5 ms·

Death of the whiz kid: Robert Strange McNamara, 1916-2009.

17 points by terpua 17y ago

spitfire 17y ago
I have respect for McNamara after seeing the excellent documentry fog of war. Many despise him for the things he had done during vietnam, but I have great respect for the wisdom he decided to share later in life. We need more people sharing the wisdom of their errors.
- TriinT 17y ago
  I wonder if the relatives of the 2,000,000+ or so Vietnamese civilians who died during the war can also respect McNamara. Some mistakes are simply not excusable. LBJ was the commander-in-chief, but McNamara was his right-arm.
  - noonespecial 17y ago
    When I make a serious career level mistake in judgment, software projects might fail. Someone might even lose their job. When people of certain levels make the same order of errors, many people may die. We're both human. I haven't the fortitude to make those decisions (even if I was in the position to), but someone has to and sometimes they are wrong. Some of them hang banners on aircraft carriers and pretend they are right anyway. Some of them humbly admit they were wrong. The people still die. Bummer.
    - TriinT 17y ago
      So, you're comparing a software error to the act of initiating aggression and killing millions of people, including 58K of your countrymen???? If so, you need to put things in perspective, imho.
      - mhansen 17y ago
        I think he was aiming at contrasting the two.
        TriinT 17y ago
        I get that. But imho it's a tiny bit distasteful contrasting them, isn't it? The total number of Vietnamese who were killed was to the tune of 3 million. That's a "semi-Holocaust". No one would compare a software glitch to the Holocaust, right?
        noonespecial 17y ago
        Ok, let me put the right hand brace on this one before it gets away. My point was simply that humans are going to make mistakes in the course of their jobs. People can be hurt by these mistakes. The difference is a matter of scale, and not intent. People want to make McNamara out to be Evil with the big e. I think he probably wasn't. His actions later in life point to this. The idea is that if we accept that people make mistakes (sometimes HUGE ones) we can prevent a few of them in the future by learning from the past. If we'd really listened to McNamara its quite possible we might have avoided Iraq. If we just call him evil and forget about it, we miss the wisdom.
        TriinT 17y ago
        I entirely agree that one should try to learn from the past. I disagree on the "scale x intent" issue, though. The initiation of aggression is immoral, in my view. Attacking someone who did not attack you is wrong regardless of the death toll. In this case, I believe that intent does matter. Sadly, McNamara would probably have been remembered as a great man had he left his office after JFK was killed. After all, McNamara played an important role in nuclear deterrence, during the Cuban missile crisis, etc. Too bad he was foolish enough to help start an unwinnable, useless war in Indochina.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      You both own your mistakes, you own yours, mcNamara owns his. I give the man props for genuinely being sorry but that does not absolve him from the damage that he's done. I'd hate to have been in his shoes though, I can't imagine what that kind of guilt would do to your nights rest.
  - callmeed 17y ago
    So, there is a line somewhere between excusable and inexcusable mistakes. Who gets to decide where that line is drawn?
    - TriinT 17y ago
      North Vietnam did not initiate aggression, the U.S. did. In fact, the Vietnam war was an undeclared one. How ironic. The longest war was never declared officially. About mistakes, let us see: - having the CIA planting a brutal, oppressive puppet government in Saigon. - when puppet government fails, invent a fictitious act of aggression, lie to the Congress, bomb South Vietnam to hell, and send in thousands of American boys to die for nothing. - years later, after 58K Americans and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians have been killed, write a book saying "sorry, it was a mistake". Yeah. It's really hard to draw the line here... If there had been a threat against the U.S., then yes, decisions would have to be made, and unavoidably mistakes would have been made, unfortunately. However, in Vietnam there never was a threat to the U.S., except in the "brilliant" minds of the "domino-theorists" who never bothered to try to understand the enemy and its motivations.
