Word: war
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...McNamara waited 30 years before conceding in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, that he had waged the war in error. "My voice would have had no impact at all at that point," he told TIME when the book came out, explaining why he hadn't revealed his doubts when he stepped down as Secretary of Defense in early 1968. "My voice would have had no impact whatsoever." (See pictures of the China-Vietnam border...
...baby boomers who came of age during the Vietnam War, McNamara's actions at the time spoke louder than the words of contrition he would utter three decades after 58,000 Americans had lost their lives in Vietnam. In their youth, they referred to the Vietnam conflict as "McNamara's war." Tens of thousands of them marched to protest against it in Washington, while thousands of young men burned their draft cards or fled to Canada to avoid the draft. One poured gasoline on himself outside McNamara's Pentagon window in 1965 and set himself ablaze, dying to protest...
...kind of "qualitative analysis" he had used to turn Ford around and which he believed would lead to a better and less costly military. But their approach didn't work so well during peacetime - McNamara spent a lot of time developing a "flexible response" strategy for nuclear war - and, combined with overly compliant military leaders during Vietnam, his team failed miserably...
...publication of the 1995 memoir revived the debate over his role in the war. McNamara admitted in his book that the U.S. government had never answered key questions that drove its war policy, such as whether the fall of Vietnam would lead to a communist Southeast Asia and if such an occurrence would really have posed a grave threat to the West. "It seems beyond understanding, incredible, that we did not force ourselves to confront such issues head-on," he wrote. He said he wanted to help prevent the country from making similar mistakes in the future and that...
...McNamara continued to wage his campaign to make amends for Vietnam through the end of his life, most notably in Errol Morris' Oscar-winning 2003 documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. And he was a vocal critic of the Bush Administration's war in Iraq. Still, there were those who found it hard to forget or forgive his handling of the war he helped lead. Inevitably, its failure is now his epitaph...