'Terribly Wrong' Handling of Vietnam Overshadowed Record of Achievement

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Robert McNamara, 1916--2009

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and a primary architect of the Vietnam War, died at age 93 on July 6, 2009.

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The problem was that as the war escalated, the briefings grew increasingly irrelevant to what was really happening. McNamara tolerated, even encouraged, a system in which optimistic Washington analysis dictated the content of the briefings, rather than the other way around.

For all his participation in the great events of his time, it was the Vietnam war that shaped the nation's perception of McNamara and his performance and eventually eroded his credibility. When he said, in 1966, that manpower requirements and draft calls would be reduced the next year, hardly anyone seemed to believe him. When he told Congress that the purpose of bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail was to reduce North Vietnamese troop infiltration into the South, newspaper analysts pointed out that the Pentagon's own charts showed infiltration was increasing.

An incident that reflected the temper of those tense, bitter years occurred in November 1966, when McNamara traveled to Harvard for an informal discussion with undergraduates. He was mobbed by about 800 jeering students, who blocked his car and cried "Murderer!"

The secretary, never apologetic, climbed atop his car, in shirt sleeves despite the New England chill, and told the crowd: "I spent four of the happiest years of my life on the Berkeley campus, doing some of the things you do today. But I was tougher than you, and I'm tougher than you are now. I was more courteous then, and I hope I'm more courteous today."

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It is inaccurate to portray McNamara as an unreconstructed hawk to the bitter end; his early doubts became known after the war. But he failed to persuade the president and such hard-line White House insiders as national security specialist Walt W. Rostow to moderate their views. McNamara succeeded only in hastening his own ouster from the Cabinet, and because he waited 20 years after the fall of Saigon in 1975 to go public with his confession of error about the war, he retained his reputation as a technocrat committed to firepower above all else.

McNamara later dismissed as "absurd" and "baloney" suggestions that he devoted himself to helping Third World countries through the World Bank to atone for his record in Vietnam. But he never attempted to defend himself against critics of his role in Vietnam or to justify the escalation there. For more than two decades after leaving the Pentagon, he avoided the topic of Vietnam in his public statements.

Publication of his 1995 memoir opened some kind of intellectual floodgate for McNamara. He developed a virtual fourth career of organizing and participating in seminars about the war -- about who did what and why, and about how doing something else might have meant, if not a different outcome, at least less death. In 1999, he published a book about this quest for the truth about the war, with a title signaling that he did not find it: "Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy."

Thus in the final years of his life, the war again took over the reputation of a man whose life in many ways had embodied the American dream.

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Robert Strange McNamara was born June 9, 1916, in San Francisco, where his father was sales manager for a wholesale shoe company. He demonstrated academic brilliance from the time he was in elementary school and achieved straight A's in high school. At the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied economics and philosophy, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa after his sophomore year.

After graduation in 1937, he went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, where he received his MBA in 1939. He went back to the West Coast for a year to work for the accounting firm of Price, Waterhouse and Co., and during that time he married a former classmate, Margaret Craig. She died in 1981.