Some Sad news via The Washington Post:
Robert S. McNamara, the former secretary of defense whose record as a leading executive of industry and a chieftain of foreign financial aid was all but erased from public memory by his reputation as the primary architect of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, died early this morning at age 93.
Diana McNamara said her husband died at his home in Northwest Washington. She did not give a cause of death.
McNamara was secretary of defense during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. In that capacity he directed a U.S. military buildup in Southeast Asia during the critical early years of a Vietnamese conflict that escalated into one of the most divisive and bitter wars in U.S. history. When the war was over, 58,000 Americans were dead and the national social fabric had been torn asunder.
Before taking office as secretary of defense in 1961, McNamara was president of Ford Motor Co. For 13 years after he left the Pentagon in 1968, he was president of the World Bank. He was a brilliant student, a compulsive worker and a skillful planner and organizer, whose manifest talents carried him from modest circumstances in California to the highest levels of the Washington power structure. He was said to have built a record of achievement and dedication in business, government and public service that few of his generation could match.
After his retirement from the bank in 1981, he maintained an exhausting schedule as director or consultant to scores of public and private organizations and was a virtual one-man think tank on nuclear arms issues.
But more than 40 years after the fact, he was remembered almost exclusively for his orchestration of U.S. prosecution of the war in Vietnam, a failed effort by the world’s greatest superpower to prevent a communist takeover of a weak and corrupt ally. For his role in the war, McNamara was vilified by harsh and unforgiving critics, and his entire record was unalterably clouded. For the rest of his life, he would be haunted by the Vietnam ghosts.
No matter one’s opinion of the war. It is no doubt that this man carried the burden of that war with him. He later admitted that he was wrong. But by then, it was too late. He wrote a memoir, that only enraged his critics the more.
I was raised in the tradition that one does not speak evil of the dead. Just bury ‘em and remember the good about them. Mr. McNamara. rest in peace sir. May you find it in death.
His Book:
Update: Taki’s Magazine has an excellent entry on this subject.