Vietnam Era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara Dead (Photos/Video)

Posted on July 6, 2009

Robert S. McNamara, the former secretary of defense who was vilified for the Vietnam war, and in his later years devoted his time to helping the poor nations has died at age 93. Read more on Robert McNamara’s life and death below.

The former secretary of defense for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson during the Vietnam-Era has died at the age of 93.

McNamara’s wife, Diana, confirmed that her husband had died at 5:30 a.m. at his home. She revealed McNamara had been in bad health for quite some time.

Robert McNamara has always been known for the Vietnam War,which had even been referred to as “McNamara’s war.

Robert McNamara was recruited to run the Pentagon by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. McNamara remained for seven years, which is longer than anyone since the job started in 1947.

McNamara’s association with Vietnam was truly personal. McNamara’s own son, a student at Stanford University, protested the war as his dead headed the war.

It all became too much for McNamara, and he left the Pentagon on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He then went on to be president of the World Bank and devoted his energy to the belief that if we could improve life in the rural communities in poor countries that it was a better path than building up weapons and armies.

McNamara was a very private person but finally opened up in the early 90’s. He told Time magazine in 1991 that he did not think the bombing of North Vietnam 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.”

In 1993 McNamara decided to write his memoirs because some of the lessons of Vietnam were applicable to the post-Cold War period “odd as though it may seem.”

“In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam” came out and McNamara revealed that by 1967 he had deep misgivings about Vietnam, and how 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.

Even with those doubts, he acted confident in public that the firepower the U.S. had would make the Communists make peace. In that time period, the number of U.S. soldiers that were dead, missing and wounded surged from 7,466 to over 100,000.

“We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of our country. But we were wrong. We were terribly wrong,” McNamara, then 78, told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of the book’s release.

McNamara talked about his theories on war in the 2003 documentary “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.” With the U.S. in the first year of the war in Iraq, it became a popular and timely art-house attraction and won the Oscar for best documentary feature.

Our condolences to Robert McNamara’s friends and family.

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