He was the US Secretary of Defense who authorized and oversaw the US Invasion of DR in 1965. In other words the man who delayed demoracy another 20 years and permitted the Trujillistas through Balaguer to continue to plunder and repress the people.

Though I resented his views then, maybe, just maybe as intelligent and well educated and as an observer of human nature and the political process. He already knew that in the end. The only difference between the people and parties views which brought about the revolution, where really just who would get to steal the peoples money.

In other words the PLD and the reformistas are just the same crooks on different teams.

Anyone see HONDURAS here, also to have the same future.

Don't forget that he would also be the man responsible for the US losing Vietnam. The men in the Department of Defense really resented his unceasing meddling on the military details of the war.

his apology still gives me the creeps and why he waited so long ....he showed a lack of courage

Robert Mcnamara, the devil awaits you with a pitch fork in hand. Obviously those that fancy themselves among the masters of this world are as mortal as us all.

McNamara is a man we should all study in depth. he is in many senses exemplary of his time and his people, and also exemplary of a consummate Western intellectual.

he believed too fully in REASON and in the capability of the 'best and the brightest' minds to solve modernity down the throats of the underdeveloped world. somehow this 'whiz kid' minds huge brains and learning came to the genius conclusion that by engineered, calculated BRUTE force was the answer for these little brown places. in this sense he is TYPICAL of men of his age.

we see how it worked out in Vietnam

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
page 1
HOW should we remember Robert McNamara? As an engaged public servant who participated in some of the most important decisions of the 20th century? A hawk who served as the chief architect of the war in Vietnam? A technocrat who never fully understood the moral implications of his policies? A hero who steadfastly worked to prevent the escalation of conventional war into thermonuclear conflict? All of the above?

It’s impossible to mention his name without starting an argument. Mr. McNamara engendered strong opinions, particularly among those who came of age in the 1960s. People have wanted to know, “Did he ever say he was sorry?” They wanted an apology for his role in Vietnam. The publication of his memoir “In Retrospect” (in 1995) only seemed to make people angrier with him.
In the News section


He said, “We were wrong.” He was reluctant to use the first person. It was always “we,” not “I.” But he did say it. It might not have been enough for many people, but it was an unmistakable admission of error. Still, how do you say you’re sorry for history? It’s impossible to see him as unaware of the role he played in World War II or in Vietnam. What he did give us was his struggle to understand the meaning of what he had done. We got to see him wrestle with history. And thus he serves as an object lesson to many of us.

His refusal to come out against the Vietnam War, particularly as it continued after he left the Defense Department, has angered many. There’s ample evidence that he felt the war was wrong. Why did he remain silent until the 1990s, when “In Retrospect” was published? That is something that people will probably never forgive him for. But he had an implacable sense of rectitude about what was permissible and what was not. In his mind, he probably remained secretary of defense until the day he died.

One angry person once said to me: “Loyalty to the president? What about his loyalty to the American people?” Fair enough. But our government isn’t set up that way. He was not an elected official, he said repeatedly. He served at the pleasure of the president.

THIS brings us to the question of what, if any, were Mr. McNamara’s lasting contributions as secretary of defense? Mr. McNamara saw his central role as preventing nuclear war. During his tenure as secretary of defense, there were conflicts that could have escalated into nuclear war — the confrontation over Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis. All of this must be seen against the backdrop of the prevailing ideas of the time, the domino theory and the cold war.

Mr. McNamara became defense secretary in 1961. The Joint Chiefs were hawks. This is clear in reading the transcripts of the Cuban missile crisis; the generals speak to John F. Kennedy with derision, contempt and anger. When Mr. McNamara took office he discovered secret Pentagon plans for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.

He worried that the Joint Chiefs wanted nuclear war, and he was determined not to allow that to happen. From ’63 to about ’67, we had first-strike capacity and nuclear superiority against the Soviet Union. (In the words of George C. Scott in “Dr. Strangelove,” I’m not saying we wouldn’t have got our “hair mussed.” But we would have destroyed them.) After Kennedy’s death, he served that central role of keeping the Joint Chiefs in check. If true, he becomes not the villain of American history, but something quite different.

And what about the escalation of the Vietnam War? Recently, the taped conversations between President Lyndon Johnson and his advisers have been made public. Listening to the president and Mr. McNamara, it appears that the pressure for escalation did not come from Mr. McNamara, but from Johnson. Mr. McNamara was not an enthusiast for this war. But charged with the responsibility for carrying it out, he argued for it.

page 2 In a 1966 speech in Montreal (delivered while he was still secretary of defense), he returned to the theme of rationality:

“Who is man? Is he a rational animal? If he is, then the goals can ultimately be achieved. If he is not, then there is little point in making the effort. All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal but with a near infinite capacity for folly. His history seems largely a halting, but persistent, effort to raise his reason above his animality. He draws blueprints for utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand: his own part-comic, part-tragic, part-cussed, but part-glorious nature.”

It’s the endless juggling of personal morality, loyalty, political possibility and the caprice of history. If he failed, it is because he tried to bring his idea of rationality to problems that were bigger and more deeply irrational than he or anyone else could rationally understand. For me, the most telling moment in my film about Mr. McNamara, “The Fog of War,” is when he says, “Perhaps rationality isn’t enough.” His career was built on rational solutions, but in the end he realized it all might be for naught.

