quickly assessed his situation to see how dumb it would be to die where he was not famous and in a place that had no apparent strategic importance. I can see how it made sense to surrender.

Unfortunately, Santa Anna was reportedly incensed that his “take no prisoners” order was ignored and he ordered their execution. All they had bought for themselves was a couple more hours of time. That was 183 years ago last March.

As it turns out, it doesn’t really matter how Davy died. There are only a handful of serious historians who know anything about his real life, much of which was camouflaged by fabrications and frontier humor.

For the rest of us, we have the Davy who was played so heroically by Fess, the Davy who believed in justice, who never gave up, who fought for freedom at the Alamo until his last righteous breath. Okay.

Maybe it didn’t really happen that way. But the fact is, in real history, it almost never happens that way.

But 236 years after his birth, we might still remember Davy with fondness for what we think he was and not for what he really was.

So I think we can be excused if we choose to celebrate his birthday with a healthy nip of Tennessee bourbon. Or four.

The more we nip, the less likely we will hear the real Davy bragging to us from his grave.

“Not since the Civil War has our country been more divided.”

That exaggerated claim appears occasionally in social media. It’s not true, of course, because we are not forming factional armies and going to war with one another. At least not yet.

But it is certainly true that the issues of the Civil War never went away. There are still Southerners who believe the war was fought over states’ rights, not slavery. And as Bryan Stevenson, civil rights lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative points out, slavery never really went away anyway. It just evolved. For millions of persons of color, equal justice and equal opportunity are empty words.

It seems to me that white racists who hid in the shadows during the Obama years have now erupted in the national soil like jimsonweed. They sense their natural tendencies to hate persons other than themselves will be sanctioned by followers of the current president, and that if they act on those hatreds they can count on the president’s approval.

They may be right. I think it’s patently obvious that the president is a racist, even if he has to try to hide it from the 60 percent of U.S. voters who are appalled by him.

But the odd thing about racism is that racists tend to think everyone shares their prejudices. They think their hate of the other is the most natural thing in the world.

American racism is certainly not restricted to the south but it takes on a special flavor there.

My own encounter with the Jim Crow south took place a half century ago. I had just returned to my native land after three years as an Air Force chaplain’s assistant in England. I stopped by South Carolina to see one of the chaplains I had worked for before reporting to my new assignment at McConnell Air Force Base, Kans.

The first thing the chaplain did was take me to Sunday services at a small white Southern Baptist Church near Sumter, S.C. The visit was memorable, at least for me, because the pastor – also white – kept punctuating his sermons with “wise words” from “an old n—– preacher.” He used an exaggerated Joel Chandler Harris accent to complete the effect.

Perhaps he was making the point that wise sayings are not racially exclusive, but I told the chaplain I was shocked to hear the ‘n’ word used from a pulpit.

“Aw, everyone uses it here, both colored people and white people,” he explained. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

The next day, the chaplain and I decided to take a trip from Sumter to Charleston, where a mutual friend Bentwaters/Woodbridge was waiting to take us to lunch. We invited a staff sergeant friend of the chaplain’s to join us and hopped into a cavernous Chevy wagon for the three-hour drive to Charleston.

Even in February, the South Carolina countryside was beautiful and the chaplain and I began telling the sergeant diverting tales of our last assignment in rural England. After an hour, the car engine began to gasp and the chaplain pulled off the road.

“Out of gas,” he said. We were in the middle of nowhere, a long way between Sumter and Charleston.

“I have an old gas can in the back,” the chaplain said. “When was the last time we passed a gas station?”

“I think there was one back there,” the sergeant said, gesturing down the long road we had just traveled.

The chaplain got out of the car to retrieve the gas can and handed it to me. Military life simplifies many decisions, and the fact that both my companions outranked me made it obvious that I would volunteer to buy the gas.

“Wait here,” I said, stressing the irony. And I took the can to the side of the road and stuck out my thumb.

Even in bucolic South Carolina in the sixties, a hitchhiking stranger was suspicious and several speeding cars ignored my honest white face.

Finally, a beige Lincoln Continental pulled over. The driver was a large, middle-aged white man wearing a crisp blue blazer and a Stetson hat like Boss Hogg’s. The man was smoking a large cigar, “Where to, Son?” he asked, stifling a wheeze.

“Ran out of gas,” I said. “Can you take me to the nearest gas station?”

