Word: vietnams
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...didn't apologize [for his Vietnam mistakes], but he did certainly say a number of times in personal conversations and in public that he made mistakes, and he wanted others to avoid those mistakes," Nye said. On a post to his blog on the Huffington Post, Nye wrote that "the lives of leaders are more complicated than I thought when I was an assistant professor," and that while part of him will never forgive McNamara for the consequences of his mistakes in Vietnam, McNamara has also earned his respect by trying "to come to terms with his actions...
...problem-solving was established long before he became the secretary of defense. After studying economics, mathematics, and philosophy at Berkeley, he earned his MBA at Harvard, where he explored systems analysis and the statistical techniques that he would later rely on in restructuring the Pentagon and managing the Vietnam War effort...
...Daniel Ellsberg '52, the government insider who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971 and exposed the knowledge that top officials had believed early on that the Vietnam War could not be won, had mixed feelings about McNamara's career...
...think his overall role is considerably misunderstood," Ellsberg said. "Certainly he did have great influence on the bombing of North Vietnam, which was tragic and criminal...it's fair to say we were all participants in war crimes. I was a minor one, McNamara was a major one, as well as Johnson...
...Nobody was more important than McNamara, other than [President] Johnson, in getting us into Vietnam. But no official worked more effectively inside to limit and eventually try to end the war than McNamara," Ellsberg said. But McNamara could have even been more effective if his concerns were aired publicly, Ellsberg added, comparing McNamara's role in Vietnam to that of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in the recent Iraq...