Robert Strange McNamara

His name will be associated always with the Vietnam War, a war that was America's longest and most controversial, a war that took the lives of 58,000 U.S. servicemen. Recruited when president of the Ford Motor Co. by President John F. Kennedy, this former Harvard professor served as secretary of defense from 1961-68. He resigned from that post to become president of the World Bank, which he headed for 13 years.

He brought with him to the Pentagon young associates, academics, intellectuals and practitioners of "systems analysis," vowing to run the Defense Department like a business. Collectively, the McNamara team was known within government circles as "the Whiz Kids." They clashed repeatedly with senior military officers, and in the conduct of the war in Vietnam took over many of the prerogatives traditionally exercised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and theater commanders.

In an address to the American Society of Newspaper editors on April 8, 1987, Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale (a former president of The Citadel) spoke bitterly about the baleful influence McNamara and his men exercised over the military.

"What the hell kind of scale of values has this 20th century world lured us into?" he asked. "Those Whiz Kids and their mentors played games with the great good will of Middle America, squandered it, 'got religion,' bugged out, left a generation of their sons face down in the mud, and got away with it. They bragged about running a war without the emotional involvement of the mob, the men on the street. They decided it was best to keep the American people in the dark, and rely on their own 'creative thinking.' "

McNamara was known for his love of statistics — "body counts," bombing missions flown, bombs dropped, ammunition expended, etc. He, and to a remarkable degree President Lyndon Johnson himself, selected targets the military was authorized to attack in North Vietnam.

The strategy of "gradualism" adopted early in McNamara's conduct of the war was strenuously objected to by the Joint Chiefs. They urged a quick and massive use of air power, the mining of North Vietnamese ports and other measures they believed would bring an early end to the war. They were routinely overruled.

For 27 years after his resignation as secretary of defense, McNamara refrained from answering his many critics.

In 1995 his memoir, "In Retrospect," was published. In regard to Vietnam he confessed that he and the two presidents he worked for, JFK and LBJ, "were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."

It is a debt left largely unpaid.

Robert S. McNamara, dead at the age of 93.