Monday, 06 July 2009

• Robert McNamara Dies at Age 93

  While the media are still in an utter frenzy over the death of Michael Jackson--his highly-publicized and highly-spectacularized funeral, with tickets being scalped for as much as $15000, is tomorrow--another important American figure has passed away in what has become a summer of great loss. Robert McNamara, in many ways the architect of America's involvement in Vietnam, died today at age 93.
  
  

  
  

  McNamara, right, with President Johnson.
  

  
  
  McNamara served as the Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, advising both men through the most controversial military campaign of the 20th Century. Villified not only by his peers but arguably by history itself, McNamara recounted his experiences and discoveries in Errol Morris' stunning documentary, The Fog of War.
  
  

  
  

  
  McNamara was also a successful businessman, bookending his career as Secretary of Defense with the presidencies of the Ford Motor Company in 1960 and the World Bank from 1968-1981.
  
  I don't know about you, but there's something terribly bizarre about the number of high-profile deaths occurring recently. It was ominous enough that Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died on the same day, but the deaths of Ed McMahon before and Billy Mays after have been powerful reminders of human frailty.
  
  It would be impossible to try to enumerate the ways in which Robert McNamara has affected our world. American policymakers are still trying to disentangle our country's reputation from the shadow of many of his strategies and decisions, especially in light of the many comparisons (warranted or otherwise) between the current Middle East conflicts and those in Southeast Asia.
  
  

  
  

  With President Kennedy.
  

  
  As for me, I'm curious to see how McNamara is remembered. The media coverage of Michael Jackson's death has seemingly been in poor taste; at the least, it's been incredibly disingenuous. It's hard to stomach the way journalists are mourning his passing when just a few years ago they profited--wildly, I may add--off of scandalizing and hounding him. In very different ways, Robert McNamara, too, has been subject to media and public scorn. As the figure held most responsible for not only the nature of America's involvement in Vietnam but the involvement itself, he was never truly forgiven for nor absolved of his complicity in the atrocities and losses of that conflict.
  
  

  
  

  
  Sorry for being a downer, Mancouch. But I, an American Studies major, am personally stunned by the death of Robert McNamara and wanted to share my thoughts on the passing of one of our nation's most controversial--significantly more controversial than MJ, I'm afraid--figures.
  
  
  

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