Report: Robert McNamara dies, 93

The Washington Post reports that Robert S. McNamara, Vietnam War architect as Defense Secretary to Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and later World Bank president, has died at 93. The Associated Press adds that McNamara was in failing health for some time, and his wife says he died in his sleep in Washington early in this morning.

I sat down next to McNamara at an event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace many years ago. I didn’t even know it was him! Green behind the ears and new to Washington, it wasn’t uncommon to see older gentlemen seated at public events on nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, and I turned my attention to something else. Moments later, a more grizzled veteran of the nuclear nonproliferation field sidled up and said, “Hello Mr. McNamara” and chatted with him before the event began.

Late in his life he became very interested in the abolition of nuclear weapons, and spoke fiercely on the subject from the audience at the event I attended. Here’s a clip from Errol Morris’s excellent documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara which featured McNamara’s thinking on the US role in the world, especially in military terms.

I think the film is better than any obituary that anyone would ever write. McNamara in his own words expresses his regrets and what he thinks policymakers need to do when deciding about America’s path in the world. Particularly interesting were his insights on nuclear weapons, and why they needed to be abolished once and for all. As a statistician, the consequences of nuclear weapons use frightened him so much given the probability that we will only ever use them once. There will be nobody left alive to get nuclear war right. Whatever mistakes and war crimes he might have been a party to in the Vietnam era, I think his strong message on nuclear abolition was a fitting cap to a storied career.