Word: mcnamaras
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...election, John Kennedy mused that he wished he could make Bundy his Secretary of State, but he was "too young." Instead he became National Security Adviser, transforming the job into the powerful fiefdom it has been ever since. It was a heady time as Bundy, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and others exuberantly conceived limited-war options and counterinsurgency theories. Their intellectual firepower dazzled much of Washington, though Sam Rayburn did grumble to an awed Lyndon Johnson, "I'd feel a whole lot better about them if one of them had just run for sheriff once...
According to Peggy McNamara, spokesperson for HUPD, the students' description has been forwarded to the officers patrolling the Yard...
Hendrickson's churning account begins with an anonymous man's attempt to throw McNamara overboard during a ferry ride to Martha's Vineyard in 1972. Many of Hendrickson's scenes and anecdotes first appeared in the Washington Post in the mid-'80s. Here the journalist looks further into McNamara's brilliant careers at the Harvard Business School and the Ford Motor Co. The record reveals a top-of-the-line number cruncher steeped in the values of corporate loyalty. But as Secretary of Defense, his mistakes cost lives, not shareholder dividends. And yet his responsibilities required a level of abstraction...
Paul Hendrickson's The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (Knopf; 427 pages; $30) portrays the chief operating officer of the Vietnam buildup as a "tragically split man." Central to this view are McNamara's unsatisfactory answers to questions that have dogged him since he left the Pentagon on Feb. 19, 1968: Why did he choose to remain in office more than two years after he was telling colleagues the war was futile? And why did he continue to rationalize publicly a conflict he privately did not believe...
Attempts to overdramatize McNamara and his times are unnecessary. Shattering events speak for themselves, as the witness literature of the 20th century reminds us again and again. But even though The Living and the Dead fails to levitate McNamara and his Pentagon, it touches a heavy truth: Americans did not have to die in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the war, and today the region is overrun by venture capitalists...