Ex-Defense secretary Robert McNamara dies at 93

WASHINGTON -- Robert McNamara had excelled at everything: Eagle Scout, young Harvard professor, corporate "whiz kid" at Ford. As one of the longest-serving and most influential Defense secretaries, however, he found himself consumed by the Vietnam War and eventually vilified as its architect.

At age 93 and in failing health, he died at 5:30 a.m. Monday at his home here, his wife, Diana, told the Associated Press.

He was second only to Donald Rumsfeld as the longest-serving Defense secretary, and for 13 years afterward, he served as president of the World Bank.

"In Vietnam, he was the architect of one of America's greatest tragedies," says Richard Immerman, a historian at Temple University in Philadelphia and a former intelligence official in the George W. Bush administration. "He will always be associated with the futile effort to apply 'systems analyses' to human behavior."

McNamara was famous for his devotion to qualitative analysis and his efforts to impose business practices on the sprawling Pentagon. He was easy to caricature with his trademark rimless glasses and dark, slicked-back hair.

He became "a tortured man" for his role in Vietnam, says defense analyst Loren Thompson, who studied McNamara's record for his doctoral dissertation at Georgetown University. Critics including anti-war Sen. Wayne Morse, D-Ore., dubbed the Vietnam conflict "McNamara's War."

In a best-selling memoir published in 1995, McNamara wrote that he had misgivings about the Vietnam conflict as early as 1967, though he continued to prosecute the war even as U.S. and Vietnamese casualties mounted.

The mea culpa chronicled in In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam was hammered as too little, too late by anti-war activists and editorial writers, including in a scathing editorial in The New York Times.

He lived quietly in Washington for decades, maintaining a downtown office as recently as 2006 and keeping a listed home telephone number. He got on the phone when a USA TODAY reporter called in 2006 for a story written when Rumsfeld, the architect of an unpopular war in Iraq, was about to surpass him as the nation's longest-serving Pentagon chief.

"I thought he was the longest" already, McNamara said, chuckling and seemingly unconcerned about losing the record. President Kennedy appointed him in 196, and he continued into the Lyndon Johnson administration. Rumsfeld's service was divided between the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Bush.

"In his case, the long time is desirable because he's learned in the first term some things that he applied in the second," McNamara said. "In mine, you can make your own judgment."

In comments that he did not want made public at the time, McNamara said of Rumsfeld, "I think he's doing a good job, if you set aside the Iraq war. I personally am very much opposed to the Iraq war," though he said he had decided against expressing his reservations in public.

He waved off a question asking him to compare the Vietnam and Iraq wars. "I'm 90 years old now," he replied.

Robert Strange McNamara— his middle name was his mother's maiden name — was born in the San Francisco Bay Area on June 9, 1916. He later said his first memory was of the celebration marking the end of World War I in 1918. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of California-Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard. He served with the Army Air Forces during World War II.

He joined Ford as an executive, briefly becoming the company's first president from outside the Ford family in 1960. Kennedy soon appointed him to head the Pentagon, a post he held for seven years. During that time, U.S. troop levels swelled, as did protests against the war — including by his son, Craig, then a student at Stanford.

"I don't think there's a man in government as valuable as McNamara," Johnson said in 1964 on Oval Office tapes available at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. "He just gives you the answers, and he gives you cooperation, and he's a can-do fellow."

Four years later, Johnson would push McNamara from his Pentagon job after he counseled an end to the war.

"Robert McNamara was the first Pentagon leader who tried to impose an analytical framework on the organization of people and money," says Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a think tank that focuses on military issues. He "faltered when he tried to apply management concepts to a conflict that was alien to his experience. ... The real tragedy of McNamara's tenure at the Pentagon wasn't that he made a mistake, but that when he realized it, he couldn't get the president to accept that."