Robert S. McNamara, pictured here at Fort Bragg in 1961, served as defense secretary under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The Vietnam War was known to many as “McNamara’s War.”
Cecil Stoughton, White House photographer via Wikimedia
McNamara at his desk in the Pentagon. President Kennedy recruited him as secretary of defense after just a month as president of Ford Motor Co. He was the longest-serving secretary of defense, staying in that role for seven years.
MSGT Frank Hall/ Rapport
Kennedy and McNamara in the Cabinet Room in 1962.
Cecil Stoughton, White House photographer via Wikimedia
McNamara and General William Westmoreland speaking with a general about the Vietnam War in 1965. Although initially proud of his association with the war, he expressed regret in his 1995 memoirs.
Dept. of Defense via Wikimedia
Secretary of State Dean Rusk (left), President Johnson and McNamara at a Cabinet meeting in 1968. “He’s like a jackhammer,” President Johnson said, as quoted by the New York Times. “No human being can take what he takes. He drives too hard. He is too perfect.”
White House via Wikimedia
By the mid 1960s, McNamara was having doubts about whether the war was winnable. But he didn’t publicly acknowledge these doubts until his 1995 memoirs, in which he called his own conduct “wrong, terribly wrong.”
White House via Wikimedia
McNamara speaks at a 2005 event for the WMD Awareness Programme, an organization that opposes nuclear weapons. “My sense of the war gradually shifted from concern to skepticism to frustration to anguish,” he wrote in his book. “I had always been confident that every problem could be solved, but now I found myself confronting one — involving national pride and human life — that could not.”
Zuma
