McNamara

Robert McNamara died today. From 1961 to 1968 he was Defense Secretary for Kennedy and Johnson. Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War are inseparable, they are one, he believed in it, he sold it the way he sold cars as president of Ford Motor Co., he was--as today's headlines put it--the architect of the war. And he was as wrong as a powerful government official can be about the single greatest foreign policy issue of his day. In the '90's he wrote two books on Vietnam and said that he and his cohorts had been "wrong, terribly wrong" about the war from the start. That seemed rather too late to many Americans.

I heard him speak in San Francisco about ten years ago when he wrote his second book. At the end of the evening I shook hands with him--he had a bone-crushing handshake--and told him I appreciated his current work of atonement and truth-seeking. I was one to talk!--like most Americans , I believed him and Johnson until very late in the game. I was not drafted; McNamara's problems are the families and friends of those who were and did not come home alive.

C-SPAN has re-run a 1995 interview with him today and the old contradictions and bluster were still there. What was he like when he died?