Obituaries

Robert S. McNamara, defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and dubbed the "architect" of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, has died at the age of 93, AP reports. He died early today, according to his wife.

At first he took pride in his work in the Vietnam conflict, but then, after the whole policy went haywire, with tens of thousands of Americans having died in an unjust war, he spent the rest of his life wondering where and why the hell it went wrong.

When McNamara realized the war was a mistake, he pissed off LBJ, who thought McNamara was out to support his bitter enemy RFK:

The turning point came on May 19, 1967, when Mr. McNamara sent a long and carefully argued paper to Johnson, urging him to negotiate a peace rather than escalate the war.

“The Vietnam war is unpopular in this country,” the paper began. “It is becoming increasingly unpopular as it escalates — causing more American casualties, more fear of its growing into a wider war, more privation of the domestic sector, and more distress at the amount of suffering being visited on the noncombatants in Vietnam, South and North.”

“Most Americans,” Mr. McNamara continued, “are convinced that somehow we should not have gotten this deeply in. All want the war ended and expect their president to end it. Successfully. Or else.”

That was the last straw for Johnson, who came to believe that Mr. McNamara was secretly plotting to help Robert F. Kennedy, then a Democratic senator from New York, run on a peace ticket in the 1968 election. The president announced on Nov. 29, 1967, that Mr. McNamara would give up his post at the Pentagon to run the World Bank. Mr. McNamara left office two months later, never comprehending, in his words, “whether I quit or was fired.”