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Robert McNamara, R.I.P.July 07, 2009 Robert McNamara was high on my list of villains when I was an antiwar activist, and for many years after the war ended I predictably frothed at the mouth when his name was mentioned. But then I saw Errol Morris's film The Fog of War not long after it came out in 2004. I won't say the film -- which is subtitled "Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara" -- changed my opinion of what the man had done, but it sure deepened my understanding of both McNamara and the rarefied upper echelons of business and politics in which he moved. Against my will I emerged with a serious respect for the guy. He was one of the very few from that era who really did wrestle with the morality of the war. He came to understand that U.S. involvement in Vietnam was a huge mistake not just because the U.S. lost (which still seems to be the prevalent conviction in the halls of Congress, not to mention in the country at large) but because the assumptions underlying that involvement were, to put it mildly, flawed. To question all the truths you've held to be self-evident all your life -- the ones that are taken for granted by most of the people around you -- takes courage for anyone. But for someone like Robert McNamara, whose adherence to those flawed truths helped cause vast death, suffering, and destruction in the world . . . ? Stiff-upper-lip denial would be so much easier, at least on the surface, even if you had to reinforce it with alcohol or medication. The pressing question, of course, is why he, his colleagues, his successors, and all the rest of us have such a hard time identifying those deeply flawed but "self-evident" truths before they get us in big trouble. McNamara asked himself that, and he found no easy answers.
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