Robert McNamara, Vietnam War "Architect," Dies at Age 93

Robert McNamara, the Pentagon chief who was largely responsible for and directed the U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War, died yesterday at the age of 93. McNamara admitted, decades after the end of the ill-fated military escapade, that he had serious doubts about the war even as plans were laid to ramp up the American military presence in Indochina. His involvement in that war was so integral to its execution that some people have called it "McNamara’s war."

In 1995, McNamara admitted to the Associated Press that he was wrong about the war and its direction. Said McNamara at that time, "We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of our country. But we were wrong. We were terribly wrong." At the time of the war’s early years, McNamara was an optimist who predicated that U.S. intervention in the region would free the South Vietnamese to govern themselves freely "by the end of 1965." Those predictions, of course, turned out to be terribly wrong and the war dragged on for another ten years after his predicted end date.

Many in the press lauded McNamara for coming clean as he did in 1995, while others derided the admission as "too little, too late." A Boston Globe editorial, for instance, asked rhetorically, "Where was he when we needed him?" Ted Sorensen, however, a speechwriter and adviser who worked with McNamara, noted that "Most military chieftains – presidents or Cabinet members or otherwise – don’t admit error, ever. At least Bob had the courage and commitment to truth to put out that he was wrong and why it was wrong so that we could all learn the lessons from that."