Robert McNamara dies

His death will become a retrospective on the Vietnam war. That is as it should be. He was an articulate spokesman for bad policy. Both those who supported the war and opposed it blamed him for the failure of the policy he articulated and they were both right.

McNamara thought he could modulate the warfare and thereby achieve an eventual peace agreement. By doing so he lost the impact of giving the communist a "hard knock" that many in the military thought was necessary. His modulation of the war made it longer and bloodier.

I don't think he ever understood that. Instead he evolved into a position the anti war critics had embraced, that the war was never winnable. In fact it was winnable, but he just did not want to follow a strategy that would win.

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