You younger readers especially, just so you will know, read this. It is part of our "recent" history. -- A Onetime 'Whiz Kid' Brought Low by Vietnam

From The Wall Street Journal (complete article):

For Robert S. McNamara, the former secretary of defense who died Monday at the age of 93, life broke into two parts: before Vietnam and after.

Prior to landing at the Pentagon at age 44, Mr. McNamara was seen as the embodiment of mid-century managerial competence for helping bring about a U-turn at Ford Motor Co. When he was made president of the company, a headline extolled "Ford's Fastest Whiz Kid." Weeks later, he was summoned to Washington by incoming President John F. Kennedy, a Merlin at the new Camelot.

But after Vietnam split the nation in the late 1960s, Mr. McNamara spent the rest of his life caught between the two eras, approaching problems with technocratic zeal while harried by demands that he apologize or be made to pay for helping escalate what demonstrators called "McNamara's War." The man President Lyndon Johnson once called "the smartest man I ever saw" was harried by epithets like "baby burner" and "murderer."

His silence for decades after the war was taken as yet more evidence of a habitual arrogance. When he brought his talents to bear as head of another giant organization, the World Bank, many complained that his approach to eliminating poverty made things worse by shackling developing nations to insurmountable debt.

During the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was publicly upbeat and maintained for decades a sphinx-like silence about his tenure at the Pentagon. When he finally did open up, in his 1995 memoir "In Retrospect," it was not so much to apologize as to explain.

"[W]e were wrong, terribly wrong," he wrote. "We owe it to future generations to explain why."

Mr. McNamara had honed his management skills by directing bombers in World War II and later at Ford, where he rose to become the first president who wasn't a member of the Ford family. He was widely credited with establishing central controls over a sprawling military bureaucracy, and his recall of facts and statistics was legendary. Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater once called him "an IBM machine with legs."

But his genius lay in pursuing efficiencies rather than in questioning policy goals. Throughout his career, he harbored misgivings about military campaigns but failed to negotiate changes that would address them. It was perhaps a businessman's habit of seeking immediate fixes to problems.

"I see my position as being that of a leader, not a judge," he said when he came to Washington in 1961. "I'm here to originate, to stimulate new ideas and programs, and not just to adjudicate arguments."

Sometimes the business philosophy made for nifty policy-making. His insight that nuclear wars were unwinnable led to a new U.S. doctrine of limited "flexible response," superseding all-out "massive retaliation." And it is Mr. McNamara who signed off on a secret swap in which the U.S. removed its nuclear-tipped Jupiter missiles from Turkey in exchange for the USSR removing missiles from Cuba.

But business acumen didn't always translate smoothly into questions of war and peace. Soon after taking office, it became clear the "missile gap" with the Soviet Union that the new president had campaigned on was a fiction. Yet he undertook the modernization and expansion of U.S. nuclear weapons that President Kennedy's campaign had promised. Similarly, having inherited plans for the invasion of Cuba from the Eisenhower administration, he signed off on the military's role in the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961.

On both the nuclear issue and the Bay of Pigs, Mr. McNamara expressed serious reservations about whether victory was possible. Yet in all cases he continued to toe in public the administration line and to find practical solutions.

In "The Best and the Brightest," David Halberstam wrote "[H]e did not serve himself nor the country well; he was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool."

Behind the slicked-back hair and steel-rimmed glasses lurked an agile mind, one well-aware of subtleties and doubts accompanying U.S. actions in Southeast Asia. As early as 1965, he later said, he saw little chance of an armed victory and urged President Johnson to approve a bombing pause to encourage the North Vietnamese to make peace. Many suspect his dovishness -- less apparent to those outside the administration -- was the reason he lost the president's faith. In his memoir he wrote, "I do not know to this day whether I quit or was fired."

Whether he jumped or was pushed, Mr. McNamara moved at President Johnson's behest to the presidency of the World Bank. In 12 years at the helm, he initiated numerous new programs and switched the focus from building industries in economies shattered by World War II to fighting poverty through rural development, such as large-scale water projects. Loans grew from $1 billion to $11.5 billion, adjusted for inflation.

Some have suggested that such charitable intentions were meant as a kind of atonement for Vietnam. Whatever the motive, Mr. McNamara believed passionately in the work, former associates say.

"He'd show up at annual meetings at the World Bank and bring himself nearly to tears by giving speeches on absolute poverty and failure of world to resolve it," says Sebastian Mallaby, now a researcher with the Council on Foreign Relations. "He got the expansion [of World Bank lending] and the ambitious reach he wanted, but he didn't deliver a great leap forward against poverty."
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And from The New York Times.