Skip to main content

Robert S. McNamara, RIP

Image
By

He died today at 93. I've always been fascinated by him. A troubled soul, who it seemed was never really able to come to grips with his role in life, but tried to make up for it in his own, halting, self-serving and ineffectual way. Yet I can't help but view him with a lot of sympathy.

Clearly an astoundingly brilliant man, and clearly a product of the technocratic fetishism of the 50s. Driven, wound to the breaking point.

One must remember that other figures of that time--George McGovern comes to mind--did oppose the Vietnam War from the start, and deserve moral accolades far greater than that of McNamara. Yet not many others who were neck-deep in the conflict tried to deal with the lessons of Vietnam in any way. It's fair to say that he was devastated, haunted by his role in the war, and spent most of the rest of his life trying to atone for it, unlike say Nixon or Kissinger.

I also don't think he can be compared with Rumsfeld. One must remember that in the 60s, the memories of WWII were still fresh. Hitler's march across Europe was not the tired conservative platitude it is today. The USSR was not the broken industrial distopia we remember now, but rather the massed tanks of the Red Army, defeating Germany basically singlehanded. Vietnam was still doubtless a boneheaded war, but its stupidity does not even register compared to the utterly-batshit fever dream of Iraq.

See Kevin Drum for a similar take.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Setswana Grammar Manual

By
One of my few successes during my service here was formatting the Peace Corps South Africa grammar manual for Setswana, written mostly by Art Chambers, an SA16 volunteer.  For anyone wanting to learn Setswana, I reckon it's a pretty good primer, so I present it for free here .  If you think it sucks and you want to make changes, or you'd like to take a look at the raw TeX file, you can find it here .
6 comments
Read more

On Refusing to Vote for Bloomberg

By
Billionaire Mike Bloomberg is attempting to buy the Democratic nomination. With something like $400 million in personal spending so far, that much is clear — and it appears to be working at least somewhat well, as he is nearing second place in national polls. I would guess that he will quickly into diminishing returns, but on the other hand spending on this level is totally unprecedented. At this burn rate he could easily spend more than the entire 2016 presidential election cost both parties before the primary is over. I published a piece today outlining why I would not vote for Bloomberg against Trump (I would vote for Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Biden), even though I live in a swing state. This got a lot of "vote blue no matter who" people riled up . They scolded me and demanded that I pre-commit to voting for Bloomberg should he win the nomination. The argument as I understand it is to try to make it as likely as possible that whatever Democrat wins t...
4 comments
Read more