Robert S. McNamara (1916-2009)
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Washingtonpost.com News Alert:
Robert McNamara, Architect of Vietnam War, Dies at 93
Robert S. McNamara died in his sleep at his home in Washington early this morning, family members said. McNamara, who served as secretary of defense during the Vietnam war under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was 93.
by Noah
David Halberstam's assessment was right. Mix that with the fact that McNamara was both a banker and an oilman, and was probably exposed to Henry Ford's political sympathies, and it doesn't look good.
I am reminded of the bios of some of Hitler's inner circle of industrialists and military men. He even looked the part. So many died and died horribly because of this guy. If I ever meet "God," I might have to ask him why such people live so long, while so many good people live half as long. It says something bad about us that he was never tried and imprisoned for the rest of his days.
What should be on his tombstone?
1) "What an ASSHOLE!"
2) "MASS MURDERER"
3) "War Criminal Extraordinaire"
4) "Proudly strove to be one of the worst people EVER to walk the Earth!" (In the end, he failed at that just like he failed at most things, but he gets an A for effort.)
5) "A real piece of shit!"
6) "Feel Free to Relieve Yourself Here."
Maybe the family should hold an epitaph contest, or maybe DWT should, at least. I have to go take a shower now, after just READING about this despicable cretin.
KEN ADDS: ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, THERE'S NO
SHORTAGE OF BUDDING NEW WAR ARCHITECTS
If you've got a really great new war you need architecturalized, there's plenty of talent in the wings. For starters, you might send a flier to the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution and ask them to post it on their bulletin boards. (Hint: If you have access to a free copying machine, make a whole bunch of copies of your flier and send a stack to each to give out!)
HOWIE ADDS: ROBERT S. WHO?
Are the people lining up for scalped tickets for his Staples Center memorial?
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Labels: Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, Vietnam
10 Comments:
R.I.H.
[Rot In Hell]
He was 93. I hope he had to suffer the indignity of needing assistance to shit or something for last 15 years or so; otherwise, I cant fathom that he ever came close to getting his comeuppance. Lucky bastard.
But unlike so many other imperialist leaders, he actually learned from his mistakes:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0125-01.htm
"And if we can't persuade other nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merit of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely change it. And if we'd followed that rule, we wouldn't have been in Vietnam, because there wasn't one single major ally, not France or Britain or Germany or Japan, that agreed with our course or stood beside us there. And we wouldn't be in Iraq."
Good point, B, and thanks for making it. McNamara himself eventually became the bitterest critic of McNamara the war-maker, and surely deserves some credit.
Ken
I cut McNamara no slack, but remember this: Johnson banished McNamara to the World Bank (where his policies arguably killed more people in the third world than died in Vietnam before 1968) in December 1967 because McNamara pleaded with LBJ to stop escalating the war and negotiate with North Vietnam.
Twelve months later, after a devastating year that proved McNamara right, Kissinger told Nixon to keep the war going.
From January 1969, the blood is on Kissinger's hands.
Finally! Now... if we could just see the news headline, " Richard "Nixon" Cheney, dead at ???" Reason for the ???- Because no one knows how old he really is... surely he is half-robot.
It will forever stick out in my mind hearing the taped telephone conversation where Lyndon Johnson was saying that the "son of a bitch" McNamara wants us (the US) in Vietnam, and "...there is nothing I can do to change his mind. He has everyone convinced this is the right thing to do and I just don't think we need to be fightin' the god damned Chinese, because that's what the Russians did and that's all we'll do."
---Yep and that's all we did.
C3,
One might say that McNamara was the Military Industrial Complex's inside man or ambassador in the JFK and LBJ administrations. He was the kind that Eisenhower warned us about. Just before he was murdered in the streets of Dallas, JFK was determined to end the war. LBJ witnessed, first hand, how that turned out.
Then, in 1968, Kissinger and Nixon, in their own version of what is now known as an "October Surprise", sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks, thus prolonging the war and costing the world thousands of lives and increasing the Swiss bank accounts of their war profiteer buddies. Nothing has changed. In fact, if Cheney and his mindless hand puppet Bush are any example, things have gotten worse.
NOrmally I wouldn't post 2 times in one session, but that has happened... you guessed it, twice in as many days.
Here is a link to some tapes that were released detailing McNamara, and others prescription for Vietnam and the M.I.C.
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/ondemand/index.cfm?fuseaction=Media.play&mediaid=21C8C414-C3B7-ACBD-8810F07716638A30
The next link is where Johnson accused Nixon of being a conspiratorial asshole. Not that any of us need these links, but for outsiders, its good fun.
http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/Dictabelt.hom/highlights/news.shtm
Noah hit it right on the head. Personally, I vote for epitaph #4) "Proudly strove to be one of the worst people EVER to walk the Earth!"
Ken is right, too. A brand new McNamara is born every minute. A new mass murderer is begat every second. There should be a social mechanism of some sort to filter out these monsters before their reach adolescence and become dangerous. Alas, the system we live in seems not only to condone them, but thrives on them.
MacNamara appeared in the leaked list of The Pilgrims, 1974, and Kissinger is a current VP of the almost unknown organization sponsored by The British Crown to return America to Crown rule. The group established subsidiaries like the Japan Society in 1907; Council on Foreign Relations 1921; Bilderberg 1954; Trilateral Commission 1973 and many others Prince Philip for example is Royal patron to over 800 organizations. In the globalist movement, all roads converge upwards past a wall of silence into The Pilgrims Society ("a secret society gradually absorbing the wealth of the world," Review of Reviews, May 1902, pp 557-558, life of Cecil Rhodes) www.silverstealers.net
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