Good Riddance
Robert Strange McNamara, the man who took his success in producing the Ford Falcon all the way to the grotesque fiasco that was the Johnson Administration's pursuit of the Vietnam war has died. He lived far too long. I recall that some years ago, this sad, bitter man published a book about how he had been misled by those around him which caused the debacle that cost over 50,000 lives of good, young American men. My late father was still alive when this pathetic attempt at blame laying was made. My father who went to Vietnam as a civilian and ended up spending five years in captivity in the north. My father the career foreign service officer who went a war to direct pacification programs. I talked with my dad, perhaps too briefly, when McNamara came out with his self-serving revisionism. My father was there, in the room as it were, when those people McNamara was accusing of lying to him were telling him the truth about what was actually going on. And my father watched McNamara destroy their careers.
That's right. The son of a bitch was told precisely what was happening but it didn't fit with what he wanted to happen, with his bean-counting measures of success like "body counts." So he ruined the careers, possibly the lives as well (though good men can usually overcome such career destruction), of those he would later accuse of making him look bad.
I'm glad you're dead you bastard. A lot of better men than you never made it back.