Former United States defence secretary Robert McNamara, the architect of US involvement in the Vietnam War, died in his sleep at his home on Monday, his wife Diana said. He was 93.
McNamara, who had become increasingly frail after falling and cracking a vertebrae last year, died at about 9.30 am, his wife said.
”His age just caught up with him,” she told Reuters. ”He was not ill. He died peacefully in his sleep.”
McNamara was defence secretary for seven years from 1961 to 1968 under presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
McNamara also forged brilliant careers in industry and international finance, but his painful legacy remains Vietnam.
More than anyone else, except possibly president Lyndon Johnson, McNamara became to anti-war critics the symbol of a failed policy that left more than 58 000 US troops dead and the nation bogged down in a seemingly endless disaster in South-East Asia.
Pundits came to call the conflict ”McNamara’s War”.
With his slicked-back hair and rimless glasses, he became a familiar face to the nation as one of ”the best and the brightest” assembled by president John Kennedy to form his policy-making brain trust.
But he left the Cabinet in 1968 under pressure from Johnson. By then disillusioned with the war, McNamara had criticised US bombing of North Vietnam.
He spent the rest of his life trying to explain the US role in Vietnam and apologising for his mistakes, becoming the subject of an Academy Award-winning documentary, The Fog of War. In the film, he discussed the difficult decision-making process during the Vietnam conflict as well as his Pentagon role in the Cuban missile crisis.
He first came to prominence as one of the ”Whiz Kids” who revitalised Ford after World War II and ended his public career as president of the World Bank.
To those jobs, as well as defence secretary, the dynamic McNamara brought a driving ambition, a phenomenal memory for statistics and a quick, efficient grasp of facts.
McNamara was named defence secretary by Kennedy in 1961 and held the post longer than anyone before or since. He put his corporate organisational skills to use in trying to modernise the Pentagon during the Cold War.
Blocking communism
But more and more, Vietnam became his focus. He made several fact-finding visits there in the early days of the US military build-up, which Washington saw as the only way to block a communist takeover of South-East Asia.
Theodore White, in his book The Making of the President 1968, said McNamara argued behind the scenes that the United States must not slip quietly into the war — that the decision must be brought before Congress and the issue debated openly.
But Kennedy authorised a small-scale increase in troop strength and, after his assassination in 1963, Johnson bowed to pressure from his generals and began a major build-up that finally had more than 500 000 U.S. troops in Vietnam.
McNamara, convinced the war could be ended by Christmas 1965, threw his energies into effective execution of Johnson’s policies, but miscalculated resistance to US intervention both in Vietnam and at home.
In late 1967 he criticised the decision to bomb North Vietnam in retaliation for strikes on US bases in the south. Johnson decided to remove him the following year, offering him the presidency of the World Bank.
In 1971, the classified and highly sensitive Pentagon Papers, an official record of the US involvement in Vietnam, were leaked to the New York Times.
In McNamara: His Ordeal in the Pentagon, Henry Trewhitt wrote that McNamara ordered the study to provide material that might help future generations avoid the mistakes made in Vietnam by intelligent, well-intentioned men like himself.
”When its contents broke in the press, however, his pleasure at seeing the record clarified was badly diminished by his shock that the two administrations [Kennedy and Johnson] had been deceitful about escalating the war,” Trewhitt wrote.
McNamara was quoted as saying: ”My God, does anyone think I would have commissioned this if reasonable men could conclude that it shows me to be a liar?”
Fighting poverty
At the World Bank, McNamara conducted a crusade against poverty and directed an expansion of World Bank influence.
When he took over the independent United Nations affiliate in 1968, the bank was making only $1-billion in annual loan commitments to Third World nations. For the fiscal year ending June 30,1981, his last day in office, it lent $11,5-billion.
McNamara shifted the emphasis of the bank’s lending from heavy industry to basics like farming and population control.
Robert Strange McNamara was born in San Francisco on June 9 1916 to Robert James McNamara, a wholesale shoe salesperson, and the former Clara Nell Strange, both of British ancestry.
A brilliant student, he graduated from the University of California in 1937 and earned a master’s degree from Harvard Business School, where he joined the faculty in 1940.
While employed at the Pentagon in 1946, he and nine colleagues sent a prospectus to 20 firms, offering themselves as a ”package deal” to any company needing managers.
Ford, then in financial trouble, accepted the 10, all statistics experts nicknamed ”the Whiz Kids.” McNamara rose to the presidency of Ford by 1960.
On taking early retirement from the World Bank in 1981, McNamara kept an office in Washington where he joined dozens of corporate boards, including the Washington Post. He was also a member of the Trilateral Commission that promoted cooperation between Europe, Japan and the United States.
McNamara married Margaret Craig, a fellow student at the University of California, who died of cancer just before he left the World Bank. They had a son and a daughter.
And in 2004 at age 88, he married his Italian-born sweetheart, Diana Masieri Byfield in Assisi, Italy. — Reuters