My colleauge, Marc Ambinder, has a smart take on Robert McNamara here. It's a safe bet that Robert McNamara's death won't get the coverage afforded Farrah Fawcett or even Ed McMahon. The former Defense Secretary and Vietnam War architect led a life as big as the 20th century, from whiz kid at the Ford Motor Company through Vietnam and then on to the World Bank. His regrets and agony over Vietnam became legend in his later years and his work for liberal causes like the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s made him an ally of those who used to protest outside his office at the Pentagon. Mickey Kaus asked in the New Republic more than 20 years ago whether any single American had done more damage than McNamara.
At McNamara's footsteps, Kaus laid blame for the collapse of the American auto industry and the dysfunctional policies of the West towards the Third World as well as Vietnam. That seems too harsh. His tenure at Ford wasn't long enough--he'd only been president 10 weeks when Kennedy tapped him to be Defense chief--to assign him blame for the industry's later demise. And the World Bank years, while expansive, merely continued a direction set by others.
McNamara should be judged harshly for the Vietnam years but his contrition shouldn't be dismissed lightly. Henry Kissinger has never shown anything like it in the years since even though Vietnam was more of a lost cause by the time Richard Nixon took office in 1969. Kissinger's other brilliant decisions, such as making the Shah of Iran our gendarme in the Middle East, also seemed at least as brilliant as McNamara's. And this is leaving aside Pinochet, enabling Nixon at his maddest, and so on.
If McNamara spent the last decades of his life apologizing, shouldn't Henry the K.?
McNamara should be judged harsly not just for Vietnam but for his disastrous tenure at the World Bank pushing massive development efforts that harmed millions of people in the developing world. It takes a real genius to totally cock up two jobs like that.
Except at the time pretty much everyone thought that big development projects would be the most successful way to help bring the least-developed countries up to developed world standards. You can't really blame McNamara when he implemented a policy on which there was broad consensus. And it's not like anyone has come up with a better plan, even now - the history of international development has been a long story of attempt after attempt resulting in failure. Not that I think we should stop trying - we need to learn from what has not worked and try to figure out what might. The focus has now shifted to things like microloans, which are showing promise, but we won't really know for another twenty years or so.
Also - it's really hard to figure out how prior development strategies might have worked in the absence of external factors such as the AIDS pandemic in Africa, wars and civil wars, instability in oil prices, etc.
I am 100% disabled veteran of the American War in Vietnam. On May 20, 1969, a full year after R. Strange McNamara left the DoD and knowing the war was "unwinnable," I was wounded.
The man who measured the American "success" in the war by the 'body count' of the enemy is the only way to think about McNamara; not a bean counter, but a body or body part counter; a butcher, a liar, a privileged criminal, who, unlike the 58,000 young boys who were killed, lived a life on clean sheets, with warm food, warm and cold running water, decent medical care, carried about by limos, and lived way too long.
May he never rest in peace, but wander in Hell for eternity.