Robert McNamara Dies at 93

[Gaybutton]

I'm beginning to think we need a separate forum just for obituaries.

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Robert McNamara, Ex-Defense Secretary, Dies

 

(CNN) -- Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a key architect of the U.S. war in Vietnam under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, has died at age 93, according to his family.

 

McNamara was a member of Kennedy's inner circle during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war.

 

But he became a public lightning rod for his management of the war in Vietnam, overseeing the U.S. military commitment there as it grew from fewer than 1,000 advisers to more than half a million troops.

 

Though the increasingly unpopular conflict was sometimes dubbed "McNamara's War," he later said both administrations were "terribly wrong" to have pursued military action beyond 1963.

 

"External military force cannot reconstruct a failed state, and Vietnam, during much of that period, was a failed state politically," he told CNN in a 1996 interview for the "Cold War" documentary series. "We didn't recognize it as such."

 

A native of San Francisco, McNamara studied economics at the University of California and earned a master's degree in business from Harvard. He was a staff officer in the Army Air Corps during World War II, when he studied the results of American bombing raids on Germany and Japan in search of ways to improve their accuracy and efficiency.

 

After the war, he joined the Ford Motor Company and became its president in November 1960 -- the first person to lead the company from outside its founding family. A month later, the newly elected Kennedy asked him to become secretary of defense, making him one of the "whiz kids" who joined the young president's administration.

 

In October 1962, after the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, McNamara was one of Kennedy's top advisers in the standoff that followed. The United States imposed a naval "quarantine" on Cuba, a Soviet ally, and prepared for possible airstrikes or an invasion. The Soviets withdrew the missiles in exchange for a U.S. guarantee not to invade Cuba, a step that allowed Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev to present the pullback as a success to his own people.

 

In the 2003 documentary "The Fog of War," McNamara told filmmaker Errol Morris that the experience taught American policymakers to "put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes." But he added, "In the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war."

 

McNamara is credited with using the management techniques he mastered as a corporate executive to streamline the Pentagon, computerizing and smoothing out much of the U.S. military's vast purchasing and personnel system. And in Vietnam, he attempted to use those techniques to measure the progress of the war.

 

Metrics such as use of "body counts" and scientific solutions such as using the herbicide Agent Orange to defoliate jungles in which communist guerrillas hid became trademarks of the conflict. McNamara made several trips to South Vietnam to study the situation firsthand.

 

He, Johnson and other U.S. officials portrayed the war as a necessary battle in the Cold War, a proxy struggle to prevent communism from taking control of all of Southeast Asia. But while they saw the conflict as another front in the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, which backed communist North Vietnam, McNamara acknowledged later that they underestimated Vietnamese nationalism and opposition to the U.S.-backed government in Saigon.

 

"The conflict within South Vietnam itself had all of the characteristics of a civil war, and we didn't look upon it as largely a civil war, and we weren't measuring our progress as one would have in what was largely a civil war," he told CNN.

 

Casualties mounted, as did domestic opposition to the war. In 1965, a Quaker anti-war protester, Norman Morrison, set himself on fire outside McNamara's office window. In 1967, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched on the Pentagon, which was ringed with troops.

 

By November 1967, McNamara told Johnson that there was "no reasonable way" to end the war quickly, and that the United States needed to reduce its forces in Vietnam and turn the fighting over to the American-backed government in Saigon. By the end of that month, Johnson announced he was replacing McNamara at the Pentagon and moving him to the World Bank. But by March 1968, Johnson had reached virtually the same conclusion as McNamara. He issued a call for peace talks and announced he would not seek re-election.

 

After leaving the Pentagon in early 1968, McNamara spent 12 years leading the World Bank. He said little publicly about Vietnam until the publication of a 1995 memoir, "In Retrospect."

 

"You don't know what I know about how inflammatory my words can appear," he told Morris. "A lot of people misunderstand the war, misunderstand me. A lot of people think I'm a son of a bitch."

