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"Fool"
Robert McNamara dead
Robert S. McNamara, 93, the
former secretary of defense whose record as a leading executive of
industry and chieftain of foreign financial aid was all but erased
from public memory by his reputation as the primary architect of
U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, died yesterday at his home
in Washington. McNamara was secretary of defense during the
presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. In that
capacity, he directed a U.S. military buildup in Southeast Asia
during the critical early years of a Vietnamese conflict that
escalated into one of the most divisive and bitter wars in U.S.
history. When the war was over, 58,000 Americans were dead and the
national social fabric had been torn asunder. (Lippman "forgets" the
more than one million dead Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians;
webside manager.) In his 1995 memoir of the war, "In Retrospect: The
Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," McNamara said he and his senior
colleagues were "wrong, terribly wrong" to pursue the war as they
did. He acknowledged that he failed to force the military to produce
a rigorous justification for its strategy and tactics, misunderstood
Asia in general and Vietnam in particular, and kept the war going
long after he realized it was futile because he lacked the courage
or the ability to turn Johnson around.
It was "McNamara's war"...
As early as 1964, after Buddhist uprisings that shook Saigon's
political structure, he observed that the Viet Cong had "large
indigenous support" and were held together by "bonds of loyalty." In
1966, even as the buildup of U.S. forces continued and Cold War
tensions gripped Europe, he said it was "a gross oversimplification
to regard Communism as the central factor in every conflict
throughout the underdeveloped word. . . . The United States has no
mandate from on high to police the world and no inclination to do
so." McNamara acknowledged late in his Pentagon tenure that the
bombing of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh trail supply line could
not cripple the Viet Cong because the Viet Cong hardly needed any
supplies other than ammunition. In journalist and author David
Halberstam's judgment, McNamara "did not serve himself or his
country well. He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a
fool."
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