Robert S. McNamara (1916-2009)

FEBRUARY 1968: RUSK, JOHNSON AND McNAMARA

There may have been no more tragic figure in modern American political history than Robert S. McNamara.

As secretary of defense for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he was vilified for the Vietnam War much as Donald Rumsfeld was vilified for the war in Iraq a generation later.

McNamara came to understand and regret his role, and his mea culpa is summed up in one of the essential books on the war, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995).

Herewith a quote from the book that is all the more compelling because of the situation that George Bush found himself in:

"Why did President Johnson not force a full and open debate on issues that so sharply and clearly divided his most senior advisers? Perhaps his failure was rooted in his realization that the problem of Vietnam was intractable, that there was no satisfactory solution, no way to bring his advisers to consensus. Perhaps he saw clearly that the decision about changing the war's direction rested with him and it was a decision he could not bring himself to make."

Photograph by Yuichi R. Okamoto/White House Press office