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McNamara, Defence chief during Vietnam war, dies

— Photo: AP

In a Thursday, December 10, 1962, file photo, Robert McNamara (left) inspects Vietnamese civil guards at Song Mao, Vietnam.

WASHINGTON: Robert S. McNamara, the cerebral Secretary of Defence who was vilified for prosecuting the Vietnam War, then devoted himself to helping the world’s poorest nations, died Monday. He was 93.

Mr. McNamara died at 5.30 a.m. (09.30 GMT) at his home, his wife Diana told The Associated Press. She said he had been in failing health for some time.

For all his healing efforts, Mr. 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 policymaker with a fixation for statistical analysis, Mr. 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, Mr. McNamara once had to flee a student mob through underground utility tunnels. Critics mocked Mr. 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, Mr. 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 and armies.

In the early 1990s, he began to open up. He told Time magazine in 1991 that he did not think the bombing of North Vietnam — the biggest bombing campaign in history up to that time — would work but he went along with it “because we had to try to prove it would not work, number one, and [because] other people thought it would work.”

The Iraq war, with its similarities to Vietnam, at times brought up Mr. McNamara’s name, in many cases in comparison with another unpopular Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Mr. McNamara was among the former Secretaries of Defence and State who met twice with President George W. Bush in 2006 to discuss Iraq war policies.

In the Kennedy administration, Mr. McNamara was a key figure in both the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis 18 months later. Mr. McNamara served as the World Bank president for 12 years. He tripled its loans to developing countries and changed its emphasis from grandiose industrial projects to rural development.

After retiring in 1981, he championed the causes of nuclear disarmament and aid by the richest nation for the world’s poorest.

As a professor at the Harvard Business School when World War II started, he helped train Army Air Corps officers in cost-effective statistical control. In 1943, he was commissioned an Army officer and joined a team of young officers who developed a new field of statistical control of supplies.

Mr. McNamara and his colleagues sold themselves to the Ford organisation as a package and revitalised the company. The group became known as the “whiz kids,” and Mr. McNamara was named the first Ford president who was not a descendant of Henry Ford.

A month later, the newly elected Kennedy, a Democrat, invited Mr. McNamara, a registered Republican, to join his Cabinet. President Lyndon Johnson replaced Kennedy and retained Mr. McNamara as “the best in the lot” of Kennedy Cabinet members and the man to keep Vietnam from falling to the Communists.

When U.S. naval vessels allegedly were attacked off the North Vietnamese coast in 1964, Mr. McNamara lobbied Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which Johnson used as the equivalent of a congressional declaration of war.

Mr. McNamara visited predicted that American intervention would enable the South Vietnamese to stand by themselves “by the end of 1965,” an early forerunner of a seemingly endless string of official “light at the end of the tunnel” predictions of American success. — AP

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