Robert S. McNamara dies at 93; former Defense secretary was architect of Vietnam War

McNamara was the top policymaker who oversaw the buildup of U.S. forces in Vietnam. He later called the decisions he made in that war wrong.

By Stephen Braun
LA Times
3:20 PM PDT, July 6, 2009

Driven, cerebral and pugnacious, Robert S. McNamara was the preeminent policymaker behind the massive buildup of American forces in Vietnam between 1964 and 1968. As Defense secretary for two administrations, he wielded blizzards of facts and figures to press the case for deploying military advisors and then ground troops to counter the advance of Communist forces in North Vietnam and Viet Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam.

By the time he left office in 1968, however, what had begun as a "limited war" involved 535,000 U.S. servicemen, of whom nearly 30,000 had died. The casualties would mushroom to 58,000 Americans and 3 million Vietnamese over a decade of conflict.

McNamara, 93, who died at his home in Washington today after a period of ill health, came to harbor regrets about his role as the architect of the war's deadly escalation, but he kept his doubts private for nearly three decades before finally going public.

In a 1995 memoir and later in the 2004 Oscar-winning documentary "The Fog of War," he offered a carefully parsed reassessment of his wartime decisions that mollified some critics and infuriated others.

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