Robert McNamara Dies at 93

Robert McNamara has died at the advanced age of 93. He was the former “whiz kid” who transformed Ford Motor Company in the late 1950s into a viable, modern corporation. McNamara introduced systems analysis into business and government, revolutionizing how these institutions are run. Later in his career he served several years a president of the World Bank. But it is his tenure as U.S. Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson from 1961 to 1968 that Robert McNamara is most known for.

It is always interesting for me to see how differently Presidents Kennedy and Johnson treated American involvement in Vietnam, even though they both had essentially the same Departments of State and Defense (with the same Cabinet Secretaries). Kennedy, although very anti-communist, approached the area in a more clandestine manner, using the CIA and advisers. Johnson, on the other hand, decided to make a major stand in Vietnam, sending hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops there. For years after the tragic Vietnam War, criticisms against Johnson were basically that he just misjudged the situation in Indochina. But tapes released of his discussions with his advisers and cabinet indicate that not only did he know early on of the futility of the conflict, but also that the Gulf of Tonkin incident that he used to politically rally the nation behind him and the coming war was completely fabricated. And Secretary of Defense McNamara was with Johnson every step of the way, both with the Gulf of Tonkin deception and the early judgment about the war’s infeasibility. And yet both went on with it, sentencing millions of Vietnamese and almost sixty thousand Americans (many of them conscripts, not volunteers) to their deaths. Not to mention the horrible physical and psychological injuries to so many of the surviving soldiers.

I was watching an interview that Brian Lamb of C-Span had taped with him a few years ago. McNamara was very talkative, lucid and charming with just about any subject about his life. Except for Vietnam. Then he just wanted to talk about something else. Yes, I can understand that.

Robert McNamara did some pretty incredible things for this country, his systems analysis contributions being one of them. Had there been no Vietnam War, who knows; his image might even have been on a postage stamp some day. But the fact that HE KNEW, very early on, that launching a full-scale war in Vietnam would not work, and then having the gall to have Americans sent over there to their deaths anyway, is one of the most despicable things that anyone in government has ever done. It is very convenient to try to lay the blame for everything at the feet of the later Nixon administration, which to be sure committed some very bad mistakes regarding Indochina (especially with the invasion and bombing of Cambodia). But Nixon inherited the full-blown, escalated conflict that Johnson and McNamara so cynically and hopelessly began.