Robert McNamara Dead

[Gawdzilla Sama]

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."

[klr]

So, the Mac is no more. Fascinating character, although I certainly wouldn't find myself in agreement with everything he did or said (such as some of the 'lessons' in The Fog of War).

[Transgirlofnofaith]

The New York Times has a great Op-ed piece about him. It's a subscriber page, so I'll just rip it off and fuck over the NYT's IP rights. BTW, if you have Firefox, and you highlight the title on those NYT subscriber pages, and right click, then select the "search with google" option, you can select the NYT article from the Google list and bypass the lockout. But I've been kicked off sometimes, so it's not foolproof. And the page can react if you do anything to the page while it's loading, like scrolling down.

Calculus and Compassion
By PHILIP BOBBITT
Published: July 7, 2009

FOR Christmas in 1963 we gathered at the ranch that had belonged to my great-grandfather, a few miles outside the town — Johnson City — named for our family.

Lyndon Johnson, my uncle, presided over the noisy feast, and the unwrapping and the prayers. By the fire, that afternoon, he quizzed me on the cabinet he had inherited. I was 15, a high school senior. Could I name all the cabinet members? I could. Did I know which ones were from Wall Street, which ones had served in Congress, which ones had been governors? I did. It went on and on — not so unlike the quizzes he must have given his students 30 years earlier when he coached a high school debate team as a young teacher in Houston.

But now, he said, he had a question that was sure to stump me. Who was the most compassionate member of the cabinet? I guessed, rather unconfidently. Wrong. I guessed again, wrongly. He laughed and said: “You’ll never get it. It’s Bob McNamara. By far.” And it was a surprise, because we all thought of Bob McNamara as the no-nonsense numbers man from corporate America. The steel-rimmed glasses and the steel-trap mind were perfectly suited to an industrial mentality.

Lyndon Johnson was a good reader of men and he was right about Robert McNamara, who died this week at the age of 93, after seven years at the Defense Department and then 13 at the World Bank. Just a glance at Mr. McNamara’s tenure at the World Bank shows a man driven by a desire to help the poor.

During his presidency there, lending to the developing world grew from 60 loans totaling under $1 billion to 250 loans of almost $12 billion. His efforts to move governments to increase their contributions to the poorest countries earned him the reputation in the underdeveloped world as “the conscience of the West” (a phrase unlikely to be associated with him at home). At the time of the Cuban missile crisis, his was one of the few voices ardently opposed to invasion.

At one point early in their relationship, Johnson was so taken by Bob McNamara’s commitment to social justice that he mused openly about whether he could make him the vice presidential candidate in 1964. As Clark Clifford observed, “In my years in Washington, only a handful of people below the presidential level have dominated the scene: George Marshall, Dean Acheson and Henry Kissinger all come to mind. But no one held the capital in sway more powerfully than McNamara, from 1961 until the end of 1967.”

What happened?

Robert McNamara went to the Pentagon to reform it, to rationalize its decision-making and systematize analysis. From the outset he was unpopular with many high-ranking officers who were more comfortable with the institutionalized cross-purposes of the defense establishment and the educated intuition of experienced military personnel.

Of course, Mr. McNamara was right, and it was in part his confidence in this sensible effort at reform that blinded him to the need for a change in strategy in Southeast Asia. He was used to hearing mindless criticism and became wedded to relying on those analytic methods that were superior to the ones he found at the Pentagon, not quite appreciating their limited utility in Vietnam.

Unfortunately, just as he was trying to liquidate the bureaucratic practices that governed the Army in the first half of the 20th-century, he found himself in the midst of a sudden shift away from the strategic context that had structured American warfare since the Civil War. The “total warfare” of the industrial state, at which Bob McNamara excelled, was no longer either acceptable or effective.

He was not the only one to miss the need for this kind of change, a change in the war aim rather than simply its practices. Strategic planning is an extrapolation from the past and, in Southeast Asia, the United States confronted warfare for which its past provided no guidance; Mr. McNamara’s obsession with quantitative planning tended to make matters worse: though we killed more and more of the enemy, we were never able to protect civilians adequately.

That this failure haunted him is doubtless to his credit. It is a sign of just how much his role troubled him that both he and McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, broke their silence about the conduct of the war in the mid-1990s to claim that President Kennedy, had he lived, would not have escalated the conflict in 1965, an implausible assertion from two brilliant men that depended upon the assumption that the president would have rejected the very advice they jointly urged in 1965.

BOB McNamara found it difficult to accept the human situation of inevitable tragedy. If only we worked harder, thought more clearly, marshaled our resources more prudently, if only.... And so, late in life, he published an apologia claiming that he had known for some time that the war would fail but had not been willing to undermine American morale to say so, even to the president. He seems to have been unwilling to accept that a stalemate was about as good an outcome as was available, at least until we learned new tactics and goals that we are only now coming to appreciate.

Though it may be hard for our contemporaries to view the numbers-crunching, data-driven warlord as a person of deep compassion, his naïve refusal to accept an agonizing inevitability was related to his compassion. He thought there was a way out of Southeast Asia that would save its people from ruthless dictatorships without an endless sacrifice of American and Vietnamese life. In the language of the game theorists, he believed there was an equilibrium, a stable option that would maximize freedom and minimize harm. In the end, American frustration achieved just the opposite.

There are some who have recently expressed contempt for Robert McNamara. I’m not surprised. But what’s called for, I think, is something much harder to sustain: compassion.

Philip Bobbitt, a law professor at Columbia, is the author, most recently, of “Terror and Consent: The Wars for the 21st Century.”