McNamara was a very smart man. At some point he realized what a disaster the war had been, yet he continued to implement a policy he became vehemently opposed to. He resigned far too late. He should have resigned the moment he lost faith in the cause and then he should have oppose it from the outside, but he had old fashioned ideas about "honor" and respect for authority when he could've saved many American and Vietnamese lives if he had acted courageously.

Two other culprits not so often mentioned in assigning blame for the war were: 1) the gullible, militaristic American people, their mainstream veterans organizations (American Legion, VFW, et al.); 2) the media, print and electronic, that by and large supported the war, though they are now falsely said by the right wing to have opposed it.

It's regrettable that these two are not so often identified as blameworthy, because they repeated their stupidity in supporting the "war" on terror by military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. As the old Bob Dylan song asks, "When will they ever learn?"

"Nobody takes seriously anymore the claim made by many radicals at the time that the Second Indochina War was merely an anti-colonial rebellion that had nothing to do with the wider Cold War. "

Nobody takes this fact seriously anymore? What nonsense. Virtually nobody thinks otherwise!

Except for overpaid Washington think tank wonks.

So people in the "antiwar left" blamed McNamara but not Johnson? Strange. I protested the war, and suppose I would be considered on the "left," though I consider myself a reasoning patriot, but I don't remember it that way.

Am sure those hundreds of thousands chanting, "Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" Actually meant to chant, "Hey, Hey, McNamara, you're the one who made the error."

The most important lesson of Vietnam is that our nation was led by fools - on the left and right - into a wasteful, costly and pointless war whose costs ultimately helped destroy the prosperity of the '50s and '60s.

Sound familiar?

Decades later we have to ask ourselves what was the point of the whole damn thing if we didn't even learn this most basic lesson.

Never listen to Republicans or so-called "pro-defense Democrats" - they're all a bunch of shortsighted idiots who know nothing about the reality of war or its true costs.

The doves, peaceniks and anit-war protesters were 100% right - and nobody fucking listened to them until the damage was irreversible.

American deserves its decline.

Thank you Prof Lind for such a thoughtful assessment. I would agree with much of what you've said. It does seem odd (especially to someone like me who was born after the trauma of the war) that such hatred is reserved for McNamara. For all his faults and catastrophic mistakes he is the only person from that period that seemed to express any remorse. Where is the hatred for Nixon or Kissenger? They are the ones who kept the war going long after it was abundantly clear to everyone that the war was lost. How many more lives were wasted on a policy of "peace with honor"?

The other major takeaway from McNamara's life is one that I think most people miss. It is that war is, at bottom, a human affair. The prosecution of war is not an operations research problem amenable to statistical techniques.

The hard, cold truth is that Americans do not rule themselves. America is a corporate-military oligarchy that imposes its will on the world through force and does not even meet the most basic needs of its citizens (ie healthcare).

The world would be a better place if America had lost the cold war and communism had prevailed worldwide.

At least the communists provide basic healthcare to everyone.

The so-called "Free" Market is nothing but economic slavery for 99% of the planet.

The problem with McNamara is the problem with Speer, from a victor's point of view. McNamara was the mechanic, the clever man who did the job he was given. He was not innocent and not guilty, complicitous and yet not evil.

To try to blame or exonerate Robert McNamara is odd for a historian, because it asks us to remove him from his historical moment. Within his historical moment, he was a prisoner of his horizon of expectations and personal psychology. The moral and ethical questions that we throw at him may reflect back upon us, but they adhere to the man himself only so far as he was capable of free choice.

McNamara's fault, such as it is, is in duty. Given his task, he took the task. The "hubris" that he applied to himself in interviews refers to the pride of believing that his genius and insight was greater than the world's. With the right organization, the greater logic, the purest insight, he thought that he could whip reality into obedience, and so his character comes into play in accepting and relishing the task that he should have rejected.

As for escalation, Mr. Lind is correct that the world of 1960 was caught in a tense equipoise of historical paralysis, and the actors involved would have needed to be other than themselves or other than their places to have defied it.

In his younger days, Lind wrote an execrable book on Vietnam. His current piece on McNamara shows improvement, but he falls off at the end. He denigrates the realist position by saying that the realists’ denigration of the strategic importance of Vietnam implies they would have written off Berlin. This is a straw man argument. The Kennans and Morgenthaus were explicitly Eurocentric and supported the Berlin airlift. Likewise, Lind’s comparison of Vietnam and Korea is flawed. The Korean war began with a massive North Korean military invasion of the South. As Al Loomis points out, the roots of America’s involvement in Vietnam began when we welshed on the 1954 Geneva accords mandating country-wide elections for Vietnam. In any case, the 1961 Sino-Soviet split made Vietnam strategically peripheral, a condition which did not apply in 1950 in Korea. Give Lind a gentleman’s “C” for this effort.