WASHINGTON – Former US defence secretary Robert McNamara who was vilified for prosecuting the Vietnam War died at home in Washington yesterday aged 93.
For all his healing efforts, McNamara was fundamentally associated with the war, the country’s most disastrous foreign venture and the only American war to end in defeat rather than victory.
Known as a policymaker with a fixation for analysis, McNamara was recruited to run the Pentagon by president Kennedy in 1961.
He was head of the Ford Motor Company at the time and stayed seven years, longer than anyone since the post’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 tunnels.
Critics mocked him 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 build-up of weapons and armies.
A private person, McNamara for many years declined to write his memoirs, to lay out his view of the war and his side in his quarrels with his generals.
In the early 1990s he began to open up. He told 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 other people thought it would work”.
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 insurgency that had driven the French from the same jungle countryside.
Despite those doubts, he had continued to express public confidence that the application of enough American firepower would cause the Communists to make peace. In that period, the number of US casualties – dead, missing and wounded – went from 7,466 to over 100,000. “We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of our country . . . We were terribly wrong,” McNamara, then 78, said.
Mr McNamara wrote that he and others had not asked the five most basic questions: Was it true that the fall of South Vietnam would trigger the fall of all Southeast Asia? Would that have constituted a grave threat to the West’s security? What kind of war, conventional or guerrilla, might develop? Could we win it with US troops fighting alongside the South Vietnamese? Should we not know the answers to these questions before committing troops?
Mr McNamara’s trademarks were his rimless glasses slicked back hair and his reliance on quantitative analysis to reach conclusions, calmly promulgated in a husky voice. – (AP)