“Hop in,” he said. The man tossed his cigar out the window and pressed his dashboard lighter against another one.

“We see a lot of GIs in these parts,” he said, although I was in civilian clothes and had not mentioned I was an airman. I sat quietly as he reminisced between drags on his cigar and raspy wheezes about his own service in Texas during the Second World War.

“Never fired a goddamn shot,” he said.

As his anecdotes unfolded, I noticed a gas station ahead and was a little surprised when he passed it. Trying to keep the conversation going, I told him why I was in South Carolina and where I was headed. He nodded attentively and sped passed a second gas station on the right hand side. I rustled the gas can in my lap to remind him of my mission.

When we surged past a third gas station I pointed it out to him. The man coughed wetly. “Yeh,” he said. “Well, shit, Son, those is n—–r garages.”

Obviously, he intended the explanation to suffice. Soon he pulled into a gas station that had his approval and I jumped out.

I filled the can and went back to the road to stick out my thumb. Immediately, a battered pick-up pulled over and I jumped in. The driver was a black man wearing a cloth cap and overalls.

“Thanks for stopping, Sir,” I said. “My car is down the road a few miles.”

The man nodded and the transmission grated loudly as he put the truck in gear. He didn’t say much, but he smiled when we passed the first gas station that I had obviously spurned.

When we passed the second, I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. When we passed the third, I feigned good humor and said, “Almost there.”

“Yes, Sir,” the driver drawled.

When we pulled up to the stranded car, the chaplain and sergeant were engaged in quiet conversation. They didn’t notice the driver of the truck who had delivered their gas to them.

“Let me give you something for your trouble,” I told the driver as I fumbled for my wallet.” “No, Sir,” the driver said, adding inscrutably, “Angels unawares. Angels unawares.” And the truck’s muffler popped loudly as he eased onto the highway.

I told the chaplain and the sergeant what had happened, but they soon lost interest in my account and changed the subject.

It was my first encounter with the Jim Crow south, and it stayed on my mind all my life.

And I wonder: has life in the American south changed in fifty years?

Or have old times there never been forgotten?

July 6, 2019. Martha, Will, Beny, and I visited the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential library in Hyde Park, N.Y. this weekend.

The artifact I wanted most to see again was Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal typewriter, now protected in a Plexiglas case to protect it from dust, temperature, and curious fingers.

The first time I saw her typewriter, about twenty years ago, it was mounted unobtrusively on a four-foot high wooden pedestal. Visitors to library could have touched it if they wished, and I did. If no one was looking, you could have slipped a piece of paper into the roller and started typing. I didn’t.

It is an ordinary looking Smith (Corona still hiding in the logo) typewriter of the style my father, a typing teacher, might have admired and collected. It looked a lot like the old typewriter Dad allowed me to use in my room in Morrisville, and I used it to type scores of letters to political notables in the early 1960s. Mostly I wanted to elicit a return letter from them, or an autographed picture, or some sage advice about making a career out of politics.

Most of these notables handed letters like mine to their office typists for boilerplate replies. I’m quite sure the only correspondent who typed her own responses was Eleanor Roosevelt. Thus, meeting her Smith (Corona) became as close to actually meeting her as I could manage.

I would have been in my teens when I wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt and I had only the vaguest idea who she really was. I knew she had been the wife of the 32^nd President of the United States and that she was a prominent New York Democrat who supported (reluctantly, as it turned out) my idol, John F. Kennedy. If I had gauged her true greatness, I might not have dared send my typed missives to her. I didn’t fully realize her prominence in the Civil and Human Rights movements, or her prestige in international affairs. I didn’t understand that a lot of people regarded her as the greatest woman of the 20^th century. I mailed typed letters to her with no sense of the awe I should have felt that she might hold my crude epistles in her hand.

I addressed my envelopes to Hyde Park, N.Y., but she evidently received them in her apartment at 55 East 74^th Street in Manhattan. And it was there that she slipped her stationery between the rollers of the Smith Corona and typed replies.

I wrote to her at least four times and she always wrote back. Her replies were thoughtful and direct responses to the questions I asked: Could she advise me as to whether politics was a good profession? Did she favor lowering the voting age to 21? Should I seek an appointment to become a Congressional page?

Several months before she died, I decided to interview her for Smoke Signals, the mimeographed student newspaper of Morrisville-Eaton Central School high school in Morrisville, N.Y.