[Guest lvdkeyes]

Jeeze, people are dying who have never died before. It's no wonder they put walls and fences around cemeteries.

[Gaybutton]

It's no wonder they put walls and fences around cemeteries.

Of course. A lot of people are just dying to get in.

 

What scares me is when I see my own age getting a hell of a lot closer to many of the subjects of these death notices. At the rate they're dropping off, I hope I make it to Thursday.

[Guest fountainhall]

CNN's obituary does not give sufficient emphasis to MacNamara's guilt in pursuing the Vietnam War, guilt which he subsequently acknowledged in his book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam and the subsequent documentary film The Fog of War. Let his own words be his obituary. Here is a selection from various websites.

 

"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 told The Associated Press in 1995.

 

McNamara wrote that he and others had not asked five basic questions: "Was it true that the fall of South Vietnam would trigger the fall of all Southeast Asia? Would that constitute a grave threat to the West's security? What kind of war, conventional or guerrilla, might develop? Could the U.S. win with its troops fighting alongside the South Vietnamese? Should the U.S. not know the answers to all these questions before deciding whether to commit troops?"

 

(In the Second World War) he was drafted to help develop methods of statistical control for managing the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. He worked with General Curtis LeMay on the firebombing of 67 Japanese cities that killed almost a million people, 100,000 on one night in wooden Tokyo. In The Fog of War, he agreed with LeMay's assertion that the pair "were behaving as war criminals" and would have been tried as such had their side lost.

 

George W. Bush could have learned from McNamara's revised thinking. "I don't believe we should ever apply our power unilaterally. If we can't persuade nations with similar values, we'd better re-examine our reasoning."

[Gaybutton]

If we can't persuade nations with similar values, we'd better re-examine our reasoning."

It's too bad he figured that out too late. So many died or had their lives ruined for nothing. It still goes on even now, every time someone steps on a land mine in Cambodia.

 

You're joking about Bush, aren't you? I don't think he has the capability or learning or figuring out a damned thing. At least McNamara finally admitted he was wrong. Somehow, I don't envision a similar admission ever coming from Bush.

[Guest fountainhall]

I'm glad you mentioned Cambodia which I consider one of the greatest war crimes of almost any century. You could have added the unprecedented secret bombing of Laos which had more bombs dropped on it than all of Europe in the entire Second World War. In fact, there were 50% more bombing missions over Laos than over Vietnam throughout the entire conflict. Put more simply, a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years. Up to 30% of these bombs failed to detonate.

 

There's a very interesting blog this morning on the UK newspaper The Guardian's site. One blogger says:

 

But the real, undisputed war crime didn't happen in Vietnam. It was the mass bombing of supposedly neutral countries (Laos and Cambodia) resulting in countless deaths of non-combatants. The fact that not one cent of compensation has been given to the people of Laos for the slaughter is shocking (the country is still littered with UXB's)

 

He might have added this bombing (unauthorised by and kept secret from Congress by Nixon and Kissinger) created the conditions for the rise of the Khymer Rouge.

[Guest lvdkeyes]

In an episode of a travel show in Laos, they said the bombs were dropped on Laos every 9 minutes, 24 hours a day for 10 years. There are still many unexploded bombs and land mines that are maiming and killing people all the time there.

[Guest tdperhs]

What scares me is when I see my own age getting a hell of a lot closer to many of the subjects of these death notices. At the rate they're dropping off, I hope I make it to Thursday.

Bear in mind, if 80,000 people did not die every day, we'd soon have more people than there are termites and in no time the people would take over the world, then we'd really be in trouble. Just their natural production of methane gas... Never mind.

 

[Guest lvdkeyes]

Bear in mind, if 80,000 people did not die every day, we'd soon have more people than there are termites and in no time the people would take over the world, then we'd really be in trouble. Just their natural production of methane gas... Never mind.

It's easy to be cavalier and pragmatic when it's not your family or homeland that was bombed.