Vietnam war architect Robert McNamara dies

Robert McNamara, who as Secretary of Defence under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson was one of the chief architects of the Vietnam war, has died in his sleep, aged 93.

One of the first men to bring modern business thinking into the boardrooms of America, it was this same technocratic approach which foundered in the paddy fields and jungles of Vietnam.

McNamara served as a Far East analyst with the American Air Force during World War Two, and, along with his wife, survived a bout of polio shortly after the conflict finished. It was the escalating cost of her medical bills that made him accept a job with Ford, the then-struggling car giant.

There, he became part of a group known as the 'Whiz Kids', and quickly moved up the company, implementing safety measures like the seat belt and a steering wheel which wouldn't impale the driver during a crash. In 1960, he became the first president of the company from outside the Ford family.

Soon after, he was headhunted by John F Kennedy, and appointed Secretary of Defence in 1961. In that role, McNamara reorganised America's military bureaucracy, campaigned for the country to stop the escalation of the arms race with the USSR by scaling down its nuclear defence programme, and was one of the men who defused the Cuban Missile Crisis.

McNamara was a phenomenally capable technocrat. His most enduring legacy, however, was the number of troops he sent to Vietnam. At the start of his stint there were merely 500 American fighters helping the French in an obscure foreign war. By the end, now under the Lyndon B Johnson presidency, there were over half a million.

What is commonly held to be McNamara's great mistake was his faith in the charts, statistics, technology and organisation that had taken him to such a high level of public service. They told him America had the military capability to win the war, while the reality on the ground turned out to be much trickier. McNamara was vilified for his 1962 assertion that "every quantitative measurement we have shows we're winning this war".

Ever dispassionate, and a sleek, noticeable presence with his rimless spectacles and combed back hair, McNamara had many critics. One said that he was "a prisoner of his own background... unable, as indeed was the country which sponsored him, to adapt his values and his terms to Vietnamese realities", and a "fool" who ended up "becoming part of a vast unwitting and elaborate charade, the institutionalising and legitimising of a hopeless lie."

Such was his unpopularity that during a ferry trip to Martha's Vineyard in 1972 an anti-war protester tried to throw him into the sea. On another occasion, while visiting Harvard, McNamara was surrounded by 800 students, all shouting 'murderer'. His son, a student at Stanford, was seen to protest against the war his father was running.

Privately, McNamara had his doubts about Vietnam, and as the conflict deteriorated, he ended his time as Secretary of Defence publicly questioning America's mission. It was this scepticism that led him to fall out with LBJ, and take up a post as president of the World Bank. While there, he was labelled "the conscience of the West" after he shifted the organisation's emphasis onto development for poorer nations, instigating a fund to help prevent river blindness.

As he confessed in his memoirs, and discussed with documentary-maker Errol Morris in the 2003 Oscar-winning film The Fog of War: Eleven lessons from the life of Robert S McNamara, it was the decisions he took in Vietnam that defined his public standing. He vehemently denied that his good works at the World Bank were his way of atoning for the errors of the war.

WHAT THEY ARE SAYING

Michael Tomasky in the Guardian: "Is it possible to think that someone was probably a war criminal and yet also is in some regards a sympathetic or at least complex figure? McNamara did show some public remorse for his actions and was pretty clearly tortured on some level in his later years. I wouldn't put him in Kissinger's class, quite. Vietnam had many fathers, and life is complicated."

Will Bunch in the Huffington Post: "The life of Robert McNamara was a personal tragedy, but it was also an American tragedy, our tragedy - because even after McNamara spelled out everything that went so horribly wrong in Vietnam, he lived long enough to see a new generation of the self-appointed 'best and brightest' in Washington pay absolutely no mind to the lessons of our recent past."

Obituary in the Times: "He could seem distant and aloof, even ruthless, but he was also an idealist who, some believed, threw himself with passion into working for the world's poor as a personal atonement for his part in the Vietnam war."