[Deathwatch] Robert McNamara, Former Defense Secretary, 93

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

McNamara dies, career haunted by Vietnam war
By Charles Aldinger 
Mon Jul 6

WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara died on
Monday aged 93. He will be remembered most as the leading architect of
America's involvement in the Vietnam War.

"His age just caught up with him," his wife Diana told Reuters. "He was
not ill. He died peacefully in his sleep."

McNamara also forged brilliant careers in industry and international
finance, but his painful legacy remains Vietnam.

More than anyone else except possibly President Lyndon Johnson,
McNamara became to anti-war critics the symbol of a failed policy that
left more than 58,000 U.S. troops dead and the nation bogged down in a
seemingly endless disaster in Southeast Asia.

Pundits came to call the conflict "McNamara's War."

With his slicked-back hair and rimless glasses, he became a familiar
face to the nation as one of "the best and the brightest" assembled by
President John Kennedy to form his policy-making brain trust.

But he left the Cabinet in 1968 under pressure from Johnson. By then
disillusioned with the war, McNamara had criticized U.S. bombing of
North Vietnam.

He spent the rest of his life trying to explain the U.S. role in
Vietnam and apologizing for his mistakes, becoming the subject of an
Academy Award winning documentary, "The Fog of War." In the film, he
discussed the difficult decision-making process during the Vietnam
conflict as well as his Pentagon role in the Cuban missile crisis.

He first came to prominence as one of the "Whiz Kids" who revitalized
Ford Motor Co. after World War Two and ended his public career as
president of the World Bank.

To those jobs, as well as defense secretary, the dynamic McNamara
brought a driving ambition, a phenomenal memory for statistics and a
quick, efficient grasp of facts.

McNamara was named defense secretary by Kennedy in 1961 and held the
post longer than anyone before or since. He put his corporate
organizational skills to use in trying to modernize the Pentagon during
the Cold War.

BLOCKING COMMUNISM

But more and more, Vietnam became his focus. He made several
fact-finding visits there in the early days of the U.S. military
buildup, which Washington saw as the only way to block a communist
takeover of Southeast Asia.

Theodore White, in his book "The Making of the President 1968," said
McNamara argued behind the scenes that the United States must not slip
quietly into the war -- that the decision must be brought before
Congress and the issue debated openly.

But Kennedy authorized a small-scale increase in troop strength and,
after his assassination in 1963, Johnson bowed to pressure from his
generals and began a major buildup that finally had more than 500,000
U.S. troops in Vietnam.

McNamara, convinced the war could be ended by Christmas 1965, threw his
energies into effective execution of Johnson's policies but
miscalculated resistance to U.S. intervention both in Vietnam and at
home.

In late 1967 he criticized the decision to bomb North Vietnam in
retaliation for strikes on U.S. bases in the south. Johnson decided to
remove him the following year, offering him the presidency of the World
Bank.

In 1971, the classified and highly sensitive Pentagon Papers, an
official record of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, were leaked to The
New York Times.

In "McNamara: His Ordeal in the Pentagon," Henry Trewhitt wrote that
McNamara ordered the study to provide material that might help future
generations avoid the mistakes made in Vietnam by intelligent,
well-intentioned men like himself.

"When its contents broke in the press, however, his pleasure at seeing
the record clarified was badly diminished by his shock that the two
administrations (Kennedy and Johnson) had been deceitful about
escalating the war," Trewhitt wrote.

McNamara was quoted as saying: "My God, does anyone think I would have
commissioned this if reasonable men could conclude that it shows me to
be a liar?"

FIGHTING POVERTY

At the World Bank, McNamara conducted a crusade against poverty and
directed an expansion of World Bank influence.

When he took over the independent United Nations affiliate in 1968, the
bank was making only $1 billion in annual loan commitments to Third
World nations. For the fiscal year ending June 30, 1981, his last day
in office, it lent $11.5 billion.

McNamara shifted the emphasis of the bank's lending from heavy industry
to basics like farming and population control.

Robert Strange McNamara was born in San Francisco on June 9, 1916, to
Robert James McNamara, a wholesale shoe salesman, and the former Clara
Nell Strange, both of British ancestry.

A brilliant student, he graduated from the University of California in
1937 and earned a masters degree from Harvard Business School, where he
joined the faculty in 1940.

While employed at the Pentagon in 1946, he and nine colleagues sent a
prospectus to 20 firms, offering themselves as a "package deal" to any
company needing managers.

Ford, then in financial trouble, accepted the 10, all statistics
experts nicknamed "the Whiz Kids." McNamara rose to the presidency of
Ford by 1960.

On taking early retirement from the World Bank in 1981, McNamara kept
an office in Washington where he joined dozens of corporate boards,
including the Washington Post. He was also a member of the Trilateral
Commission which promoted cooperation between Europe, Japan and the
United States.

McNamara married Margaret Craig, a fellow student at the University of
California, who died of cancer just before he left the World Bank. They
had a son and a daughter.

And in 2004, at age 88, he married his Italian-born sweetheart, Diana
Masieri Byfield in Assisi, Italy.

Many thanks to Deathwatch Central for posting this obituary