WASHINGTON (AP) — Robert S. McNamara, the cerebral secretary of defense vilified for his role in escalating the Vietnam War who spent many memorable years in Ann Arbor, died Monday. He was 93.

McNamara died at 5:30 a.m. at his home here, his wife Diana told The Associated Press. She said he had been in failing health for some time.

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.

Known as a policymaker with a fixation for statistical analysis, McNamara was recruited to run the Pentagon by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 from the presidency of the Ford Motor Co. — where he and a group of colleagues had been known as the "whiz kids."

According to a Dec. 26, 1960 Time article, though McNamara belonged to the Ford hierarchy, he chose to live in a $50,000 English Tudor house in Ann Arbor, rather than the mansions of Grosse Pointe or Bloomfield Hills, where many automotive executives lived.

McNamara stayed in the defense post for seven years, longer than anyone since the job's creation in 1947.

Ted Sorensen, a speechwriter and adviser who worked with McNamara in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, said President John F. Kennedy thought the late Defense secretary "was the most brilliant member of a very smart Cabinet."

According to a June 6, 1998 New York Times article, McNamara delivered a groundbreaking speech in Ann Arbor in June 1962 that offered an alternative approach to American nuclear strategy, amidst the height of the Cold War and nearly four months before the Cuban Missile crisis. In his speech, McNamara called for American strategic forces to “be aimed at Russian forces, not cities.”

McNamara's 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."

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 buildup of arms and armies.

A private person, McNamara for many years declined to write his memoirs. 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 (because) other people thought it would work."

Finally, in 1993, after the Cold War ended, he undertook to write his memoirs because some of the lessons of Vietnam were applicable to the post-Cold War period "odd as though it may seem."

"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.