Robert S. McNamara Is Dead at 93, His War Finally Over

Robert Strange McNamara died Monday morning at 93 at the end of an incredible arc of a life: at 44, he was president of Ford when heading a car company meant something. He was chosen by President Kennedy to head the Pentagon as part of his New Frontier brain trust, and later, he fought world poverty as president of the World Bank.

As defense secretary he helped design a more efficient nuclear war-fighting strategy – and years later he campaigned tirelessly for total nuclear disarmament, calling U.S. nuclear weapons policy "immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous.''

To his six-year tenure at defense, he brought his trademark slicked-back hair, jutting chin and wire-rim glasses – and the love of systems analysis he had honed at Harvard business school and at Ford.

His dogged effort to win in Vietnam with superior firepower and other high-tech gizmos – he once tried to monitor the movements of Viet Cong guerrillas by hanging urine sensors in trees -- ironically spurred development of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine by demonstrating what NOT to do.

McNamara was admired and reviled.

"I won't trust a death announcement – I'm going to want to see his body,'' growled a veteran of two combat tours in Vietnam.

McNamara came from Ford to the Pentagon convinced that war and the pursuit of battlefield victory could be precisely analyzed, its variables (manpower, training, morale, weapons, tactics, terrain) fastidiously measured and adjusted for success. Just like the production of Fairlanes and Country Squire station wagons.

In visits to the battlefields that began in 1962, he attempted to do just that. He urged Kennedy and then President Johnson to commit more and more troops. He approved battle plans for set-piece conventional battles.

The Viet Cong fought back with classic hit-and-run attacks. McNamara sent in more troops who chased the guerrillas in a deadly game of whack-a-mole. The Viet Cong treasured local Vietnamese loyalties.

McNamara measured the number of enemy dead in the often-inflated "body counts.'' The heart-breaking effect is nicely detailed, among others, in Neil Sheehan's classic study, "A Bright Shining Lie."

As the war worsened and American battle casualties rose, McNamara was heartened. He claimed to be proud of the derisive term used by antiwar protesters, "McNamara's War.''

"Every quantitative measurement we have,'' he once famously argued, "shows we're winning.''

It was true, as Army Col. Harry Summers Jr. once remarked to a North Vietnamese officer long after the war was lost, that U.S. forces were never defeated in battle.

"That may be so, but it is also irrelevant,'' the officer replied, as Summers noted in his seminal work, "On Strategy."

Although McNamara published his memoir in 1995 ( "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam"), his explanations of his tragic failures in Vietnam seemed flat and unconvincing.

"We lacked experience,'' he wrote in what I took as a warning against the political hubris he exemplified. "We misjudged.''