robert mcnamara dies at 93

Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the "architect" of the Vietnam War, died this morning. He was 93.

Family members said McNamara died at his home in Northwest Washington. They did not give a cause of death.

McNamara was secretary of defense during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. In that capacity he directed a U.S. military buildup in Southeast Asia during the critical early years of a Vietnamese conflict that escalated into one of the most divisive and bitter wars in U.S. history.

When the war was over, 58,000 Americans were dead and the national social fabric had been torn asunder.He served as secretary of defense longer than anyone else, and in that role he was a key figure in such major crises as the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile confrontation with the Soviet Union. He changed the balance of nuclear forces in the world with the development of the multiple-warhead missile.

McNamara knew the war was unwinnable by the middle of 1965. And millions of tons of bombs and missiles indiscriminately rained down on North and South Vietnam and it became an open-ended commitment to a war of attrition between that realization and his resignation in 1967. After his resignation he refused to say a word about what he knew, and the war continued, for no good reason, until 1975.

He was a narrow-minded number-crunching company man, exactly the sort of amoral little functionary we should never, ever allow to make decisions of life and death. A better man, perhaps, than a cold-blooded Machiavellian like Kissinger, but just as destructive.

Mr. McNamara married Margaret Craig, a fellow student at the University of California, who died of cancer just before he left the World Bank. They had a son and a daughter.

And in 2004, at age 88, he married his Italian-born sweetheart, Diana Masieri Byfield in Assisi, Italy.

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