Robert McNamara, the former US defence secretary who sent half a million troops to Vietnam and later called American involvement in the war a "major error," has died. He was 93.
He died in his sleep early this morning at his home in Washington. After seven years in the job, Mr McNamara became the longest-serving US defence secretary. He then spent 13 years as president of the World Bank, whose development budget he increased sixfold to fight poverty and disease.
Mr McNamara was the only member of President John F. Kennedy's cabinet to be plucked directly from the ranks of corporate America, after serving five weeks as president of Ford Motor Co. At 44, he was then the youngest-ever US defence secretary.
At the Pentagon, the former air force officer with an affinity for numbers and details played a pivotal role in crafting military strategies that shaped America's political scene for much of the 1960s and beyond.
He later acknowledged, in his books and interviews, that US defence policies on Vietnam and adjacent countries were probably rooted in a misunderstanding of Southeast Asia's history. Many critics of the Vietnam War still derided his turnaround and remained sceptical of his views.
Mr McNamara was born in San Francisco on June 9th, 1916. A brilliant student, he graduated from the University of California in 1937 and earned a masters degree from Harvard Business School, where he joined the faculty in 1940.
While employed at the Pentagon in 1946, he and nine colleagues sent a prospectus to 20 firms, offering themselves as a "package deal" to any company needing managers.
Ford, then in financial trouble, accepted the 10, all statistics experts nicknamed "the Whiz Kids," and Mr McNamara rose to the presidency of Ford by 1960.
On taking early retirement from the World Bank in 1981, McNamara kept an office in Washington where he joined dozens of corporate boards, including the Washington Post.He was also a member of the Trilateral Commission which promoted cooperation between Europe, Japan and the United States.
Mr McNamara married Margaret Craig, a fellow student at the University of California, who died of cancer just before he left the World Bank. They had a son and a daughter.
With his slicked-back hair and rimless glasses, he became a familiar face to the nation as one of "the best and the brightest" assembled by President Kennedy to form his policy-making brain trust.
But he left the Cabinet in 1968 under pressure from Johnson. By then disillusioned with the war, Mr McNamara had criticised US bombing of North Vietnam.
He spent the rest of his life trying to explain the US role in Vietnam and apologising for his mistakes, becoming the subject of an Academy Award winning documentary, The Fog of War.In the film, he discussed the difficult decision-making process during the Vietnam conflict as well as his Pentagon role in the Cuban missile crisis.
In 2004, at age 88, he married Italian-born Diana Masieri Byfield in Assisi, Italy.