RIP Robert McNamara

Former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has died at age 93.

Robert S. McNamara, perhaps the most influential defense secretary of the 20th century, who helped lead the nation into the maelstrom of Vietnam and spent the rest of his life wrestling with the war's moral consequences, died early Monday at his home in Washington, the Associated Press reported, citing his wife, Diana. He was 93, and according to the news agency, had been in failing health for some time.

Serving Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, Mr. McNamara oversaw hundreds of military missions, thousands of nuclear weapons and billions of dollars in military spending and foreign arms sales. He also enlarged the defense secretary's role, handling foreign diplomacy and the dispatch of troops to enforce civil rights in the South.

A complicated legacy, to say the least. McNamara was an unrivaled patriot and a strong supporter of civil rights; he also owned the Vietnam War, once saying he was "pleased to be identified with it," before changing his mind, profoundly and lastingly. He was haunted by the war for the rest of his life. He tried to make amends.

He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life.

In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war, confessing in a memoir that it was "wrong, terribly wrong." In return, he faced a firestorm of scorn.

...By then he wore the expression of a haunted man. He could be seen in the streets of Washington — stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind — walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.

He had spent decades thinking through the lessons of the war. The greatest of these was to know one's enemy — and to "empathize with him," as Mr. McNamara explained in Errol Morris's 2003 documentary, "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara."

"We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes," he said. The American failure in Vietnam, he said, was seeing the enemy through the prism of the cold war, as a domino that would topple the nations of Asia if it fell.

In the film, Mr. McNamara described the American firebombing of Japan's cities in World War II. He had played a supporting role in those attacks, running statistical analysis for Gen. Curtis E. LeMay of the Army's Air Forces.

"We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children," Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. "LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He — and I'd say I — were behaving as war criminals."

"What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?" he asked. He found the question impossible to answer.

A complicated man, from whose life there are lessons for all of us, I suspect. I strongly recommend The Fog of War, if you've not seen it.

RIP, Mr. McNamara.