Reading a bunch of books on Vietnam recently, and spending a lot of time around Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense whose ideas that he could logic America into winning an unwinnable war led to massive tragedy. For decades it’s stood as an abject lesson for arrogant policymakers: McNamara, undeniably an intelligent and thoughtful man, could nonetheless delude himself that there was no limit to American power, or what technology and brute force could achieve in foreign policy. In his memoirs, McNamara offered a simple condemnation of this mindset:

“We in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”

McNamara, sincerely if belatedly, realized the folly of his thought processes and hoped that future policymakers would learn from his example. He agreed to a long form interview for Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, released just after the Bush Administration launched the invasion of Iraq, which showed that McNamara’s lessons would go unheeded. Henry Kissinger, the architect of Nixon’s expansion of the war, seemed much less concerned about reflecting on his own failures.

I told him I had just interviewed Robert McNamara in Washington. That got his attention. He stopped badgering me, and then he did an extraordinary thing. He began to cry.

But no, not real tears. Before my eyes, Henry Kissinger was acting.

“Boohoo, boohoo,” Kissinger said, pretending to cry and rub his eyes. “He’s still beating his breast, right? Still feeling guilty.” He spoke in a mocking, singsong voice and patted his heart for emphasis.

It is clear which example the current Administration has chosen to draw upon.