INSIGHTS

IT’S AKIN TO leprosy in some organizations. It can be shirked, evaded or embraced, and careers are maintained by those people who avoid it most. It’s responsibility. Publicly, the leaders of those organizations proudly count themselves as respectable members of the Buck Stops Here, Rough Rider or Hair Shirt School of Management; privately, they dance to the tune Don’t Blame Me.

In choosing how you deal with responsibility, you reveal to yourself most clearly the character you have-not the one you wish you had or hope to have, but the one you have. You can understand why so many imaginative strategies have been designed simply to avoid it altogether, because in certain instances, if responsibility is mishandled, a reputation can be permanently dismantled.

From the time that David Halberstam’s book, The Best and The Brightest, was published to the airing of WGBH’s 13-hour series Vietnam-A Television History, former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara has steadfastly refused to speak about his role as one of the architects of the Vietnam War. But on May 16, in excerpts from a 444-page deposition unwillingly given by McNamara to David Boies (a lawyer representing CBS in the libel suit brought against the company by Gen. William Westmoreland), we learned in two sentences McNamara’s concept of responsibility. On the New York Times page where I read them, the words appeared emotionless and computer-generated. McNamara said, “I was a participant in a decision-making process. I do not believe a participant should be judge of his own actions or the validity of those actions.”

Am I completely missing something here, or does that mean what it says? Would the mothers and fathers of those sons and daughters whose names are inscribed on the Vietnam Memorial understand the implications of that statement? Isn’t this a textbook definition of abdication of responsibility? What tribunal will be the judge of our actions (or McNamara’s) or the validity of those actions?

Is what happened in Vietnam so horrific that McNamara understandably will use any means to distance himself from his role? McNamara’s statements are stunningly effective at least in one respect: They show the lengths to which a brilliant mind-a mind that knows better-will go. They also show that brilliant minds in the face of an unpleasant responsibility can be made just as uncomfortable as ordinary ones. But an agile mind with its conscience in neutral is more dangerous, since it has the capacity to find more ways of escape.

McNamara is an example that seizes our imaginations because, except for his high-profile role as secretary of defense, he would have had clear sailing. He went on to lead the World Bank and received high grades for his performance. He was a vigorous proponent of the necessity to help Third World countries. Today, he is a major spokesman against nuclear arms buildup. We don’t know whether McNamara sees his activities since he resigned as secretary of defense in 1968 as acts of contrition. But Halberstam believes that “his lack of accountability on Vietnam has been unbelievable. His rhetoric always soars, but his rhetoric can’t escape the role he played, about which he remains so silent.”

Another example: The president of one of Dallas’ best-run companies once headed a subsidiary of that company. The subsidiary crashed, resulting in a write-off of close to $100 million. There were lots of circumstances beyond the man’s control that caused the crash, but it was still a failure of substantial scale. Shortly afterward, when the company’s founder picked his new president, he nevertheless chose this man. The decision went against conventional corporate patterns, where those who rise highest are burnished by unbroken strings of success and are total strangers to failures of any consequence.

I had the chance to talk with the new president, and in the most roundabout, gingerly fashion, I asked how he had risen in the face of what many would have called a failure. He replied, without hesitation, “Hell, it was a big failure, and it was mine.”

Working on this column, I understood why he was chosen-he had not only the right stuff, but most of all, the best stuff. When the defeat became apparent, he didn’t wear out his fingers pointing to scapegoats; he didn’t develop any intricate formulas for apportioning blame. In accepting responsibility for failure-and blame-he defined himself as a leader. And that was the trait the founder valued; neither has been sorry.

It must be 10 or 12 years ago that 60 Minutes ran a story on busing that was really about responsibility. As I remember, the story listed Congress’ major busing proponents and where they sent their own children to school. Where did they send them? Er, well… private schools, for almost all of them.

These were the people who had taken the responsibility to make busing the law of the land, but their actions represented the all-too-familiar variety of political responsibility that has no stake in the consequences of a decision. So while communities and parents subsequently tried to make the rules of busing work, the children of busing’s major congressional proponents were spared the three-hour daily commutes and the disruptions that so many public-school kids had to endure.

In Congress, there is a willingness to be responsible in part-which is actually no responsibility at all. There was a willingness among the busing advocates to be responsible for the idea of busing and the goals of busing, but there was no willingness to be responsible-at least as far as their own children were concerned-for the day-to-day implications of the actual experience of busing.

Responsibility allows us to make decisions, and that’s the problem. The wrongdecision, even if the decision is known onlyto us, can disfigure a character. And enoughwrong decisions can leave you alone on anempty plain-a plain scorched by moralneutrality.