Robert McNamara Dead
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  1. #1
    jetdawgg
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    Robert McNamara Dead

    WASHINGTON (AP) -- Robert S. McNamara, the cerebral secretary of defense who was vilified for prosecuting America's most controversial war and then devoted himself to helping the world's poorest nations, died Monday. He was 93.

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

    For all his healing efforts, 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 rather than victory.

    See video of McNamara below.

    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. He stayed seven years, longer than anyone since the job's creation in 1947.

    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."

    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, to lay out his view of the war and his side in his quarrels with his generals. 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 greatest 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 bestselling 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 Bush in 2006 to discuss Iraq war policies.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/0..._n_226043.html


  2. #2
    Marine Free Member Wyoming's Avatar
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    McNamara was one of the politicians that ****ed up the VietNam War.


  3. #3
    Only the good die young.


  4. #4
    He would have died a lot sooner if he would have visited the troops.


  5. #5
    Trained a lot of McNamara's Band during NAM.


  6. #6
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    He would have died a lot sooner if he would have visited the troops.
    I think you are right, silverdollar.

    On September 7, 1967, at a press conference in Washington, DC, United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced plans for the construction of an electronic anti-infiltration barrier below the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the line of demarcation between North and South Vietnam. The principal purpose of this "McNamara Line" would be to sound the alarm when the enemy crossed the barrier. Allied firepower in the form of air and artillery strikes would then be brought to bear upon the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN, the North Vietnamese Army) in order to curb infiltration from the North.1 The McNamara Line represented an attempt by the US military to merge modern technology with one of the oldest defensive techniques in warfare. The US would learn that more than sophisticated technology was necessary to make an effective barrier.

    http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/ce...amara-Line.htm


  7. #7
    OK, RIP
    next topic?


  8. #8
    I helped build the " mcnamara wall" in 1967 with hqs. co 11th engr bn. we all thought it was stupid as hell then and still do now! this greasy headed bastard should split hell wide open for all the pain and suffering and death his dumb ass caused!!!


  9. #9
    Marine Free Member FistFu68's Avatar
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    FREE BEER AND PRETZELS IN HANOI 2 NITE


  10. #10
    Marine Free Member sparkie's Avatar
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    Hey blew Nam,,,,,, He blew Bay of Pigs,,,,,, I'm checkin hard, but don't believe I'm cryin,,,,,,,,


  11. #11
    Dirty Bastard, 45 Years To Late. Good Ridience


  12. #12
    Marine Free Member Wyoming's Avatar
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    The Edsel and VietNam, he ran them both in the ground.


  13. #13

    no rip

    Quote Originally Posted by William Hardy View Post
    OK, RIP
    next topic?
    That azzhole does not rate a "rip"


  14. #14
    Marine Free Member sparkie's Avatar
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    Is he buried with Walter Croncite yet?


  15. #15
    jetdawgg
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