Former secretary of defense and Ann Arbor resident Robert S. McNamara dies at 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. “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. Their numbers surpassed 16,000 by the time of his assassination.

Following Kennedy’s death, President Lyndon Johnson retained McNamara as “the best in the lot” of Kennedy Cabinet members and the man to keep Vietnam from falling to the Communists.

When U.S. naval vessels were allegedly attacked off the North Vietnamese coast in 1964, McNamara lobbied Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which Johnson used as the equivalent of a congressional declaration of war.

McNamara visited Vietnam — the first of many trips — and returned predicting that American intervention would enable the South Vietnamese, despite internal feuds, to stand by themselves “by the end of 1965.”

That was an early forerunner of a seemingly endless string of official “light at the end of the tunnel” predictions of American success. Each was followed by more warfare, more American troops, more American casualties, more American bombing, more North Vietnamese infiltration — and more predictions of an early end to America’s commitment.

As the years passed, the war became increasingly controversial. Among those who marched protest was a young American attending Oxford University, Bill Clinton. Another protester, in California, was Craig McNamara, a teenager when his father ran the war.

In 1984, in an interview with Paul Hendrickson of the Washington Post, Craig recalled how McNamara would not talk about Vietnam for years afterward.

“Nobody can get anywhere on Vietnam with my father, including me,” Craig said. “It’s just not in his scope to communicate his deepest thoughts and feelings to me.”

Toward the end, McNamara found himself pitted against the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who wanted unremitting and wide-ranging bombing of the North.

He became openly skeptical about the effectiveness of bombing the north to cut down the infiltration of men and war supplies to the south. At McNamara’s request, Johnson halted the bombing in December 1965 to induce North Vietnam to enter into peace negotiations. Nothing happened and Johnson resumed the bombing at the end of January.

McNamara, with Paul Warnke and Paul Nitze, privately transmitted a peace proposal to the North Vietnamese in August 1967. It was rejected in October. With 1,000 Americans now dying each month, McNamara recommended a bombing halt, a freeze in U.S. troop levels and a turnover of war responsibility to Saigon; Johnson rejected the idea.

The president lost faith in his secretary. McNamara would later write that he didn’t know if he quit or was fired.

At a Feb. 29, 1968, retirement ceremony, he was overcome with emotion and could not speak. Johnson put an arm around his shoulder and led him from the room.

McNamara’s first wife, Margaret, whom he met in college, died of cancer in 1981; they had two daughters and a son. In 2004, at age 88, he married Italian-born widow Diana Masieri Byfield.

—Managing News Editor Lara Zade contributed to this report.