RIP Robert Mcnamara: From Nuclear Weapons to Global Peace

Robert McNamara passed away on July 6th, 2009. He was Secretary of Defense under president John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968. The successful U.S. response to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis is largely credited to McNamara.

But he is perhaps even better known for his involvement in the Vietnam War, urging the administration to commit about 500,000 troops, believing that the numbers of Vietcong were limited and that the correct amount of U.S. soldiers eventually would outnumber them.

In the Cold War Robert McNamara not only was in charge of moving the U.S. into the nuclear arms race in the name of “mutual assured destructions” but also pushing nation-wide campaigns to justify the unjustifiable Vietnam War, those two being the key involvements which would haunt him for the rest of his life.

When he left the Pentagon and went to work at the World Bank in 1968 this seemed to many as an attempt to make up for the very destructive path he had left behind him.

But only in the Oscar-winning 2004 documentary “The Fog of War” by Errol Morris, his regrets were openly and ambiguously made accessible to the public. In the film, McNamara asked:”"What makes us omniscient?”, referring specifically to Vietnam but also to the world situation in general. “Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn’t have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better reexamine our reasoning.”

According to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post (a close friend of McNamara), it was this documentary and the many talks that McNamara had with students who had watched the movie, that finally led him into the process of finding peace with himself and his destructive past.

In his 2005 article “Apocalypse Soon” McNamara unequivocally spoke out against the immoral and hazardous use of nuclear weapons a a strategy of foreign policy.

Before he died, McNamara left a remarkably optimistic hope for the future in a final message to his wife, wishing for “others continuing to pursue the objectives which I have sought (very imperfectly at times) to move the world toward peace among people and nations and to accelerate economic and social progress for the least advantaged among us.”

Image via Wikipedia