The news comes today that Robert McNamara, famous as Kennedy and then Johnson¡Çs Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, has died at the age of 93.

Those of us who are of a certain age remember him well, as one of those responsible for what I have since termed ¡Èthe first act¡É (that is, the poorly run, poorly conceived, Johnson portion) of the Vietnam War. McNamara lived to later repudiate the war and his part in it, in a series of mea culpas that made the once-reviled man somewhat more popular among the antiwar Left, at least as an object lesson in repentance.

McNamara¡Çs public life was defined by his failure on the war. But if he¡Çd never been connected with Vietnam, he probably would have been considered a resounding success. He certainly was effective in his early years as a businessman with Ford; would that he¡Çd stayed there. But Kennedy promoted him to the Cabinet (he was also offered Treasury—a post for which he¡Çd have been far better suited—but unfortunately he turned that down) and he was kept on as Johnson¡Çs Defense Secretary after the Kennedy assassination.

McNamara had served in World War II and done statistical analysis of bombers¡Ç effectiveness, but his major expertise was in business. He used that business acumen to implement general changes in defense policy and weapons and organizational matters in the armed forces. But, faced with Vietnam, he met his match (or rather, mismatch), coming up with the idea of a deadly and misguided numbers game:

McNamara put in place a statistical strategy for victory in Vietnam. He concluded that there were a limited number of Viet Cong fighters in Vietnam and that a war of attrition would destroy them. He applied metrics (body counts) to determine how close to success his plan was.

I¡Çm no military expert, and hindsight is 20/20, but on the face of it this makes no sense, when faced with a tenacious enemy motivated by an extreme and deeply held ideology and the support and largesse of Communist China. Quite early on, McNamara became convinced that the war was unwinnable, and he left office in 1968. Despite the fact that under Westmoreland¡Çs successor General Creighton Abrams, the ¡Èsecond act¡É of Vietnam (see this and this) reversed some of McNamara¡Çs errors, the attitude of the public and especially the press was set: it was McNamara¡Çs war, and it could not be won.

The career of McNamara is a cautionary tale, wherein a man of great achievement and intelligence applied that brainpower to an area he did not sufficiently understand, and to which he was temperamentally unsuited. He spent much of the rest of his life trying to make up for it. I hope he¡Çs found his peace at last.