Has any single American of this century done more harm than Robert McNamara? No one comes readily to mind. Yes, Lyndon Johnson bears greater responsibility for the damage done the nation by the Vietnam War. But McNamara is a Renaissance man. Before he helped ruin the American polity, he helped ruin the American economy, pioneering at Ford the bloodless, numbers-oriented management methods that helped bring so many corporations to their knees. After Vietnam, as head of the World Bank, he helped ruin the entire world's economy, shoveling out billions of dollars to fund failed "development" projects. It's a tough record to match.

Now we are supposed to make a great fuss because McNamara has published a book, In Retrospect, in which he confesses his Vietnam errors. Newsweek announced that "in his 79th year, after cross-country skiing to the top of Colorado's Continental Divide, he has finally broken his long pained silence." That "took some guts," we were told. A front-page photo of McNamara, looking contented and statesmanlike, accompanied The New York Times's coverage of this event. ("We were wrong, terribly wrong," reads the caption.) There is a tearful television interview with Diane Sawyer, and a book party at Katharine Graham's house. A twelve-city promotional tour follows.

I suppose admitting mistakes is better than not admitting mistakes. But McNamara was a more sympathetic figure when he seemed tortured by guilt in private than now, when he is cashing in on it in public. There is something creepy, even slightly obscene, about the whole process, and it gets creepier upon inspection.

One problem is that In Retrospect is something less than the "brutally self-critical" account advertised in the press. In intent, it appears closer to a modified limited hangout than a mea culpa. McNamara depicts his mistakes as sins of process rather than character. He says he "should have forced examination, debate and discussion." He doesn't say he was a bully and a fool. He allows that he was "less than candid" in public about the war's progress, but then immediately muses that "perhaps a senior government official could hardly have been more straightforward in the midst of a war." He blames General William Westmoreland for the war's "attrition" strategy, admitting only that "I...must share the burden" for agreeing to it.

The book's dust jacket describes McNamara as a veritable peacenik: "Outnumbered by those who wanted to continue fighting, he left the Johnson administration and his involvement in Vietnam behind." In the text, McNamara makes it clear he didn't want to stop fighting, only to "level off U.S. military involvement for the long haul." But virtually every bit of inside information he divulges tends to make him look better rather than worse. He is constantly "disturbed" and "troubled" by the war. He highlights his own pessimistic memos (including one that, as Richard Reeves has pointed out, he never got around to showing to President Johnson). "You know that old saying--'he just doesn't get it.' Well, he did get it," boasts his co-author, Brian VanDeMark, in Newsweek. McNamara wants to both claim that he was right and get credit for admitting he was wrong.

It's an odd, modern sort of confession that becomes the occasion for such well-publicized self-congratulation. What, exactly, has been McNamara's punishment for (by his own admission) stupidly prosecuting a war in which 58,000 Americans, and many times that number of Vietnamese, died? Did he go wash the feet of lepers for a decade? No, he became president of the World Bank. He built a house at Snowmass. He built another house on Martha's Vineyard. And they're still giving parties for him at Mrs. Graham's.

I met McNamara once, at a conference. He was self-effacing, and breathtakingly concise. I understand the charm. But there is something wrong with a culture in which a McNamara is feted for his "guts" while George McGovern and Gene McCarthy, who opposed McNamara's mistakes, are regarded as nobodies. In one of the uglier passages of In Retrospect, McNamara sneers at the antiwar protesters who marched on the Pentagon in 1967. If they had been more "disciplined" and "Gandhi-like," he says, "they could have achieved their objective of shutting us down." Instead they were "troublemakers" who "threw mud balls" and "even unzipped [soldiers'] flies." This is contrition? Shouldn't McNamara be admitting that the mudball-throwers, after all, had been right?

McNamara's book confirms what he had often hinted: that he came to believe the war was unwinnable as early as 1965. At that point, as Paul Hendrickson of The Washington Post has noted, 1,335 Americans had been killed. Why didn't McNamara quit and speak out? He claims that would have been "a violation of my oath to uphold the Constitution." Cabinet officials who quit must do it "silently," he says, citing as a model Dean Acheson, who resigned from FDR's administration when he "found himself unable to accept the president's monetary policy."

Monetary policy! By the time McNamara left the Pentagon for the World Bank, another 14,000 Americans were dead. And of course the war didn't stop then. President Nixon continued it for five more years, although McNamara now says Nixon should have withdrawn. Surely whatever strictures prevented McNamara from criticizing Johnson wouldn't have prevented him from speaking out against Nixon. Even if he hadn't yet decided on withdrawal, simply giving voice to his doubts would have had an impact. Yet he didn't do it, while another 42,000 died. As McNamara puts it, defending his infamous quantitative approach to military success, "things you can count, you ought to count. Loss of life is one...."

And why, suddenly, having maintained his costly silence for so long, does McNamara break it now? Because, he says, he has "grown sick at heart witnessing the cynicism and even contempt with which so many people view our political institutions and leaders." Please. Wouldn't the cynicism have been less if he'd spoken up earlier, maybe even at the risk of losing his prestigious World Bank job? Let me offer an alternative--more cynical--explanation for McNamara's strange sense of timing, one that fairly leaps off the pages of his book: he is acting now to protect his posthumous reputation.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in a gushing back-cover blurb for In Retrospect, asks: "Can anyone remember a public official with the courage to confess error and explain where he and his country went wrong?" An answer to this question does come readily to mind, or should have come readily to Schlesinger's mind: Robert Kennedy, who admitted his own culpability when breaking with Johnson over Vietnam in 1968. But Kennedy showed his courage when it made a difference in the lives of others. McNamara only found his when the one left to save was himself.

By Mickey Kaus