Vietnam. To anyone who lived through the Vietnam era, the wound has not healed, the pain lingers, and the bill is still being paid. And the chief villain in the horror story was, is and remains Robert McNamara. Eisenhower started us down the path with his popularization of the Domino Theory; JFK kicked it up a notch with the dispatch of over 10,000 "advisors"; and LBJ sealed the deal with the fabricated Tonkin Gulf incident and the commitment of over 500,000 American troops. But the evil genius behind the actions of JFK and LBJ was McNamara.
JFK considered McNamara the smartest man he ever met, and LBJ went so far as to offer him the VP slot for his 1964 reelection bid. Yet the "smartest man" refused to look at the evidence before his eyes, relying instead on the whiz kids around him to present carefully crafted data in support of the theories that enabled the policy disasters that devastated not only America's image, but its very essence.
Only in 1995....28 years after leaving the Defense Dept and 20 years after the war ended (for the US)...did he finally open his eyes and acknowledge how wrong he had been. The war was unwinnable, his analysis of the role of outside forces was misguided, etc, etc, etc. However, for 58,000 dead American soldiers (plus countless veterans and their families doomed to misery or worse from wounds seen and unseen), not to mention the casualties in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (1 million, 2 million, who will ever know), this was far too little and far too late.
Robert McNamara, secure on the list of most evil Americans of the 20th century, is dead. He is not to be mourned, but the lessons of his hubris must be remembered as a warning of what he wrought.
