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In the late '80s (if memory serves me) McNamara visited Amherst College for the first time since 1967, when the College's Trustees unwisely decided to award him an honorary degree, and the graduating class turned its collective back as he received it. As a fairly green assistant professor, I attended dinner with him after he spoke -- his public talk was about the lessons of Vietnam. Dinner conversation turned to the subject of Nicaragua, and the Reagan administration's domino like argument that communism was knocking at the door of our southern border. I asked McNamara what he thought of the situation. His answer revealed that he had never really abandoned his cold geopolitical calculations. He said, to paraphrase, that we should go to the Soviets (the Union still existed then) and say to them that we would stop funding the resistance in Afghanistan if they would stop funding the Nicaraguan government! In other words, the old bipolar world view, as though the Nicaraguans and the Afghans were mere pawns in a geopolitical world.
The best and the brightest indeed. Lind is right on one point, though. Bundy and Rostow were worse. He wrong overall, though. No one was more vilified than LBJ for his stubborn and hideous expansion of that conflict, not even Nixon, who, with Kissinger, was the worst of a bad lot of political leaders, Kennedy included.
