On the passing of Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara, ex-defense secretary, dies

Excerpt:

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."

Comment: Because I was of draft age during his time as Secretary of Defense, he was and is of great interest to me. A great documentary about McNamara is The Fog of War

Excerpt:

Using archival footage, United States Cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the eighty-five-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts his life, from working as a WWII Whiz Kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to managing the American Vietnam War, as defense secretary for presidents Kennedy and Johnson — emphasizing the war's brutality under their regimes, and how he was hired as secretary of defense, despite limited military experience.