[R-G] The banality of evil

[Sid Shniad]

Toronto Star July 7, 2009 



Robert McNamara, 93: Haunted by Vietnam war legacy 



Secretary of defence under Kennedy and Johnson was vilified for orchestrating U.S. role in conflict 



Thomas W. Lippman 

W ashington Post 



Washington – Robert McNamara, the former secretary of defence whose record as a leading executive of industry and a chieftain of foreign financial aid was all but erased from public memory by his reputation as the primary architect of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, died yesterday at age 93. 



Diana McNamara said her husband died at his home in Washington. She said he had been in failing health for some time. 



McNamara was secretary of defence during the presidencies of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He directed a U.S. military buildup in Southeast Asia during the critical early years of a Vietnamese conflict that escalated into one of the most divisive and bitter wars in U.S. history. When the war was over, 58,000 Americans were dead and the national social fabric had been torn asunder. 



Before taking office as secretary of defence in 1961, McNamara was president of Ford Motor Co.. 



For 13 years after he left the Pentagon in 1968, he was president of the World Bank. He was a brilliant student, a compulsive worker and a skilful organizer, whose manifest talents carried him from modest circumstances in California to the highest levels of Washington. 



After his retirement from the bank in 1981, he maintained an exhausting schedule as director or consultant to scores of public and private organizations and was a virtual one-man think tank on nuclear arms issues. 



But more than 40 years after the fact, he was remembered for his orchestration of how the U.S. conducted its war in Vietnam, a failed effort to prevent a communist takeover of a weak and corrupt ally. For his role in the war, McNamara was vilified by harsh and unforgiving critics, who made much of the fact his middle name was "Strange," and his entire record was clouded. 



Even his son, as a Stanford University student, protested against the war while his father was running it. McNamara for many years declined to write his memoirs. In the early 1990s, he began to open up, telling Time magazine in 1991 that he did not think the bombing of North Vietnam – the biggest bombing campaign in history up to that time – would work but he went along with it "because we had to try to prove it would not work, number one, and (because) other people thought it would work.'' 



In his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam , McNamara said he and his colleagues were "wrong, terribly wrong" to pursue the war. He acknowledged he failed to force the military to produce a justification for its strategy and tactics, misunderstood Vietnam, and kept the war going long after he realized it was futile because he lacked the ability to turn Johnson around. 



He elaborated on Vietnam in the 2003 Academy Award-winning documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara . He described how as a young man he had analyzed bombing operations under Gen. Curtis LeMay during World War II, and in that job, played a role in making the firebombing of dozens of Japanese cities "more efficient." 



As secretary of defence, McNamara was a key figure in such major crises as the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile confrontation with the Soviet Union. He changed the balance of nuclear forces in the world with the development of the multiple-warhead missile. 



McNamara's first wife, Margaret, died in 1981. He is survived by his second wife, the former Diana Masieri Byfield, whom he married in 2004, and three children. 



With files from Associated Press