Quotes About McNamara

The foundations of our decision making were gravely flawed," McNamara wrote in his autobiography. "We failed to analyze our assumptions critically, then or later."5

Thus the portrait of McNamara in those years at his desk, on planes, in Saigon, poring over page after page of data, each platoon, each squad, studying all those statistics. All lies. Talking with reporters and telling them that all the indices were good. He could not have been more wrong; he simply had all the wrong indices, looking for American production indices in an Asian political revolution.

I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous

I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.

The ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote, "The reward of suffering is experience." Let this be the lasting legacy of Vietnam.

It is true that at the time [1962] we had a strategic nuclear force of approximately five thousand warheads compared to the Soviet's three hundred.

A lot of times on our show, 'Shadowhunters,' we have excuses to dawn some kind of sexy black leather attire under the excuse that we're going to fight demons, but it's all part of the tone of the piece and the tone of the story.

You see that honky McNamara on television? He says, Yes, we are going to draft thirty percent of the Negroes in the Army. This is where they can have equal opportunity. Yeah. Yes… it's true that they are only ten percent of the population, but this is a better chance for them. When that honky talk about drafting thirty percent black people, he's talking about black urban removal—nothing else.

McNamara leaned over to the microphone and tried to say "Vietnam muôn n?m," but, because he wasn't aware of the tonal difference, the crowd practically disintegrated on the cobblestones. What he was saying was something like "The little duck, he wants to lie down.

Kennedy said that if we had nuclear war we'd kill 300 million people in the first hour. McNamara, who is a good businessman and likes to save, says it would be only 200 million.

By 1967 McNamara was pacing about his expansive Pentagon office, staring at the large framed photograph of Defense Secretary Forrestal (who had committed suicide), and weeping. By late 1967 Johnson had given up on him. The war had savaged the self-confidence of the most certain of men.53

McNamara's plea was that he had no idea that Vietnam had a history of longing for self-determination, a history of resisting foreign invasion.

A key to McMaster's thinking is his 1997 book, 'Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam.'

When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet in public, he continued to defend the war.

files in the McNamara study offices, I had discovered that this assumption was mistaken. Every one of these crucial decisions was secretly associated with realistic internal pessimism, deliberately concealed from the public, just as in 1964–65.

McNamara had indicated to me in the luncheon in his office that he would never recommend any such thing. And as I've said, much later he revealed that in fact he had advised both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson never, under any circumstances, to initiate the use of nuclear weapons. He said that they had agreed with him.