Gambra
Anarchic Harmonics
-
Welcome, guest!
Why not take a moment to register an account?
If you already have an account, remember to Log In!
People Who Died (11 Viewers)
- Thread starter 7 - No tomorrow
- Start date
- Replies 8K
- Views 578K
- Watchers 32
- Thread starter
- #82
Mollie Sugden RIP
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unmkX15AeN8"]YouTube - Mrs. Slocombe's Pussy[/ame]
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unmkX15AeN8"]YouTube - Mrs. Slocombe's Pussy[/ame]
Jelly_Block
New Member
Thumped just did a bit of a Jesus Christ.
- Thread starter
- #85
Robert McNamara
The Vietnam War? That was his baby.
There's a good Errol Morris doco on him called The Fog Of War
The Vietnam War? That was his baby.
There's a good Errol Morris doco on him called The Fog Of War
Robert McNamara, chief US architect of Vietnam War, dies at 93
July 6, 2009 09:04 AM
President John Kennedy walked with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on July 8, 1961, in Hyannis Port.
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff
Robert S. McNamara, who as secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations was a leading architect of US military involvement in Indochina, died this morning. He was 93.
His family told the Washington Post that Mr. McNamara died in his sleep at his Washington home. The cause of death was not reported.
Besides the Defense Department, Mr. McNamara led two other institutions of global importance. He became the first non-family member to serve as president of the Ford Motor Company, in 1960. He was also president of the World Bank from 1968-81.
Yet Mr. McNamara is best remembered — and in some quarters still reviled — for the seven years he spent at the Pentagon and the part he played in waging the Vietnam War. The controversy that erupted in 1995 when he published his memoir, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” demonstrated the extent to which the scars he bore remained unhealed.
No one person can be assigned responsibility for escalating the US role in the conflict. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk: Each played his part. To many, though, it was “McNamara’s war,” as US Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon once put it.
“I don’t object to its being called McNamara’s war,” Mr. McNamara said during a 1964 press conference. “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.”
Those words would come to haunt him.
Two years earlier, he had visited Vietnam for the first time. “Every quantitative measurement we have shows that we’re winning this war,” he said. It was a telling response from someone who would be presiding over a struggle in which, as the United States came to learn, hearts and minds did more to determine the outcome than body counts or bomb tonnage.
It was also a characteristic response from a man who saw number-crunching as equal parts contact sport and higher calling. Give him enough statistics to analyze, Mr. McNamara seemed to believe, and almost any problem might be solved. “You can’t substitute emotion for reason,” he liked to say.
This quantitative bent was the foundation of his extraordinary certitude, a certitude critics called inflexibility. No one was more can-do, no one more gung-ho. Mr. McNamara brought an almost-missionary zeal to problem-solving. “I would rather have a wrong decision made than no decision at all,” he once said. It was an emblematic statement.
An avid skier, tennis player, and mountaineer, Mr. McNamara personified the New Frontier. He was youthful (only Donald Rumsfeld, during the Ford administration, was a younger defense secretary). Famously intelligent, he was cited in a 1962 Saturday Evening Post profile as having “the highest intelligence quotient of any leading public official in this century.” He was furiously dedicated, routinely working six-day weeks and 13-hour days.
Kennedy reportedly wanted Mr. McNamara to replace Rusk as secretary of state in his second administration. And Robert Kennedy said he and his brother speculated about supporting Mr. McNamara for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968.
The Kennedys were not alone in falling under the spell of the McNamara mystique. Johnson offered him the vice-presidential nomination in 1964. “He’s the best man available,” LBJ told a friend. When Mr. McNamara declined, Johnson pronounced him “No. 1 executive vice president in charge of the Cabinet.” He later awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
US Senator Barry Goldwater, who would become a harsh critic, initially hailed Mr. McNamara as “one of the best secretaries ever, an IBM machine with legs.” David Halberstam, who would later assail Mr. McNamara in his book “The Best and the Brightest,” wrote in 1963 that “McNamara may well be this country’s most distinguished civil servant of the last decade.”
Perhaps only Henry Kissinger, who simultaneously served as secretary of state and national security adviser during the Nixon and Ford administrations, surpassed him in the admittedly small category of public servants who have attained cult status.
