McNamara career haunted by U.S. role in Vietnam

By Charles Aldinger

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former Defence Secretary Robert McNamara died on Monday. He will be remembered most as the leading architect of America's involvement in the Vietnam War.

"His age just caught up with him," his wife Diana told Reuters. "He was not ill. He died peacefully in his sleep."

McNamara also forged brilliant careers in industry and international finance, but his painful legacy remains Vietnam.

More than anyone else except possibly President Lyndon Johnson, McNamara became to anti-war critics the symbol of a failed policy that left more than 58,000 U.S. troops dead and the nation bogged down in a seemingly endless disaster in Southeast Asia.

Pundits came to call the conflict "McNamara's War."

With his slicked-back hair and rimless glasses, he became a familiar face to the nation as one of "the best and the brightest" assembled by President John Kennedy to form his policy-making brain trust.

But he left the Cabinet in 1968 under pressure from Johnson. By then disillusioned with the war, McNamara had criticized U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.

He spent the rest of his life trying to explain the U.S. role in Vietnam and apologizing for his mistakes, becoming the subject of an Academy Award winning documentary, "The Fog of War." In the film, he discussed the difficult decision-making process during the Vietnam conflict as well as his Pentagon role in the Cuban missile crisis.