07-06-2009, 07:02 AM
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#1 (permalink)
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Her Jay
Location: Ontario for now....
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Robert McNamara 1916-2009
Mr. McNamara passed away this morning at the age of 93, he was the longest-serving U.S. Secretary of Defense. I must say I had a great deal of respect for the man, he was one of the few people who admitted he made mistakes and seemed to be generally bothered by them all these years, RIP Mr. Secretary.
Quote:
Agence France Presse picked up this bulletin from the Washington Post, which is reporting that Robert McNamara, who served as defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was one of the top architects of the U.S. war in Vietnam, died Monday. He was 93.
The deeply controversial McNamara, who served as head of the World Bank after stepping down from his Pentagon post at the height of the Vietnam war, died at home in his sleep, the daily reported.
He also had a brief but storied career as an executive at Ford, where as one of the automaker’s “Whiz Kids” he rose rapidly through the ranks, in 1960 becoming its first president outside the Ford family.
Reuters has a fuller obituary of the longest-serving U.S. Secretary of Defense, here, from which we taken a few more details, below:
In 1971, the classified and highly sensitive Pentagon Papers, an official record of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, were leaked to The New York Times.
In “McNamara: His Ordeal in the Pentagon,” Henry Trewhitt wrote that Mr. McNamara ordered the study to provide material that might help future generations avoid the mistakes made in Vietnam by intelligent, well-intentioned men like himself.
“When its contents broke in the press, however, his pleasure at seeing the record clarified was badly diminished by his shock that the two administrations (Kennedy and Johnson) had been deceitful about escalating the war,” Mr. Trewhitt wrote.
Mr. McNamara was quoted as saying: “My God, does anyone think I would have commissioned this if reasonable men could conclude that it shows me to be a liar?”
Robert Strange McNamara was born in San Francisco June 9, 1916, to Robert James McNamara, a wholesale shoe salesman, and the former Clara Nell Strange, both of British ancestry.
Mr. McNamara married Margaret Craig, a fellow student at the University of California, who died of cancer just before he left the World Bank. They had a son and a daughter.
And in 2004, at age 88, he married his Italian-born sweetheart, Diana Masieri Byfield in Assisi, Italy.
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Absence makes the heart grow fonder
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