      - gojomo 17y ago
        It was a different era. Smart, diligent, well-meaning people, chosen through the best mechanisms of election and promotion available, did things we now understand were awful. It's easy to judge from here and now, but in a similar position of responsibility, are you sure you would not make equivalent mistakes either way -- too much aggression, or too much passivity? WW2, Hitler, Stalin were still the kinds of threats on people's minds -- where less than 20 years earlier failure to engage and deter early had resulted in the death of tens of millions. Communism loudly claimed it was the irresistible wave of the future and was showing the military power to make the claim credible. Soviet H-Bombs. A brutal and bloody stalemate in Korea. Tanks rolling into eastern Europe; Soviet satellites crashing into Wisconsin; nuclear missiles in Cuba! And if it hadn't been Kennedy at the helm -- it would have been Nixon! And if not LBJ -- it would have been Barry "lob a [nuke] into the bathroom of the Kremlin" Goldwater! We can chuckle at the "sorry" "mistakes" of the "domino-theorists" with as many "scare-quotes" as we like from our "comfortable" "decades-later" "safe" perspective, but the fact that there was a large consensus of smart, non-evil, "right-thinking" people behind most U.S. cold-war military actions should prompt a little humility in passing judgment. Finally, peace requires some measure of forgiveness. To imply there's still some score to settle 40 years later -- some punishment McNamara (if he were alive) and peers still deserve -- is the attitude behind never-ending war and strife.
  - 100k 17y ago
    You should watch Fog of War if you haven't. It is an unflinching look at the man and what he did (with a big impact because of the camera that Errol Morris to get direct on shots of interviews). McNamara tried to systematize warfare like a factory. He played a high stakes game that ended up killing millions of people. He thought he could control the monster. He was wrong and it spiraled out of control. The movie takes an honest look at his life and it's something we have to understand if we want to avoid repeating his mistakes. Which we apparently haven't since we're stuck in two wars right now.
    - awi 17y ago
      Fog of War is one of my favorite documentaries, but McNamara is not honest about two key incidents - the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. In the movie McNamara claims he was "I was trying to help him (JFK) keep us out of war." actually he was pushing for bombing the Soviet missile site in Cuba since the third day. This is documented by recordings of meetings with JFK. About the Gulf of Tonkin incident McNamara claims that he and Johnson didn't believe the U.S. destroyer Maddox had been attacked, even though the crew sent messages that the attack they had reported was a not an attack after all. I learned this today [1] and it puts McNamara in a different light, although the lessons in the movie are still very valid. [1] The lies of The Fog of War (http://www.slate.com/id/2092916/ http://www.slate.com/id/2092916/), linked to by TFA
- puzzle-out 17y ago
  If experience is the name we give to our mistakes, McNamara had lots of experience.
TriinT 17y ago
Chomsky on McNamara (1995): http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare01.htm http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare01.htm Chomsky is rather ferociously critical of McNamara, as expected.
tomjen 17y ago
May he rot and burn in hell, and may all the world forget he ever lived.
- noonespecial 17y ago
  We went to Iraq, didn't we? I'd say we forgot him straightaway.
  - TriinT 17y ago
    Good point. Only fools fall into the same trap twice. Millions of Americans served in Vietnam. I think the veterans will never forget nor forgive McNamara. He shall be remembered as the architect of one of the greatest crimes in History.
    - wlievens 17y ago
      > Good point. Only fools fall into the same trap twice Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me ... you can't get fooled again
joeycfan 17y ago
Ho Chi Minh is responsible for the Vietnam catastrophe. He would have seen the Vietnamese people go extinct before losing that war. And, like in North Korea, they run a big song and dance on how they have to reunify their country, but thats not it at all. It's Communism first. Have to reunify under Communism Until then, the hell with the country. The Vietnam war was a triumph of evil. The bad guys won, and lots of people here helped them.

