Robert Strange McNamara, 93, passed away this morning in Washington DC. And yes, his middle name was Strange.

McNamara was President of Ford Motor Company, served as Defense Secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and was head of the World Bank. But, what he is best remembered is for his role as Secretary of Defense in the 1960s. (PBS Newshour on McNamara.)

There was nothing in McNamara’s early career to indicate that he would become the Secretary of Defense. McNamara belonged to what was described as “best and brightest” group of people from the 1960s, who worked for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. When Kennedy was elected as the President he appointed McNamara as his Defense Secretary and it is for that role he is best remembered. He was dubbed as the “Architect of the Vietnam War.”

The New York Times’ Bob Herbert wrote in his op-ed piece about McNamara and the significance of war:

None of these wars had clearly articulated goals or endgames. None were pursued with the kind of intensity and sense of common purpose and shared sacrifice that marked World War II. Wars are now mostly background noise, distant events overshadowed by celebrity deaths and the antics of Sarah Palin, Mark Sanford and the like.

The obscenity of war is lost on most Americans, and that drains the death of Robert McNamara of any real significance.

The Economist wrote:

As Americans read Mr McNamara’s obituaries today, many will see parallels with Donald Rumsfeld. And that may be the saddest legacy Mr McNamara leaves behind. His mistakes hold valuable lessons for war-time leaders, but many in the last administration failed to heed them.

The Wall Street’s Stephen writes in a piece titled From McNamara to Obama that

“Barrack Obama might take a close look at McNamara’s obituaries and note that he, too, is the whiz kid of his day.”

Some political pundits have drawn a parallel between Kennedy and Obama’s administrations and have underscored that like Kennedy, President Obama too is surrounded by the “best and brightest” from around the country. Like the Kennedy administration, the Obama administration too has its plate full of foreign affairs issue. Are there lessons that can be learned from McNamara’s interviews, memoirs and documentary about the involvement of the US in Vietnam for the current administration? Some political pundit feel there are lessons to be learned from McNamara’s involvement in Vietnam. Ironically when McNamara started to talk about Vietnam in the 1990s he admitted that he wanted to share the lessons he learned from Vietnam.

McNamara grew up in San Francisco and received his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley. In his memoir he talks about the liberal atmosphere in the Berkeley campus and how lucky he felt to be studying at this school.  He went on to to Harvard University from where he got a degree in business management, and was a for a short while taught at the University after he graduated. During World War two he was a civilian consultant for the US government and in that role he traveled to Asian countries including India and China.

A strange twist of events prompted McNamara to leave the ivory tower to work for corporate America. The McNamara’s incurred huge medical expenses when they were both diagnosed and treated for polio. In order to pay his huge medical expenses McNamara made a decision to join Ford in 1946.

Within a span of 15 years McNamara rose through Ford’s corporate ladder and became the President of Ford Motor company. The offer from President Kennedy came as a real surprise to him as McNamara describes in his book, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” that he described as “This is the book I planned never to write.”

A brilliant technocrat McNamara quickly immersed himself and learned the ropes of his job as Defense Secretary at the height of the cold war, when the two super powers: US and USSR were involved in a series of overt and covert actions around the globe. This was the height of the cold war period. The 1960s was marked by a series of global events that could have tipped the world into a nuclear war, and how to deter a nuclear war was one of the central concerns of the US government and that is background against which the international events that unfolded in the 1960s needs to be viewed.

Just as Kennedy settled down as the new President he was confronted with the now-famous Cuban Missile Crisis, where the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev almost pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear war. The Hollywood movie Thirteen Days chronicles the tense two-weeks within the inner circle of  President Kennedy and how they handled the crisis. The President’s inner circle basically stay put in the White House trying to handle the crisis. It is a movie worth watching. There is also that classic book: “Essence of Decision“ on decision making during Cuban Missile Crisis written by  Graham T Allison that is worth taking a look.

Right on the heels of the Cuban Missile crisis was a major crisis brewing in South East Asian in Vietnam, which proved to be a huge quagmire for the US government. The US involvement in Vietnam came to dominate and pale everything in comparison in the 1960s and all the way into the 1970s. It was during President Kennedy’s administration that the US stepped up its involvement in Vietnam.

On Vietnam McNamara remained quiet for a long time. He left the government in the late 1960s and joined The World Bank, but remained quiet all through the 1970s and 1980s. It was only in the mid-1990s that he talked about the Vietnam War,  about  lessons that can be learned from Vietnam, and what can be applied to the present and future situation.  He talked about political cynicism in the 1990s (a thought that President Obama talks about his book “The Audacity of Hope) and how that in turn prompted him to finally talk about the war.

McNamara confesses that he did not know then that they were not fighting a Nationalistic war in Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh was more like Tito, and not like Stalin, the Soviet leader. Tito was a nationalist communist as one critic described and it is in that vein that McNamara made that comparison between Ho Chih Minh and Tito. He  has admitted that militarily the US could not have won the war in Vietnam, and pointed out it was a very complex and complicated decision on why the war was being fought.

He writes in his book about Vietnam on why he decided to leave as Secretary of Defense:

“I was at loggerheads with the president of the United States; I was not getting answers to my questions; and I was tense as hell…The fact is I had come to the conclusion, and had told him point-blank, that we could not achieve our objective in Vietnam through any reasonable military means, and we therefore should seek a lesser political objective through negotiations. President Johnson was not ready to accept that. It was becoming clear to both of us that I would not change my judgement, nor would he change his. Something had to give.”

The war in Vietnam left  deep emotional scars on the American society and psyche. USA lost close to 60,000 people during the course of the war. The trauma from the Vietnam war was felt for many, many years after the US withdrew from that country in the mid-1970s.

It is not surprising that McNamara’s book along with the documentary that he appeared in Errol Morris “The Fog of War,” resulted in a wide spectrum of feedback ranging from very critical to people saying that the book is the start of a process of healing. There were heated debates, reviews and articles written on McNamara’s memoirs. You can get a sense of the debate over the book in this PBS Newshour video interview with McNamara and the discussion which includes Senator McGovern and a very young Senator McCain, a Vietnam veteran. Notice how McNeil questions McNamara very closely about the hostile reaction to his memoir, and why he wrote the book and his thoughts on US involvement in Vietnam. McNeil asks him about the “morality of McNamara’s silence,” and the how had he spoken earlier on the war in Vietnam could have been contained. Why did he not speak earlier on about the war McNeil asks. You have to watch the interview to find out.

As one critic put it McNamara’s book serves a purpose. The book highlights the lack of knowledge that the “best and brightest” in the White House possessed. It also highlights a lack of naunced understanding of the  geopolitical issues in South East Asia. As this critic points out maybe this group did not read Graham Greene’s book The Quiet American.

Many felt that even after McNamara wrote his memoir and appeared in the documentary “The Fog of War,” there were many unanswered questions. Should McNamara have put his loyalty to the President even if the course the country was taking was disastrous asked McNeil in that telling PBS interview in 1995. It is worth watching the video clip to hear what McNamara said.

Some have asked: Why should McNamara take all the heat?  And one explanation offered is that perhaps the reason he took the heat is that old fashioned set of values that the “best and brightest” possessed and that is you follow your orders that your leaders give you.

McNamara must have known that something was wrong with the war in Vietnam. He must have felt it at home, where his family might have been against the war points out Senator McGovern. McNamara’s  son was a war protester, who believed the Vietnam war was immoral.

McNamara and India: Here is an interesting tidbit.  McNamara scored a perfect 800 in his GMAT scores. And in the 1980s when an IITian scored a perfect 800 in his GMAT score, McNamara supposedly called the Indian student and congratulated him.