Banging away on my own Smith Corona, I sent her seven questions.

Within days, she sent back seven carefully typed answers on two light-bond sheets of paper, once editing with her pen and once inserting a word with the typewriter.

I printed the answers in the student newspaper, using a manual typewriter to cut the mimeograph master. I don’t recall that the interview made a big impact on the student readers, most of who were stalwart Republicans and didn’t fully appreciate whom Eleanor Roosevelt was.

Naturally, I sent copies to the great lady. And, naturally, she wrote back to express her appreciation.

Eleanor Roosevelt died November 7, 1962. I wonder how many admirers and school children wrote to her as her health declined. How many hundreds of scrapbooks and attics contain her modest responses, “Very Sincerely Yours, Eleanor Roosevelt”?

For me, the typewritten letters she sent to me are valuable beyond price.

And the fact that she took time in her old age to read and respond to the letters of 15-year-olds leaves little question that what historians have said about her is true:

She was a woman of the people.

Below:

1: My first letter from Eleanor Roosevelt, offering advice about entering politics as a profession and advocating lowering the voting age to 18.

2. The second letter, encouraging my pursuit of an appointment to become a Congressional page (a quest quickly abandoned when I realized candidates had to have passing grades in high school mathematics).

3. The third letter, thanking me for sending copies of our high school newspaper, Smoke Signals, which included my interview with her.

4., 5.  Eleanor Roosevelt’s personally typed responses to my interview questions.

My mother imagined great things for all five of her children and her support knew no bounds. In high school my younger sibs showed great promise for careers in architecture, medicine, health care, and engineering. My only talent was cartooning and I spent hours copying drawings from Superman and Lone Ranger comic books. Mom chose to think of these scratchings as art. We visited an art museum once and she stared critically at a painting by Pablo Picasso. Mom looked at me and declared loudly, “You can do better than that!”

Sometimes Mom personified Picasso’s own adage, “Todo lo que puedas imiginar es real” – anything you can imagine is real. I thought of her loving but vast overestimation of my art recently when I cartooned a fake Picasso to illustrate a blog about how God’s messages are sometimes hard to read.

Needless to say, I am no Picasso. But both Picasso and Mom believed that even the most unattainable aspirations are never silly.  And anything you can imagine may take on a reality no one else can see.

As Independence Day approaches, our hearts and minds turn to holy writ.

At least, it sounds like holy writ.

Immigrant Irving Berlin writ it as a fervent prayer, and Kate Smith belted it out:

God Bless America, Land that I love.
Stand beside her, and guide her,
Through the night with a light from above.
From the mountains to the prairies,
To the oceans, white with foam,
God bless America,
My home sweet home.

If you remember the Kate Smith you probably also remember John Cameron Swayze. I remember each with fondness and was a fan of both Swayze’s NBC Camel News Caravan (1949 to 1956) and the CBS Kate Smith Hour (1950 to 1954). I remember she read charming stories to children. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced her to King George VI of England, saying, “Miss Smith is America.”

As it turns out, that was all too true.

Recently both the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers stopped playing Kate Smith’s recording of God Bless America at games when it was revealed she also belted out this cringe-worthy ditty in 1931:

Someone had to pick the cotton,
Someone had to pick the corn,
Someone had to slave and be able to sing,
That’s why darkies were born.

It seems that God Bless America and Someone had to pick the cotton form an apt metaphor of where our nation finds itself in the 243^rd year of its independence.

Founded by white men who either owned slaves or co-depended with slave owners, our forebears pursued a virulently racist agenda climaxing with a bloody civil war that was supposed to free the slaves. But as Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, points out, slavery never completely disappeared in America. “The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery,” Stevenson says. “Because we never dealt with that evil, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.”

There was a naïve temptation in 2008 to think the election of Barack Obama signaled a post-racial epoch in American history.

In actuality, American racism lurked beneath the surface during the Obama years and often gurgled through the sewer grate as African Americans continued to die openly in confrontations with white cops, or die mysteriously in dark prisons. “Black Lives Matter,” a movement aimed at protesting the systematic lack of justice for persons of color, was dismissed as dangerous militancy. White persons who tell you they don’t have a racist bone in their bodies would whisper among themselves that Michelle Obama looked like monkey. White GOP politicians in Congress, anxious lest the black President appear to be an effective leader, coalesced to block Obama’s programs and nominations. Donald Trump, then a shady self-promoter and quirky television personality (described by the New York Daily News as a clown), said he had proof Obama was born in Kenya and was constitutionally ineligible to be president.

