RIP: Robert McNamara

From the AP:

Robert S. McNamara, the cerebral secretary of defense who was vilified for carrying out the Vietnam War, then devoted himself to helping the world’s poorest nations, died Monday. He was 93.

Known as a policymaker 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. He stayed 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 University 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. Critics mocked McNamara mercilessly; they made much of the fact that his middle name was “Strange.”

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 buildup of arms and armies.

McNamara was a complicated man who served during an intensely hard period in American foreign and military policy. I would strongly encourage readers to watch “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert McNamara” which was a powerful documentary about McNamara made in 2003. The candid interviews with the man throughout the movie are chilling but also extremely insightful about the Vietnam Era.

I hope McNamara find the peace now that he had clearly been looking for for the last 40 years.