McNamara, architect of Vietnam War, dies

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(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-07 11:10

WASHINGTON: Robert S. McNamara, the cerebral secretary of defense who was vilified for prosecuting the Vietnam War, then devoted himself to helping the world's poorest nations, died yesterday. He was 93.

His wife Diana said he had been in failing health for some time.

For all his healing efforts, McNamara was fundamentally associated with the Vietnam War, "McNamara's war", the country's most disastrous foreign venture.

Known as a policymaker with a fixation for statistical analysis, McNamara was recruited to run the Pentagon by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 from the presidency of the Ford Motor Co. He stayed seven years, longer than anyone since the job's creation in 1947.

His association with Vietnam became intensely personal. Even his son, as a Stanford University student, protested against the war while his father was running it. At Harvard, McNamara once had to flee a student mob through underground utility tunnels. Critics mocked McNamara mercilessly; they made much of the fact that his middle name was "Strange."

After leaving the Pentagon on the verge of a nervous breakdown, McNamara became president of the World Bank and devoted evangelical energies to the belief that improving life in rural communities in developing countries was a more promising path to peace than the buildup of arms and armies.

In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam appeared in 1995. McNamara disclosed that by 1967 he had deep misgivings about Vietnam - by then he had lost faith in America's capacity to prevail over a guerrilla that had driven the French from the same jungled countryside.

In that period, the number of US casualties - dead, missing and wounded - went from 7,466 to over 100,000.

"We were terribly wrong," McNamara, then 78, said in an interview ahead of the book's release.

The best-selling mea culpa renewed the national debate about the war and prompted bitter criticism against its author. "Where was he when we needed him?" a Boston Globe editorial asked.

As a professor at the Harvard Business School when World War II started, he helped train Army Air Corps officers in cost-effective statistical control. In 1943, he was commissioned an Army officer and joined a team of young officers who developed a new field of statistical control of supplies.

McNamara and his colleagues sold themselves to the Ford organization as a package and revitalized the company. The group became known as the "whiz kids," and McNamara was named the first Ford president who was not a descendant of Henry Ford. A month later, the newly elected Kennedy, a Democrat, invited McNamara, a registered Republican, him to join his Cabinet.