Quite interesting ABR23... the stuff great post are made off!

attribution for the post on Mcnamara is to Errol Morris

Errol MorrisErrol Morris is a filmmaker whose movie "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara" won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2004. He has also directed "Gates of Heaven," "The Thin Blue Line," "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control," "A Brief History of Time" and "Standard Operating Procedure." A book of his essays (many of which have appeared here) will be published later this year. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and lives with his wife and French bulldog in Cambridge, Mass.

By PHILIP BOBBITT
Published: July 7, 2009

For Christmas in 1963 we gathered at the ranch that had belonged to my great-grandfather, a few miles outside the town — Johnson City — named for our family.
Lyndon Johnson, my uncle, presided over the noisy feast, and the unwrapping and the prayers. By the fire, that afternoon, he quizzed me on the cabinet he had inherited. I was 15, a high school senior. Could I name all the cabinet members? I could. Did I know which ones were from Wall Street, which ones had served in Congress, which ones had been governors? I did. It went on and on — not so unlike the quizzes he must have given his students 30 years earlier when he coached a high school debate team as a young teacher in Houston.

But now, he said, he had a question that was sure to stump me. Who was the most compassionate member of the cabinet? I guessed, rather unconfidently. Wrong. I guessed again, wrongly. He laughed and said: “You’ll never get it. It’s Bob McNamara. By far.” And it was a surprise, because we all thought of Bob McNamara as the no-nonsense numbers man from corporate America. The steel-rimmed glasses and the steel-trap mind were perfectly suited to an industrial mentality.

Lyndon Johnson was a good reader of men and he was right about Robert McNamara, who died this week at the age of 93, after seven years at the Defense Department and then 13 at the World Bank. Just a glance at Mr. McNamara’s tenure at the World Bank shows a man driven by a desire to help the poor.

During his presidency there, lending to the developing world grew from 60 loans totaling under $1 billion to 250 loans of almost $12 billion. His efforts to move governments to increase their contributions to the poorest countries earned him the reputation in the underdeveloped world as “the conscience of the West” (a phrase unlikely to be associated with him at home). At the time of the Cuban missile crisis, his was one of the few voices ardently opposed to invasion.

At one point early in their relationship, Johnson was so taken by Bob McNamara’s commitment to social justice that he mused openly about whether he could make him the vice presidential candidate in 1964. As Clark Clifford observed, “In my years in Washington, only a handful of people below the presidential level have dominated the scene: George Marshall, Dean Acheson and Henry Kissinger all come to mind. But no one held the capital in sway more powerfully than McNamara, from 1961 until the end of 1967.”

What happened?

Robert McNamara went to the Pentagon to reform it, to rationalize its decision-making and systematize analysis. From the outset he was unpopular with many high-ranking officers who were more comfortable with the institutionalized cross-purposes of the defense establishment and the educated intuition of experienced military personnel.

Of course, Mr. McNamara was right, and it was in part his confidence in this sensible effort at reform that blinded him to the need for a change in strategy in Southeast Asia. He was used to hearing mindless criticism and became wedded to relying on those analytic methods that were superior to the ones he found at the Pentagon, not quite appreciating their limited utility in Vietnam.

Unfortunately, just as he was trying to liquidate the bureaucratic practices that governed the Army in the first half of the 20th-century, he found himself in the midst of a sudden shift away from the strategic context that had structured American warfare since the Civil War. The “total warfare” of the industrial state, at which Bob McNamara excelled, was no longer either acceptable or effective.

He was not the only one to miss the need for this kind of change, a change in the war aim rather than simply its practices. Strategic planning is an extrapolation from the past and, in Southeast Asia, the United States confronted warfare for which its past provided no guidance; Mr. McNamara’s obsession with quantitative planning tended to make matters worse: though we killed more and more of the enemy, we were never able to protect civilians adequately.

That this failure haunted him is doubtless to his credit. It is a sign of just how much his role troubled him that both he and McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, broke their silence about the conduct of the war in the mid-1990s to claim that President Kennedy, had he lived, would not have escalated the conflict in 1965, an implausible assertion from two brilliant men that depended upon the assumption that the president would have rejected the very advice they jointly urged in 1965.

Bob McNamara found it difficult to accept the human situation of inevitable tragedy. If only we worked harder, thought more clearly, marshaled our resources more prudently, if only.... And so, late in life, he published an apologia claiming that he had known for some time that the war would fail but had not been willing to undermine American morale to say so, even to the president. He seems to have been unwilling to accept that a stalemate was about as good an outcome as was available, at least until we learned new tactics and goals that we are only now coming to appreciate.

Though it may be hard for our contemporaries to view the numbers-crunching, data-driven warlord as a person of deep compassion, his naïve refusal to accept an agonizing inevitability was related to his compassion. He thought there was a way out of Southeast Asia that would save its people from ruthless dictatorships without an endless sacrifice of American and Vietnamese life. In the language of the game theorists, he believed there was an equilibrium, a stable option that would maximize freedom and minimize harm. In the end, American frustration achieved just the opposite.

There are some who have recently expressed contempt for Robert McNamara. I’m not surprised. But what’s called for, I think, is something much harder to sustain: compassion.

Philip Bobbitt, a law professor at Columbia, is the author, most recently, of “Terror and Consent: The Wars for the 21st Century.”