Robert McNamara and the Dreams of Reason

[bemildred]

The turmoil over the Vietnam War didn't involve only Ivy Leaguers like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow. It was also a civil war among Berkeleyans. As McNamara told a campus interviewer:

Neither my mother nor father had ever graduated from college. My father hadn't gone beyond the 8th grade, and they were determined that I would go to college. I took the entrance exams for Stanford; at that time (this was 1932 and 1933), very few first-class universities required entrance exams. Stanford did; I passed. But it didn't take me long to figure out that, even working part-time and receiving scholarships, I couldn't possibly pay the board, room, and tuition at Stanford, so I came to Cal. That's the only reason I was here. It was the only first-class university in the country that I could afford to go to. What did I pay? Well I lived at home. I paid $52 tuition per year. And for that I am eternally grateful.

And he continued:

I hope I am an enlightened rationalist, and to the degree that I am, it came from this university. Surely I went to Harvard, and I've in a sense been educated in all the years after I graduated from formal education, but my basic philosophy, my basic moral standards, my basic ethical values came out of this university. . . .

http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/edward_tenner/2009/07/robert_mcnamara_and_the_dreams_of_reason.php

[ThirdWorldJohn]

1. I like how that Hippie tried to kill him when he tried to throw him off the ferry to Martha's

Vineyard.

As someone here said - he was the ultimate bean counter that had no compassion for anyone at all and loved only himself.

http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2009/07/robert_s_mcnamara_defense_chie.html

McNamara was fundamentally associated with the Vietnam War, "McNamara's war," the country's most disastrous foreign venture, the only American war to end in abject withdrawal.

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 utility tunnels. Critics mocked McNamara mercilessly; they made much of the fact that his middle name was "Strange."

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 (because) other people thought it would work."

"In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" appeared in 1995. 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 jungled 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 U.S. 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. But we were wrong. We were terribly wrong," McNamara, then 78, told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of the book's release.

The best-selling mea culpa renewed the national debate about the war and prompted bitter criticism against its author. "Where was he when we needed him?" a Boston Globe editorial asked. A New York Times editorial referred to McNamara as offering the war's dead only a "prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late."

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 constitute a grave threat to the West's security? What kind of war -- conventional or guerrilla -- might develop? Could we win it with U.S. troops fighting alongside the South Vietnamese? Should we not know the answers to all these questions before deciding whether to commit troops?