The No Fog on the Mirror: Eleven Lessons From the Death of Robert S. McNamara

(Kudos to Mark)
Robert Strange McNamara, beloved warchitect, has died at the age of 93. His ill-advised and ultimately unsuccessful expansion of the Vietnam War torpedoed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, a thwarting of liberal idealism that Rush Limbaugh could only (wet) dream of. McNamara helped to rebuild a struggling Ford Motors – where he achieved his life’s greatest success, stopping production of the Edsel, and 6 weeks after being named President, was tapped as JFK’s Secretary of Defense. He served as secretary from 1961 to 1968, continuing under LBJ, greatly expanding the powers of the office to include diplomacy, increasing the budget of the Department of Defense from $40 billion to $75 billion within 6 years and sowing the seeds that gave us Donald Rumsfeld. More than anyone else, the Vietnam War was his baby, but the eventual accomplishment of the stated war objectives were small consolation. Act 2 was his attempt to make good, serving as Director of The World Bank and doling out money to impoverished Third World nations, where the smartest man Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had ever met started massive infrastructure programs without considering ecological costs, fueled corrupt foreign governments and saddled the poorest nations on the planet with unrepayable debt. Then in a Nixonian attempt at career rehabilitation, he published a memoir in 1995 where he disclosed that he had come to the realization that the war had been a giant mistake. His mea culpa was a bit disingenuous, as he admitted that he had come to that realization while he was still sending tens of thousands of soldiers to their deaths in a war he had given up hope of winning.