Robert McNamara, who died today at age 93, had a remarkable career as president of Ford Motor Co., president of the World Bank and as a long-serving secretary of defense. “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,” the Washington Post reported. “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.”
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13 Comments
He killed 58,000 Americans for lie, good riddance
JFK?
Last I checked JFK was already dead when the Gulf of Tonkin happened
Robert Strange McNamara lived up to his middle name. There is an old saying, something to the effect, “Ordinary men make ordinary mistakes; big men in important jobs often make very big, catastrophic mistakes.” Robert S. McNamara as brilliant as he was, fell into that tragic pathway.
As I recall, McNamara was known as one of the “whiz kids” from Ford Motor Company. Indeed, he was the lead whiz kid, as president of Ford Motor Company when appointed by John F. Kennedy as Secretary of Defense.
Who knows, perhaps presidential historians do: which president led McNamara down the path of tremendously accelerating the Vietnam War. Was it John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson? Or did McNamara, as their chief advisor, lead them down that terribly destructive pathway.
Was it a kind of boisterous, macho, “we’re tougher than they are” attitude that pervaded the thinking in the White House?
In any case, the gigantic morass that resulted caused Lyndon Johnson to eventually say, “Tonight I announce to the nation, I shall not run again for President.”
I think Americans forget, Richard Nixon won that election, and soon declared a specific date (was it in 1972 or 1973?) when the Vietnam War would suddenly stop? Remember the American helicopter lifting off the roof of the American embassy in Vietnam with the last people to exit hanging onto it’s runners?
And a number of years later Robert S. McNamara himself broke into tears on national TV admitting the escalation of American forces in Vietnam had been a giant mistake.
I guess the best thing that can be said about Robert S. McNamara is he was a good man … who took the wrong fork in the road.
Hindsight is 20/20.
What McNamera and the generals missed was that Vietnam wasn’t the same kind of war as WWII or Korea, wasn’t being fought in the same way or for the same objectives. By the time they figured out how to fight that kind of war, it was all over.
We fought it as a proxy war with Russia, when it was a revolution against first, a colonial power and then the government set up by the colonial power. When we came into it, we were perceived as yet another colonial conquerer by a majority of the population. We deposed the hated Diems, but set up a military dictatorship to take it’s place. We didn’t have a chance of winning from the get-go.
Hindsight is 20/20, but plenty of us said at the time that it was a civil war we had no business fighting, killing and dying in.
“Remember the American helicopter lifting off the roof of the American embassy in Vietnam with the last people to exit hanging onto it’s runners?”
That was in April, 1975, a full nine months after nixon left office. However, the war had effectively been over 3 years before that awful day.
Terry Gross reran her 1995 interview with Robert S. McNamara.
You can hear it here. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106302175
McNamara is burning in hell while the little children he fried with napalm are looking down from heaven . . .
KSgrrl–
I remember it well. I remember Nixon running for office with his “secret plan for an honorable end to the War in Vietnam.”
It apparently was so secret that even Nixon didn’t know what it was, because after he took office, he ramped up incursions into Cambodia, heigh ho.
Thank you Jed for the best insight I’ve seen about Viet Nam in such a short few sentences.
“Regular
Posted July 6, 2009 at 1:18 pm | Permalink
Hindsight is 20/20.”
For some of us it was 20/20 foresight. We knew it was doomed from the start. McNamara finally admitted decades later that we were right all along.