A few weeks ago one of the main architects of the Vietnam War, Robert S. McNamara, died at 93. McNamara, as secretary of defense, was ultimately responsible for the killing of millions of Southeast Asians along with over 58,000 U.S. soldiers during that war. He spent most of his later years attempting to make amends for the war crimes that ended the lives of so many, and seemed a tortured man during those years.

In all of the commentary about his death and “legacy,” none caught my eye as much as the segment on July 7 that aired on the liberal-left news program “Democracy Now!”

In the segment “Vietnam War Architect Robert McNamara Dies at 93: A Look at His Legacy with Howard Zinn, Marilyn Young & Jonathan Schell,” Howard Zinn, the famous left historian comments on what he calls McNamara’s “moral intelligence.”

“Well, assessing the legacy . . . It seems to me one things [sic] which we should be thinking about, is that McNamara represented all of those superficial qualities of brightness and intelligence and education that are so revered in our culture. This whole idea that you judge young kids today on the basis of what their test scores are, how smart they are, how much information they can digest, how much they can give back to you and remember. That’s what McNamara was good at. He was bright and he was smart, but he had no moral intelligence. What strikes me as one of the many things we can learn from this McNamara experience is that we’ve got to stop revering these superficial qualities of brightness and smartness, and bring up a generation which thinks in moral terms, which has moral intelligence, and which asks questions not, “Do we win or do we lose?” Asks questions, “Is this right? Is it wrong?” And McNamara never asked that question.”

I don’t know whether McNamara asked himself whether or not the policies he implemented during the Vietnam War were right or wrong. His motives seem to have been fomented more from a Machiavellian perspective and Cold War mentality than from any sense of right or wrong . . . or what has been called by the political theorist Hannah Arendt “the banality of evil,” which is neither moral nor immoral, but rather amoral. From reading his words, and seeing him in interviews and on screen, it seems that he may have moved later in his life toward a serious consideration of those questions and of the moral implications of his policies while a member of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Neither of those administrations were far right wing in terms of all their policies. The mass media and many commentators and writers consider them both liberal, and, in the final analysis, they both did about as much damage in Southeast Asia as Richard Nixon who was clearly a member of the right wing of the Republican Party.

So, does either the right or left, or liberals and moderates for that matter, have any lock on thinking and acting in moral terms? Does any one persuasion or political belief have the only answers to the moral questions? Certainly, since the resurgence of the religious right in the early 1980s that movement became adept at feigning a sense of moral superiority (read hypocrisy) over the rest of humanity and pointing fingers at so-called moral transgressors.

In the 1970s, Noam Chomsky, considered to be a preeminent scholar on left matters, and a linguist by training, seemed to downplay the role of the Khmer Rouge in the slaughter that lead to the genocide of about 2 million Cambodians following the end of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. In the article “Distortions at Fourth Hand” (1977), Chomsky, along with Edward S. Herman, accuses the media of creating a “seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasizing Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered.”

There is no doubt whatsoever that the U.S. did play an instrumental role in setting the stage for the Khmer Rouge to spill the blood of nearly 2 million of their countrymen. However, what is lacking in Chomsky and Herman’s analysis is the fact that it was the Khmer Rouge that actually carried out this genocide with no assistance from the U.S. Downplaying the primary actor’s role in a genocide is like saying that the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I was solely responsible for the actions of Adolph Hitler during the Holocaust. That kind of logic from such eminent thinkers as Chomsky and Herman defies common wisdom!

Abbie Hoffman was one of the most popular leaders of the counterculture movement of the 1960s. He was also one of my heroes and one of the greatest activists of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Yet, his major biographer, Jonah Raskin, in For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (1996), documents how Hoffman was abusive to each of the three women who formed the most serious relationships of his life. Many feminists justifiably damned males within the antiwar movement during the 60s and 70s for their treatment of women, and especially those women with whom they were close and with whom they interacted with as activists. A person cannot be for the right cause, I have found, and act in a diametrically opposite manner in his or her personal life. The personal is absolutely the political as the saying that emerged from the 1960s goes!

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was another of my heroes. No one can doubt the power of his actions and accomplishments in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 50s and 60s. However, his personal life was at extreme odds with his quest for civil rights and the end of the Vietnam War that he sought. This is not to diminish any of his Herculean accomplishments or the ultimate sacrifice that he paid for his work.

During the past national election cycle in the U.S., the issue of the role of the radical Vietnam-era group the Weathermen came under scrutiny. The Weather Underground was an offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society, the latter of which had lofty goals that reflected the best traditions of participatory democracy in the U.S. However, the Weather Underground distorted those principles and moved into the cul-de-sac of violence that resulted in the eye for an eye mentality that is so much a part of contemporary culture in the U.S.

The attempt to create saints out of those on the left distorts the reality of life and the fact that the personal and the political sometimes do not mesh seamlessly in an activist’s life. President John F. Kennedy was regarded as an intellectual and liberal, yet his personal life spoke of great contradictions. It may be that the role of leadership leads to a kind of personality that distorts the moral compass of the individual, or perhaps those personality traits are present before becoming a leader. The issue of personal control of others that emanates from holding power also impacts a person’s personality and moral bearings in many ways. It may also be that the fact that we are imperfect as human beings enters into the equation of which actions are right and which ones are wrong in ways that are not always easily discerned.

It would be a mistake, however, to conflate a view of right and wrong with Puritanism as it evolved in colonial America and its later manifestation in the Christian right. Such black and white morality exists somewhere beyond the grasp of most people.

Left-based activism is an effective means of addressing the needs of people in a social and political system that panders to the right and the dictates of a capitalist economic system that values greed and empire above all other values and goals. But, a moral sense is in the possession of no particular group or individual regardless of political persuasion. To think that ability to tell right from wrong, and to act on that knowledge, is in the sole possession of a single group or individual is false thinking of the highest order!