By: Staff and Wire reports
Published July 6th, 2009
"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."
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"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?
He discussed similar themes in the 2003 documentary "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara." With the U.S. in the first year of the war in Iraq, it became a popular and timely art-house attraction and won the Oscar for best documentary feature.
The Iraq war, with its similarities to Vietnam, at times brought up McNamara's name, in many cases in comparison with another unpopular defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld. McNamara was among former secretaries of defense and state who met twice with President George W. Bush in 2006 to discuss Iraq war policies.
In the Kennedy administration, McNamara was a key figure in both the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis 18 months later. The crisis was the closest the world came to a nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Sorensen said while history may remember McNamara's involvement in the Vietnam War, that would be a mistake.
"I think that his single-most important contribution to this country came in carrying out the policies of John F. Kennedy which avoided war over Berlin, war in Africa, war in Europe and, above all, nuclear war on the occasion of the Cuban Missile Crisis," he said.
On McNamara's later admission of mistakes, Sorensen said: "His last book was pooh-poohed by some people who said, 'Well, he should have admitted error at the time, not 40 years later.' Well, most military chieftains — presidents or Cabinet members or otherwise — don't admit error — ever. And at least Bob had the courage and commitment to truth to put out that he was wrong and why it was wrong so that we could all learn the lessons from that."
McNamara's trademarks were his rimless glasses and slicked down hair and his reliance on quantitative analysis to reach conclusions, calmly promulgated in a husky voice.
As a professor at the Harvard Business School when World War II started, he helped train Army Air Corps officers in cost-effective statistical control. In 1943, he was commissioned an Army officer and joined a team of young officers who developed a new field of statistical control of supplies.
McNamara and his colleagues sold themselves to the Ford organization as a package and revitalized the company. The group became known as the "whiz kids" and McNamara was named the first Ford president who was not a descendant of Henry Ford.
A month later, the newly elected Kennedy invited McNamara, a registered Republican, to join his Cabinet. Taking the $25,000-a-year job cost McNamara $3 million in profit from Ford stocks and options.
As defense chief, McNamara reshaped America's armed forces for "flexible response" and away from the nuclear "massive retaliation" doctrine espoused by former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. He asserted civilian control of the Pentagon and applied cost-accounting techniques and computerized systems analysis to defense spending.
Early on, Kennedy regarded South Vietnam as an area threatened by Communist aggression and a proving ground for his new emphasis on counterinsurgency forces. A believer in the domino theory — that countries could fall to communism like a row of dominoes — Kennedy dispatched U.S. "advisers" to bolster the Saigon government.