If American racism hadn’t been lurking so breathlessly in the sewers for the eight years of Obama’s presidency, it wouldn’t have burst forth like projectile diarrhea to support Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign – a slogan to declare his intention to rescue America from the Obama years.

Trump’s Electoral College victory was not due entirely to racism, of course, and had there been no Electoral College he would have lost the election by 2.8 million votes.

But a racist and xenophobic bloc in the U.S., undergirded by an intransigent syndicate of Republican reactionaries in Congress, backed Trump’s bigoted policies. Even before he was inaugurated, Trump declared a ban on the immigration of persons from Muslim countries. He began to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border to discourage immigrants and asylum-seekers from crossing the border. He established a blanket policy of separating immigrant children from their parents and, when challenged, lied, and said Obama started it. He is now detaining thousands of brown people in centers that can only be described as concentration camps, many of which do not provide  basic necessities of survival such as toothbrushes, soap, and blankets. When Nazis and Ku Klux Klan white supremacists rioted in Charlottesville, he described some of them “as very fine people.” And he literally wraps himself in the American flag, embracing Old Glory with an orgiastic smirk.

Future generations will undoubtedly look back on the Trump years as a fleeting clown show, a political aberration. His racism is just part of his unhinged personality but so far his base – estimated at 30 to 40 percent of voters in polls – continues to embrace him as doltishly as he embraces the flag. It is enough for them that he promises to protect then from encroaching black and brown people and Muslims and they are willing to overlook the fact that 22 women have accused him of sexual assault, that he is a chronic and perhaps pathological liar, that he doesn’t pay his creditors, that he hides his tax returns behind a web of secrecy. Just how much longer his base will believe his claims that these realities are “fake news” remains to be seen.

Perhaps one of the reasons his base adores Trump is that they mistook the Obamas’ view of America as unpatriotic. Michelle Obama, in an unguarded moment during the 2008 campaign, said, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” President Obama sought to acknowledge the injustices persons of color face in the U.S. and, in statements that alarmed the Trump base, called for increased controls on gun ownership. But, obviously, the thing about the Obamas that seemed most un-American to Trump’s base was the content of their character and the color of their skin.

Fired by a patriotic zeal that is fueled by an international surge toward xenophobic Nationalism, his base seems willing to allow Trump unlimited license so long as he maintains America’s historic bigotry. So long as he “Makes America Great Again.”

As Independence Day 2019 approaches, I think I will be celebrating not what America has been historically, or what it is now, but what it could be if all of us live up to the American ideals of justice for all.

Love of one’s country is an honorable thing, especially when one loves it enough to see its flaws and want to correct them. This is the right of all Americans.

And love of one’s country is enhanced when it includes an understanding that citizens of other nations are entitled to a patriotic fervor based on their own quest for freedom, opportunity, and justice.

So, thank you, Mr. Berlin, for the stirring strains of God bless America.

But as we celebrate our nation’s untidy birth, let us also stand and sing the more inclusive hymn written by Lloyd Stone in 1934 and supplemented by Georgia Harkness in 1864:

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;
but other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine:
O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,
a song of peace for their land and for mine.

May truth and freedom come to every nation;
may peace abound where strife has raged so long;
that each may seek to love and build together,
a world united, righting every wrong;
a world united in its love for freedom,
proclaiming peace together in one song.

NOTE: Robert McNamara died ten years ago July 6 after a long delayed confession that the Vietnam War had been a terrible mistake. Our leaders then, who were “the best and the brightest” of their generation, didn’t have to listen to McNamara because he remained silent out of a misguided sense of patriotism. And that is hard to forgive. I wrote this essay the week he died.

They called it “McNamara’s War” after the intellectual car maker who masterminded it.

By early 1967, Robert Strange McNamara had already concluded that the Vietnam War had been a terrible mistake. It blows my mind (to borrow a phrase from the era) that Secretary of Defense McNamara realized it before I did.

In May 1967, when McNamara wrote a secret memo urging President Johnson to end the war, I was still fighting the Cold War at the Bentwaters-Woodbridge Air Bases in bucolic Suffolk, England. F4C fighter pilots from the 81st Tactical Fighter Wing were routinely assigned temporary duty in Thailand to drop bombs on Hanoi before resuming their Cold War duties in the U.K. I’d see the returning pilots in Sunday worship at the chapel where I worked, silently flexing their jaw muscles while grasping their wives’ hands. I’d ask them how it went, and they’d shrug. “Had to be done,” they’d say, avoiding eye contact.

