Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara Dies - ABC News

Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara is dead at 93

His first great sin was that he, unlike his colleagues, was smart enough to know better. He did not have enough of a conscience to know that many American actions in Southeast Asia were morally wrong, but he had enough of a brain to know that the conflict was unwinnable, yet he advised LBJ to send American soldiers to fight there anyway. He also went along with the bombing although he knew it had no chance to create a victory. All of this he admitted later.

His second great sin was that he could have done something but didn't. He was influential and trusted. He called the shots.

Robert McNamara may have created the America we know today. McNamara was, in essence, the architect of what we now look back on as "the sixties" - the protests, the cultural revolution, an entire generation disillusioned and mistrustful of a governmental system they had believed in when they were children, a system that their forebears had toiled and sacrificed to create, a system which once shone so brightly that it restored light to a world darkened in the shadow of the Axis.

Perhaps that loss of faith was a good thing in the long run, because people should have a healthy skepticism about their government, perhaps even a deeply cynical mistrust, and Americans had been kind of a naive lot before McNamara came along. But America's self-awareness was achieved at a very high price. In addition to your uncles and fathers, some four million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians died in McNamara's war - for no reason.

And he knew better.

That is his legacy.