The book is McNamara's confession after 27 years of silence that he knew the Vietnam War was wrong and unwinnable, even when he was still Secretary of Defense for JFK and LBJ. He helped propagate the lie during his cabinet post that we were very close to winning the war...we were " turning the corner" and that "there was light at the end of the tunnel." In this case, the old joke was more accurate: the light at the end of the tunnel was an oncoming train. The Tet Offensive of 1968 finally shattered all of our safe assumptions about the American military might and our "winning the war." It also forced McNamara to finally resign.
Yet for some 27 years he has kept his silence. While some of us have named the Vietnam War as wrong and been criticized for it in Revolutionist America, and while first Dan Quayle and then Bill Clinton were raked over the coals because they worked to stay out of that terrible war, McNamara kept his silence. He could afford to, not all of us could. Maybe he was afraid of what telling his story might do.
Gina Grant found out what telling her story accomplishes. In case you missed it, Gina Grant is an honors high school student from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School who was rejected by Harvard after they previously accepted her. Harvard learned that at 15, Gina had killed her mother. The case involved years of abuse: Gina served her 6 months probation and set about getting her life back together. Till now. Harvard doesn't want her.
Of course Harvard wanted Henry Kissinger, whose foreign policy cover-ups and lies and resultant death and violence would fill numerous books; they wanted McGeorge Bundy, another LBJ advisor and Harvard Alum who insisted bombing civilians and others in north Vietnam would win the war. Seems Harvard likes some killers and liars more than others. Poor Gina Grant. Maybe if she joins the CIA and helps some Guatemalan thug kill some "terrorists," then Harvard might look more friendlier to her application for admission.
You see, boys and girls, HOW AND WHEN you TELL YOUR STORY makes a difference. You can twist your story so much that even if it is fiction it will, if repeated enough times sound like the truth. And you can wait till the right moment... the moment when the consequences seems least fatal and then confess. But one thing is certainly true. Stories count! Told often enough and in the right way, stories can be killers. Just ask any survivor of a Nazi concentration camp.
For thousands of years, we Christians told the story of Jesus' arrest, trial, and execution and put the blame for it on Jews. They were the ones in Galilee who feared him, they brought him to Pilate, they forced the Romans to kill Jesus. As if they could. No Roman governor ever would have caved into any religious minority to satisfy the mob. Jesus was hung by Romans because he preached and lived a life of shared eating and shared healing and calling persons to God's Kingdom... asking them to imagine a world with God, not Caesar on the throne. That living and preaching is sedition by any definition. That is why the Romans, not the Jews, had him crucified.
Yet we Christians, from the earliest priests through Martin Luther, through Vatican proclamations and Sunday sermons, cast Jesus' blood upon the Jews. Only now are we confessing to our lie and redressing history. But like McNamara's late confession, we are in many ways too little too late. For the way we told our Passion story led to anti-Judaism and eventually anti-Semitism. John Dominac Crossan starts his new book, The Killing of Jesus this way: "Anti-semitism means six million Jews on Hitler's list but only twelve hundred on Schindler's list."
How you tell your story counts.