I hold this man personally responsible for the troubles my father faces now because he led the push for U.S involvement in Vietnam.

As early as April 1964, Senator Wayne Morse, Democrat of Oregon, called Vietnam “McNamara’s War.” Mr. McNamara did not object. “I am pleased to be identified with it,” he said, “and do whatever I can to win it.”

He did the very thing Pres. Eisenhower warned against and sold the nation, and the world, to the military industrial complex. He started a bad line of government appointees that moved from private industry to public office with the intent to make private monetary gains. The use of the United States military to execute completely subjective goals in completely subjective war is reprehensible beyond fathom.

Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come.

Serving both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara allowed his intellect and practicality determine his course of action. In true Western elitist fashion he and many others like him failed to grasp the desire of an already battle hardened people to resist foreign meddling. Ho Chih Minh was a popularly, democratically elected president, but his ability to see the possible benefit of socialism for his people ensured his demise in the eyes of the myopic American government. What is even more despicable about Robert S. McNamara is his willingness to repeat massive human devastation.

In the film, Mr. McNamara described the American firebombing of Japan’s cities in World War II. He had played a supporting role in those attacks, running statistical analysis for Gen. Curtis E. LeMay of the Army’s Air Forces.

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals.”

So the problem is with his ability to make decisions that are not completely compromised by his lack of so-called moral fiber. I hope that the world remembers this man as a criminal who sent thousands of young Americans to die and many more to be maimed for reasons that still cannot be adequately explained. His attempts to squash populist political movements in the world began a brutal legacy of CIA involvement with military coups, juntas, and civil wars.

Robert McNamara dead at 93. He’s lucky he was able to live as long as he did. Maybe that was the best punishment he could have. Apparently he was haunted and troubled by his life’s work, but his personal regret is no comfort to the millions of people directly affected by the policies he enacted as the Secretary of Defense to the President of the United States in the 1960s.

(Quotes in this post are courtesy of the NY Times feature.)

For more information about R.S McNamara look at:

Wikipedia: Robert S McNamara

NNDB: Robert Strange McNamara

Noam Chomsky responds to McNamara’s #1 bestseller In Retrospect, 1995

Documentary: The Fog of War, 2003