17 points by terpua 17y ago

I have respect for McNamara after seeing the excellent documentry fog of war. Many despise him for the things he had done during vietnam, but I have great respect for the wisdom he decided to share later in life. We need more people sharing the wisdom of their errors.

TriinT 17y ago
I wonder if the relatives of the 2,000,000+ or so Vietnamese civilians who died during the war can also respect McNamara. Some mistakes are simply not excusable. LBJ was the commander-in-chief, but McNamara was his right-arm.
- noonespecial 17y ago
  When I make a serious career level mistake in judgment, software projects might fail. Someone might even lose their job. When people of certain levels make the same order of errors, many people may die. We're both human. I haven't the fortitude to make those decisions (even if I was in the position to), but someone has to and sometimes they are wrong. Some of them hang banners on aircraft carriers and pretend they are right anyway. Some of them humbly admit they were wrong. The people still die. Bummer.
  - TriinT 17y ago
    So, you're comparing a software error to the act of initiating aggression and killing millions of people, including 58K of your countrymen???? If so, you need to put things in perspective, imho.
    - mhansen 17y ago
      I think he was aiming at contrasting the two.
      - TriinT 17y ago
        I get that. But imho it's a tiny bit distasteful contrasting them, isn't it? The total number of Vietnamese who were killed was to the tune of 3 million. That's a "semi-Holocaust". No one would compare a software glitch to the Holocaust, right?
        noonespecial 17y ago
        Ok, let me put the right hand brace on this one before it gets away. My point was simply that humans are going to make mistakes in the course of their jobs. People can be hurt by these mistakes. The difference is a matter of scale, and not intent. People want to make McNamara out to be Evil with the big e. I think he probably wasn't. His actions later in life point to this. The idea is that if we accept that people make mistakes (sometimes HUGE ones) we can prevent a few of them in the future by learning from the past. If we'd really listened to McNamara its quite possible we might have avoided Iraq. If we just call him evil and forget about it, we miss the wisdom.
        TriinT 17y ago
        I entirely agree that one should try to learn from the past. I disagree on the "scale x intent" issue, though. The initiation of aggression is immoral, in my view. Attacking someone who did not attack you is wrong regardless of the death toll. In this case, I believe that intent does matter. Sadly, McNamara would probably have been remembered as a great man had he left his office after JFK was killed. After all, McNamara played an important role in nuclear deterrence, during the Cuban missile crisis, etc. Too bad he was foolish enough to help start an unwinnable, useless war in Indochina.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    You both own your mistakes, you own yours, mcNamara owns his. I give the man props for genuinely being sorry but that does not absolve him from the damage that he's done. I'd hate to have been in his shoes though, I can't imagine what that kind of guilt would do to your nights rest.
- callmeed 17y ago
  So, there is a line somewhere between excusable and inexcusable mistakes. Who gets to decide where that line is drawn?
  - TriinT 17y ago
    North Vietnam did not initiate aggression, the U.S. did. In fact, the Vietnam war was an undeclared one. How ironic. The longest war was never declared officially. About mistakes, let us see: - having the CIA planting a brutal, oppressive puppet government in Saigon. - when puppet government fails, invent a fictitious act of aggression, lie to the Congress, bomb South Vietnam to hell, and send in thousands of American boys to die for nothing. - years later, after 58K Americans and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians have been killed, write a book saying "sorry, it was a mistake". Yeah. It's really hard to draw the line here... If there had been a threat against the U.S., then yes, decisions would have to be made, and unavoidably mistakes would have been made, unfortunately. However, in Vietnam there never was a threat to the U.S., except in the "brilliant" minds of the "domino-theorists" who never bothered to try to understand the enemy and its motivations.
    - gojomo 17y ago
      It was a different era. Smart, diligent, well-meaning people, chosen through the best mechanisms of election and promotion available, did things we now understand were awful. It's easy to judge from here and now, but in a similar position of responsibility, are you sure you would not make equivalent mistakes either way -- too much aggression, or too much passivity? WW2, Hitler, Stalin were still the kinds of threats on people's minds -- where less than 20 years earlier failure to engage and deter early had resulted in the death of tens of millions. Communism loudly claimed it was the irresistible wave of the future and was showing the military power to make the claim credible. Soviet H-Bombs. A brutal and bloody stalemate in Korea. Tanks rolling into eastern Europe; Soviet satellites crashing into Wisconsin; nuclear missiles in Cuba! And if it hadn't been Kennedy at the helm -- it would have been Nixon! And if not LBJ -- it would have been Barry "lob a [nuke] into the bathroom of the Kremlin" Goldwater! We can chuckle at the "sorry" "mistakes" of the "domino-theorists" with as many "scare-quotes" as we like from our "comfortable" "decades-later" "safe" perspective, but the fact that there was a large consensus of smart, non-evil, "right-thinking" people behind most U.S. cold-war military actions should prompt a little humility in passing judgment. Finally, peace requires some measure of forgiveness. To imply there's still some score to settle 40 years later -- some punishment McNamara (if he were alive) and peers still deserve -- is the attitude behind never-ending war and strife.
- 100k 17y ago
  You should watch Fog of War if you haven't. It is an unflinching look at the man and what he did (with a big impact because of the camera that Errol Morris to get direct on shots of interviews). McNamara tried to systematize warfare like a factory. He played a high stakes game that ended up killing millions of people. He thought he could control the monster. He was wrong and it spiraled out of control. The movie takes an honest look at his life and it's something we have to understand if we want to avoid repeating his mistakes. Which we apparently haven't since we're stuck in two wars right now.
  - awi 17y ago
    Fog of War is one of my favorite documentaries, but McNamara is not honest about two key incidents - the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. In the movie McNamara claims he was "I was trying to help him (JFK) keep us out of war." actually he was pushing for bombing the Soviet missile site in Cuba since the third day. This is documented by recordings of meetings with JFK. About the Gulf of Tonkin incident McNamara claims that he and Johnson didn't believe the U.S. destroyer Maddox had been attacked, even though the crew sent messages that the attack they had reported was a not an attack after all. I learned this today [1] and it puts McNamara in a different light, although the lessons in the movie are still very valid. [1] The lies of The Fog of War (http://www.slate.com/id/2092916/ http://www.slate.com/id/2092916/), linked to by TFA
puzzle-out 17y ago
If experience is the name we give to our mistakes, McNamara had lots of experience.

TriinT 17y ago

Chomsky on McNamara (1995): http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare01.htm http://www.chomsky.info/books/warfare01.htm Chomsky is rather ferociously critical of McNamara, as expected.

tomjen 17y ago

May he rot and burn in hell, and may all the world forget he ever lived.

noonespecial 17y ago
We went to Iraq, didn't we? I'd say we forgot him straightaway.
- TriinT 17y ago
  Good point. Only fools fall into the same trap twice. Millions of Americans served in Vietnam. I think the veterans will never forget nor forgive McNamara. He shall be remembered as the architect of one of the greatest crimes in History.
  - wlievens 17y ago
    > Good point. Only fools fall into the same trap twice Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me ... you can't get fooled again

joeycfan 17y ago

Ho Chi Minh is responsible for the Vietnam catastrophe. He would have seen the Vietnamese people go extinct before losing that war. And, like in North Korea, they run a big song and dance on how they have to reunify their country, but thats not it at all. It's Communism first. Have to reunify under Communism Until then, the hell with the country. The Vietnam war was a triumph of evil. The bad guys won, and lots of people here helped them.