Nevertheless, the very things that gave Mr. McNamara such cachet — briskness, brilliance, decisiveness — came to undermine him. Vietnam was only the most obvious example. His run-ins with senior military leaders, Congress, and the media earned him widespread enmity in Washington. A congressman dubbed him “I-Have-All-The-Answers McNamara.”
The New York Times columnist James Reston wrote in 1966, “He is tidy, he is confident, he has the sincerity of an Old Testament prophet, but something is missing: some element of personal doubt, some respect for human weakness, some knowledge of history.”
What Mr. McNamara once described as his image of “cool efficiency” even extended to his appearance. With his slicked-back hair and rimless glasses, he looked to be part accountant, part recording angel.
Yet much of Mr. McNamara’s fascination sprang from how he could subvert that image. This supreme bean-counter also loved poetry. This avatar of detachment and abstract reasoning was prone to bouts of weeping
.
The bouts increased as the war dragged on. “He does it all the time now,” a secretary remarked shortly before Mr. McNamara left the Pentagon, in 1968. “He cries into the curtain.”
The term “McNamara’s war” arose from his very public enthusiasm for a military solution to the conflict. As the statistics that crossed Mr. McNamara’s desk more and more indicated the improbability of victory, the term remained fitting. For no one waging the war endured such agonies of doubt: He mirrored the nation’s own consternation. “My sense of the war gradually shifted from concern to skepticism to frustration to anguish,” Mr. McNamara later wrote.
To arrive at some better understanding of how things could have gone so wrong, Mr. McNamara commissioned a study called “United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967.” The public would come to know it by another name: “The Pentagon Papers.”
A man of phenomenal abilities, Mr. McNamara discovered how few of them were suited to the demands of Vietnam. “I had always been confident that every problem could be solved,” he wrote in his memoir, “but now I found myself confronting one — involving national pride and human life — that could not.”
Mr. McNamara’s 13 years as president of the World Bank were widely seen as an act of atonement for what he had done in Vietnam, though he denied this. He increased tenfold the amount of money the bank had out on loans. In particular, he championed the Third World, tripling the bank’s loans to developing countries and shifting its emphasis from large-scale industrial projects to rural development and population control. He also began publication of an annual World Development Report.
After leaving the bank, Mr. McNamara emerged as an elder statesman in the field of nuclear affairs. He had played a leading part in bringing about a limited test-ban treaty in 1963, and his propounding the concept of mutual assured destruction, the cornerstone of the nuclear balance of power for much of the Cold War, may have been his single most important legacy as defense secretary. Such credentials gave weight to Mr. McNamara’s advocacy of a nuclear freeze and a US policy of no first use of nuclear weapons.
Elder statesman or no, Mr. McNamara remained a controversial figure, as the media firestorm that greeted “In Retrospect” made plain. Mr. McNamara’s growing doubts about the Vietnam War were widely known as early as his final months at the Pentagon, but he had never directly addressed the subject. Now he put them on the record. “Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong,” he wrote. “We owe it to future generations to explain why.”
The words were front-page news. “His regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books for our dead soldiers,” a New York Times editorial declared. “What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.” The New Republic asked, “Has any single American of this century done more harm than Robert McNamara?”
Despite such withering criticism, Mr. McNamara remained a figure of public fascination. In 2003, the filmmaker Errol Morris released an Academy Award-winning documentary about him, “The Fog of War.”
- Thread starter
- #87
CinnamonBoy
Well-Known Member
Renowned Limerick spoofer Frank McCourt.
Anarcho Munk
New Member
That argument is amazing.
Milker
Well-Known Member
Renato Pagliari, R.I.P.
- Thread starter
- #91
If only he'd heeded his own advice, eh Milker?
Does anyone else, whenever they see an unexpected name trend on Twitter assume that the person in question has died?
yup! Chris Jericho the other night for starters
Well that just ruined my day.
quackster
Member
filthy animals 
- Thread starter
- #97
Super Dexta
New Member
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2002
- Messages
- 7,841
Of chlamydia no less, the hussy.
Cryptid
New Member
That's like when Tony Blair made a statement in the House Of Commons about Deirdre's prison sentence in Coronation Street.
GODDAMMIT
Users who are viewing this thread
Activity
So far there's no one here
21 Day Calendar
Similar threads
Support thumped.com
Support thumped.com and upgrade your account
Upgrade your account now to disable all ads...
Upgrade now