McNamara Obits From Around the Web

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Robert McNamara, the defense secretary who served under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and helped lead America into the Vietnam War, died today at the age of 93. Here are selections from today’s obituaries:

From the New York Times: “The war became his personal nightmare.”

By [1995] he wore the expression of a haunted man. He could be seen in the streets of Washington — stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind — walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.

From the Washington Post:

He was a brilliant student, a compulsive worker and a skillful planner and organizer, whose manifest talents carried him from modest circumstances in California to the highest levels of the Washington power structure. … But … [f]or his role in the war, McNamara was vilified by harsh and unforgiving critics, and his entire record was unalterably clouded.

From the Boston Globe:

No one person can be assigned responsibility for escalating the US role in the conflict. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk: Each played his part. To many, though, it was “McNamara’s war,” as US Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon once put it.

“I don’t object to its being called McNamara’s war,” Mr. McNamara said during a 1964 press conference. “I think it is a very important war, and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.”

From The Associated Press:

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.

And:

McNamara served as the World Bank president for 12 years. He tripled its loans to developing countries and changed its emphasis from grandiose industrial projects to rural development.

After retiring in 1981, he championed the causes of nuclear disarmament and aid by the richest nation for the world’s poorest. He became a global elder statesman.

From the Los Angeles Times:

McNamara was a colossus of the briefing room, equipped with a steel-trap memory and a facility with numbers that dominated Cabinet meetings and congressional hearings. Early on, a dazzled Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater Jr. called him “one of the best secretaries ever, an IBM machine with legs.” Goldwater later altered his view, echoing veteran generals who felt McNamara was “a one-man disaster.”

Latest News
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: