McNamara's Dead

Robert McNamara, he corporate leader who became architect of the failed U.S. war policy in Vietnam for Kennedy and Johnson from 1961-1968, is dead at 97 years old:

Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come.

The war became his personal nightmare. Nothing he did, none of the tools at his command — the power of American weapons, the forces of technology and logic, or the strength of American soldiers — could stop the armies of North Vietnam and their South Vietnamese allies, the Vietcong. He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life.

In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war, confessing in a memoir that it was “wrong, terribly wrong.” In return, he faced a firestorm of scorn.

He lived long enough to get multiple helpings. Check out Errol Morris' masterpiece of McNamara intimate and unsettling non-confession, The Fog of War. A cautionary tale for the ages, but also what Derosaworld says about Robert Strange McNamara:

President John F. Kennedy was surrounded by some very strange men. Men who were the ‘best and brightest’, but who also had dark secrets and responsibilities beyond what previous generations of government leaders had experienced.

The atomic bomb ended World War Two, but it also ended a sense of terrain: mountains and seas, protecting people and countries from the total devastation of warfare.

Now, we were all potential victims of the bomb. We could blow up the entire planet in a day if we wanted to.

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The best and the brightest. Robert McNamara looked the part. Young, nerdy, glasses, slicked back hair, the President of The Ford Motor Company. The New Frontier was here. Camelot was bivouacked in Washington, D.C.

A question for historians is why was McNamara selected to be the Secretary of Defense. Was it a Kennedy strategy to bring the various defense departments (air, sea, land) under White House managerial control? Was McNamara the loyal corporate man who would take orders from his Commander in Chief?

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The Johnson/McNamara era of the Vietnam War brings out the demons that brought America on the brink of insanity and Richard Nixon. The many locked doors in the White House became too scary for McNamara to open by 1968. He had to get out or was asked to leave. The nastiness was not over. Another Kennedy was going to be killed.

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Robert McNamara was in the center of the American maelstrom from 1961 to 1968. Decisions made on his watch have led us to the place in history we stand now, on a precarious precipice. Robert McNamara was a watchman at the gate and he let too many bad things slip under our defenses…either by accident, mismanagement or on purpose.

To give the man credit for even having thought about this stuff after committing it and coming up with the prescription the Cheney Administration was too Nixon to follow:

R.S. McNamara's eleven life lessons

1. Empathize with your enemy
2. Rationality will not save us
3. There's something beyond one's self
4. Maximize efficiency
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war
6. Get the data
7. Belief and seeing are often both wrong
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
10. Never say never
11. You can't change human nature

Guaranteed as much my parents generation hated McNamara when he was in office and the boys started coming home in boxes, I'll bet he comes out looking at least more reflective than this war criminal.