Thaindian News

Former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a key architect of the U.S. war in Vietnam under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, has died, aged 93.

Robert McNamara took a lead role in managing the US military commitment in Vietnam and was a member of Kennedy’s inner circle during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war.

During the war in Vietnam he oversaw the US military commitment as it grew from fewer than 1,000 advisers to more than half a million troops – he would later go on to say both administrations were “terribly wrong” to have pursued military action beyond 1963.

Born in San Francisco, McNamara studied economics at the University of California and earned a master’s degree in business from Harvard.

He was a staff officer in the Army Air Corps during World War II.

After the war, he joined the Ford Motor Company and became its president – the first person to lead the company from outside its founding family.

A month later, the newly elected Kennedy asked him to become secretary of defense, making him one of the “whiz kids” who joined the young president’s administration.

In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War, McNamara told filmmaker Errol Morris that the experience taught American policymakers to, “put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes.” But he added, “In the end, we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war.”