Robert McNamara
Robert McNamara
Robert Strange McNamarawas an American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, during which time he played a major role in escalating the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Following that, he served as President of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth9 June 1916
CitySan Francisco, CA
CountryUnited States of America
General, you don't have a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm!
That's one of the major lessons: no president should ever take this nation to war without full public debate in the Congress and/or in the public.
I don't object to its being called "McNamara's war." I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.
What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed.
If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals.
All those involved in the firebombing of Tokyo .. were war criminals interviews recorded in the movie The Fog of War.. the firebombing of Tokyo occurred before the atom bombs.. 100,000 civilians died in one night from American bombs.. 500,000 altogether over several days say some.
The greatest contribution Vietnam is making-right or wrong is beside the point-is that it is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.
At my age, 85, I'm at age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions. My rule has been try to learn, try to understand what happened. Develop the lessons and pass them on.
Short of nuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.
To this day we seem to act in the world as though we know what's right for everybody.
I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.
She was one of the greatest citizens of our country of the past half-century.
We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo - men, women and children. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?