America’s defence secretary during Vietnam War dies

ROBERT S McNamara, the cerebral secretary of defence who was vilified for his role in escalating the Vietnam War, a role he later deeply regretted, has died.

He was 93.

McNamara died at his home, his wife Diana told reporters. She said he had been in failing health for some time.

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.

Known as a policy maker 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 – where he stayed for 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 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.

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 build-up of arms.

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. Finally, in 1993, after the Cold War ended, he undertook to write his memoirs. McNamara disclosed that by 1967 he had deep misgivings about Vietnam – 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.

Despite those doubts, he had continued to express public confidence that the application of enough American firepower would defeat the Communists.

In that period, the number of US casualties – dead, missing and wounded – went from 7,466 to over 100,000.