I don’t think any of us understood why it had to be done. I was a 21-year-old chaplain’s assistant who could have been the model for M*A*S*H’s Radar O’Reilly and I got most of my war news from the Stars and Stripes newspaper. All of us, officers and GI’s alike, worked in duty sections that had black-and-white pictures of LBJ and Robert McNamara staring suspiciously at us. The portraits were hung just below the metallically glistening Air Force motto: “Peace is Our Profession.”

Oddly enough it all made sense: as a product of our profession of peace we dropped bombs on people in North Vietnam because it “had to be done”. Even if we were inclined to analyze it, we’d be distracted by inspiring speeches at Commander’s Call by officers like Colonel Robin Olds, the Vietnam War’s first flying “ace”, and the awesome Colonel Daniel N. “Chappie” James, later the Air Force’s first black four-star general. Neither enjoyed a good debate with subordinates, so we’d nod and salute.

Meanwhile, and unbeknownst to us, Robert McNamara had digested a CIA report that the so-called enemy was intractably committed to reuniting the country and there was nothing the U.S. could do to prevent it. McNamara, who was skilled at pursuing facts to their inevitable conclusion, realized his original judgment about the winnabilty of the Vietnam War had been wrong.

His memo to President Johnson is quoted in his obituary in the New York Times: “The war is becoming increasingly unpopular as it escalates – causing more American casualties, more fear of its growing into a wider war, more privation of the domestic sector, and more distress at the amount of suffering being visited on noncombatants in Vietnam, South and North.” Americans, McNamara told LBJ, “want the war ended and expect their president to end it. Successfully. Or else.”

When McNamara wrote that memorandum on May 19, 1967, I still had 17 months to go on my Air Force enlistment. The Vietnam War itself would continue for eight more bloody years.

Nearly 38,000 Americans died in Vietnam in the years after McNamara concluded the war had been a mistake. I didn’t reach that conclusion until September 1968, my first year in college.

Within weeks after his memo to LBJ, McNamara found himself ushered out of the Pentagon and installed as head of the World Bank. Although it’s clear now that Johnson fired him, at the time it looked like he was promoted for faithful service. McNamara gave no indication that he was having second thoughts about the war.

And that’s what I can’t forgive. When his voice could have thundered around the world, he chose to be silent. There are thousands of gravestone monuments to the price of his silence.

Years later, after McNamara finally revealed his regrets, my wife Martha and I visited the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where her immigrant father once worked as a dish washer after he left Cuba. The cemetery at West Point tends to be organized by the war in which the soldiers fell, and as we passed by the graves of Vietnam veterans I became bitterly mindful of McNamara’s change of heart. A lot of those graves were of men and women who died after 1967 — after their Secretary of Defense had concluded the war was unnecessary and unwinnable.

Why didn’t McNamara speak up? Did he feel honor-bound to be loyal to an intransigient president? What were his thoughts when the casualty figures continued to mount: 16,592 in 1968? 11,616 in 1969? 6,081 in 1970? — all for a cause he knew to be lost from the beginning?

In his later years, Robert McNamara was eloquent in his contrition. In a 1995 memoir he declared the war had been “wrong — terribly wrong.” He spent the rest of his life trying — futilely, it turned out — to prevent similar American disasters.

But the terrible question hanging over McNamara’s life can’t be avoided: what if he had spoken up sooner? Would the timely confession by the architect of the war that he had been wrong all along have forced LBJ to halt it? Would it have given subsequent warriors, Nixon and Kissinger, sufficient pause to sue for peace? Would it have saved thousands of lives?

Tragically, we’ll never know. Personally, I think a public admission by Robert McNamara in May 1967 would have been loud enough to suck the air out of public opinion and silence the bombs over Hanoi.

When Robert McNamara died July 6, 2009, his aged and sallow face appeared once more on our television screens and it was moving to hear the agony in his voice as he admitted his terrible mistakes.

Quite evidently he has lived in a hell of contrition since 1967. I hope our nation’s leaders listened carefully, because his confession was starkly convincing and no doubt saved his soul.

I only wish it had come sooner.