Former US defense secretary Robert McNamara, seen here during a visit to Havana in 2007, has died

Former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, one of the leading architects of the Vietnam War, died in his sleep Monday. He was 93.

The former defense secretary famously wrote in 1964: “I don’t object to it being called McNamara’s War. I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.”

Chosen as one of “the best and the brightest” by President John Kennedy as he assembled his policy-making team, McNamara directed the escalation of the war against Vietnam between 1961 and 1968.

He left the cabinet in 1968 under pressure from President Lyndon Johnson, by which time he believed that the war could not be won, and criticized the US bombing of North Vietnam.

However, he kept quiet about his disillusionment until he published his memoirs in 1995 titled, “In Retrospect: The Tragedies and Lessons of Vietnam,” wherein he admitted that the war was a mistake.

“We were wrong, terribly wrong,” he said, adding “We owe it to future generations to explain why.”

However, author Carl Mollins notes in a review of McNamara’s book that while the former defense secretary did acknowledge that it was a US failure to recognize that “we do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our own image as we choose,” his conclusion of what was terribly wrong had mostly to do with military tactics and political strategy.

“Little is said about the morality of waging a Cold War battle based on public lies and private conspiracies. The errors, McNamara writes, were ‘not of values and intentions, but of judgment and capabilities,’” Mollins writes.

The war left more than three million Vietnamese and around 1.5 million Laotians and Cambodians dead. Casualties on the American side were 58,000.

McNamara first came to prominence as one of the “Whiz Kids” who had sold themselves as a package deal to corporate entities, ending up revitalizing Ford Motor Co. as its president.

After his role in the Vietnam War, he went on to become the president of the World Bank, retiring in 1981.

As president of the World Bank, McNamara brought in an antipoverty focus and vastly increased lending to developing countries.

Reuters reports that when he took over the independent United Nations affiliate in 1968, the bank was making only US$1 billion in annual loan commitments to Third World nations. When he left it in 1981, this figure had gone up to $11.5 billion.

McNamara was born in San Francisco in 1916. He graduated from the University of California in 1937 and obtained a masters degree from Harvard Business School, following which he joined the faculty in 1940.

After his retirement from the World Bank, McNamara maintained an office in Washington where he joined dozens of corporate boards, including the Washington Post. He was also a member of the Trilateral Commission which promoted cooperation between Europe, Japan and the United States, Reuters reports.

McNamara was married to Margaret Craig, a fellow student at the University of California, who died of cancer just before he left the World Bank. They had a son and a daughter.

In 2004, at 88, he married his Italian-born sweetheart, Diana Masieri Byfield in Assisi, Italy.

Source: Agencies, TN