Published: Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Passages: Robert McNamara was Vietnam War architect
Robert S. McNamara, the Pentagon chief who directed the escalation of the Vietnam War despite private doubts about it, died Monday at 93 at his Washington, D.C., home. His wife said his health had been failing for some time.
McNamara revealed his misgivings three decades after the American defeat that some called "McNamara's war."
"We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of our country. But we were wrong. We were terribly wrong," McNamara said in 1995, the year his best-selling memoir, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," appeared.
McNamara predicted that American intervention would enable the South Vietnamese to stand by themselves "by the end of 1965." The war ground on until 1975, with more than 58,000 U.S. deaths.
Anti-war critics ridiculed him as an out-of-touch technocrat and made much of the fact that his middle name was "Strange." Simon and Garfunkel worked his name into a ditty about an overbearing government: "A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)."
A student of statistical analysis, McNamara was recruited to run the Pentagon by President John Kennedy in 1961 from the presidency of the Ford Motor Co. McNamara was a key figure in both the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis 18 months later. Historians have pointed to McNamara's role in steering internal debate away from a U.S. airstrike during the crisis.
He stayed in the defense post for seven years. He left on the verge of a nervous breakdown and became president of the World Bank.
Associated Press
McNamara revealed his misgivings three decades after the American defeat that some called "McNamara's war."
"We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of our country. But we were wrong. We were terribly wrong," McNamara said in 1995, the year his best-selling memoir, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," appeared.
McNamara predicted that American intervention would enable the South Vietnamese to stand by themselves "by the end of 1965." The war ground on until 1975, with more than 58,000 U.S. deaths.
Anti-war critics ridiculed him as an out-of-touch technocrat and made much of the fact that his middle name was "Strange." Simon and Garfunkel worked his name into a ditty about an overbearing government: "A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)."
A student of statistical analysis, McNamara was recruited to run the Pentagon by President John Kennedy in 1961 from the presidency of the Ford Motor Co. McNamara was a key figure in both the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis 18 months later. Historians have pointed to McNamara's role in steering internal debate away from a U.S. airstrike during the crisis.
He stayed in the defense post for seven years. He left on the verge of a nervous breakdown and became president of the World Bank.
Associated Press
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