The World’s Jason Margolis has this look back at former Secretary of State Robert McNamara, who died today at the age of 93. McNamara served under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and came to be vilified for his role in escalating the war in Vietnam.
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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins, and this is The World, a co-production of the B-B-C World Service, P-R-I, and W-G-B-H, Boston. One of the architects of the Vietnam War died today, Robert McNamara was 93 year old. He passed away this morning at his home in Washington. Robert McNamara had a varied career, but his legacy lies in the advice that he gave two US Presidents. McNamara was the Secretary of Defense for John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The World’s Jason Margolis has this remembrance.

JASON MARGOLIS: Robert McNamara had a long and distinguished career. He was President of the Ford Motor Company. He ran the World Bank, where he expanded programs to combat poverty. But McNamara will primarily be remembered as an architect of the Vietnam War. Presidential historian Robert Dallek says at first, McNamara honestly thought that American forces would overwhelm a small undeveloped country.

ROBERT DALLEK: The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said convictions are a greater enemy of truth than lies. And that’s what I think operated with, happened with McNamara. He had this conviction that they could manage this war, Johnson believed this. They just didn’t think they could lose that conflict. Who the heck were they fighting?

JASON MARGOLIS: Dallek says by 1967, however, McNamara came to understand that the war in Vietnam was a quagmire. And this realization got to him. His boss couldn’t help but notice.

ROBERT DALLEK: Johnson was troubled by how uneasy and upset actually McNamara seemed to be over his continuing service as Secretary of Defense. And Johnson said to some people, he was afraid that McNamara was having some kind of collapse or breakdown. So he was as eager to push McNamara out, as McNamara was eager to go.

JASON MARGOLIS: McNamara later said he wasn’t sure if he quit or was fired as Defense Secretary. McNamara was a brilliant man, but he also didn’t seem to completely understand his enemy. And it showed.

BUI DIEM: His attitude is very, very insensitive about the Vietnamese people.

JASON MARGOLIS: Bui Diem served as the South Vietnamese ambassador to the US from 1966 to 1972.

BUI DIEM: We South Vietnamese people, we think that when the US intervene in Vietnam, it would be more, well human, if I can use that term, to think in terms of the suffering of the Vietnamese people too and the consequences of the US intervention in Vietnam.

JASON MARGOLIS: Many Americans also hold McNamara in part responsible for the deaths of 58 thousand US troops. McNamara felt compelled to act in Vietnam though, to contain the threat of communist expansion. McNamara also helped build up the nation’s nuclear arsenal to thwart the Soviet Union. Here he is speaking in 1963. That was the year after the Cuban missile crisis brought the US and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.

ROBERT MCNAMARA: I don’t regard the present communist leaders as wholly reckless. But recent experience in Cuba, and on a lesser scale in Berlin, has not persuaded me that I can predict with any confidence the sort of challenges that communist leaders will come to think prudent and profitable. If they were to again to miscalculate, as dangerously as they did last year at this time, it would be essential to confront them wherever that might be, with the full consequences of their decision.

JASON MARGOLIS: Later in life, McNamara spoke frequently about how close much of the world had come to annihilation. Steven Miller of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs says McNamara came to believe that nuclear weapons served no military purpose.

STEVEN MILLER: Because the level of destruction was be so great. The implications and consequences would be so massive of any even limited use of nuclear weapons that they were essentially useless devices. And that’s one of the reasons why he became more and more passionate as his life went on about nuclear arms control.

JASON MARGOLIS: This stance reflects a tension between McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, and the man in his twilight years. In 1995, McNamara published a memoir, largely accepting responsibility for the failings in Vietnam.  Many saw the book as admirable, others were less generous. A New York Times editorial said McNamara offered the war’s dead only a prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late. For the World, I’m Jason Margolis.

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