When I was younger I thought that McNamara was evil and should be tried for war crimes.

When I got older and in a position of power and made a few mistakes (with the best of intentions) my attitude softened and now I am sympathetic. I understand how good people can do things that seem bizarre.

To be in power is to act and if you act you will make a mistake. The older I get the less judgmental I am.

I guess he could have resigned but then he would have been forgotten much like Palin will be. I know from bitter experience that what keeps people around (like Colin Powell, or McNamara) is the belief that you can change things and sometimes this is true and sometimes not, one thing is for certain though, and that is you will never change anything if you resign.

I wish I could muster the righteous anger that I see around me but the hypocrisy would be overwhelming. I am too aware of my frailties to cast stones. Hell, if it makes you feel good about yourselves throw stones at him, I presume that he is past caring at this point.

Cali64, if you change your quote slightly, then you have a very accurate characterization of Hitler:

In the view of many ... his achievements on the domestic front outweigh his failure ...

He still had the support of about 20-25% of the population shortly after the war. The bombing of the German cities knitted the people closer to their leadership... the NAZIs used a simple trick (I quote my grandmother who had lost everything in one night):"Hitler gave us real coffee after the bombings." She was still pissed about the bombings in general and about the Americans thirty years later. She was never a NAZI btw, and was always with one foot in a concentration camp (socialist and married to a half-jew).

...he captivated the people (and most of the world) with his style and charisma

You think there might be a reason why Roosevelt had such a hard time to get a war against Germany started?

Himmler was not only responsible for the Holocaust. He was Reichsführer SS, the top man of police, Gestapo and SS - the whole system of injustice and murder. There are more reasons for him to rot in hell than "just" the Holocaust.

Excuse me to go off toopic, but I wanted to explain that topic.

Was the idea to pull out of Vietnam the reason for Kennedy's assassination? I mean the war must have brought some profit to the weapon industry they'd have lost otherwise.

It is clear to me that Mr. Lind is attempting to redeem Robert McNamara's reputation by simultaneously pigeonholing misrepresenting history key historical facts and pigeonholing his critics.

Firstly, the relationship between North and South Vietnam- one country which had been split in two entirely at the behest of occupying powers and their puppet dictators- was not at all the same as that between North and South Korea- two countries which have historically been the seats of warring empires which occasionally intermingled through alternating periods of conquest. The people of South Korea generally did not welcome invasion by North Korea. Vietnam, on the contrary, was meant to be whole, and on a cultural level attempts to prevent its unification were contrary to the wishes- as expressed in well-documented polls of the time- of the citizens of both territories.

Second, Mr. Lind deeply misrepresents Vietnam as an exemplar of the domino theory. Temporarily putting aside the not-insignificant fact that a victoriously reunified Vietnam did NOT embark upon a campaign of conquest which transformed all of southeast Asia into a bastion of communism, the presence of North Vietnamese insurgents in South Vietnam is not proof of the domino theory. It IS proof that North Vietnam wanted unification, was willing to resort to military force to get it (as we were to opposed it), and used its cultural advantages to do so.

Sure, Vietnam accepted help from China and Russia. Why wouldn't they, when they were the countries offering North Vietnam help? But that again is not proof that Vietnam was ever intended as a staging point for world conquest justifying US intervention and the deaths of 2+ MILLION Vietnamese.

Mr. Lind clearly clings to the notion that an exhausted Vietnam was somehow held in check by US intervention, prevented from embarking on the conquest of Southeast Asia by our unsuccessful war. But why should we assume that to be the case? Surely, Russia and China could have simply used Vietnam as a staging area without bothering to rebuild it, or else spent a handful of years rebuilding (as Germany did between 1918 and 1939) and then used Vietnam as a partner in conquest. Yet after thirty years, Vietnam is less militaristic than capitalistic. There is no grand threat that I am aware of from Vietnam, putting Japan at risk of imminent bloodshed.

That reality brings us to Mr. Lind's third huge misrepresentation- his idea that liberals consider Vietnam a war crime because it had no geniune link to the larger cold war. No, our objection is simply this- it did not need to be fought. We could have gained the friendship of the Vietnamese government- and steered it toward a better version of the capitalistic society which it became anyway- if we had simply stopped supporting a legacy French-created puppet government and offered our full economic support to a unified government on neutral terms. Had we welcomed Ho Chi Min as a friend, there would have been no war, no 40,000 US dead, no 2+ million Vietnamese dead, and in all probability, today Vietnam would be no more communist than South Korea.

Mr. Lind also neglects to mention Robert McNamara's instrumental role in starting the Vietnam War- his insistence to Lyndon Johnson that the evidence of the attack on a US warship in the Gulf of Tomkin by North Vietnamese gunboats was ironclad. In fact, it never happened. That reality- combined with McNamara's own admission that he kept the war going long after it became apparent that it would not accomplish its goals- is what truly made McNamara worthy of the disgust of the men who died because of him.