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Sunday, May 26, 2013

Published: July 9, 2009

Robert S. McNamara, a Chilmark visitor and property owner since the 1960s, died Monday. He was 93.

As secretary of defense Mr. McNamara drew enormous criticism for conducting America's most controversial war. Late in life, he acknowledged his own misjudgments and went on to devote himself to helping the world's poorest nations.

The former defense secretary died at 5:30 am at his home, his wife Diana told The Associated Press. She said he had been in failing health for some time.

Mr. McNamara was part of a group led by Nicholas Freydberg of Chilmark, who bought from George D. Flynn 460 acres of land in the south shore area of Edgartown known as Oyster Watcha Midlands. Later, the McNamaras, in partnership with others, bought about 40 acres in Chilmark, including what's now widely known as Lucy Vincent Beach. The group donated beach, land behind the beach and a parking lot to the Chilmark Town Association, which leased the property to the town for a nominal fee. Beachgoers shared the access to the beach with the McNamaras

Later, Mr. McNamara sold his Chilmark house and built a house he called Sandpiper Point on his Oyster Watcha property. President Clinton and his family used the house for a summer visit in 1993.

For all his healing efforts, Mr. McNamara was fundamentally associated with the Vietnam War, "McNamara's war," the country's most disastrous foreign venture, the only American war to end in abject withdrawal rather than victory.

Known as a policymaker with great faith and aptitude for statistical analysis, Mr. McNamara was recruited from the presidency of the Ford Motor Co by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, to run the Pentagon. He stayed seven years, longer than anyone since the job's creation in 1947.

His association with Vietnam became intensely personal. Even his son, as a Stanford University student, protested against the war while his father was running it. At Harvard, Mr. McNamara once had to flee a student mob through underground utility tunnels. Critics mocked Mr. McNamara mercilessly; they made much of the fact that his middle name was "Strange."

Although Vineyarders were not widely hostile to the vacationing defense secretary, they objected to his attempts to keep swimmers and sunbathers off his south shore Chilmark property, and one evening, in 1972, while traveling to the Vineyard aboard the Islander, a Vineyard war critic attempted to push the defense secretary overboard.

After leaving the Pentagon he became president of the World Bank and devoted his enormous energies to improving life in rural communities in developing countries.

A private person, McNamara for many years declined to write his memoirs. He told Time magazine in 1991 that he did not think the bombing of North Vietnam - the biggest bombing campaign in history up to that time - would work, but he went along with it "because we had to try to prove it would not work, number one, and [because] other people thought it would work."

In 1993, he undertook to write his memoirs because some of the lessons of Vietnam were applicable to the post-Cold War period, "odd as though it may seem."

"In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" appeared in 1995. In it, Mr. McNamara disclosed that by 1967, he had deep misgivings about Vietnam and that he had lost faith in America's capacity to prevail over a guerrilla insurgency. Despite those doubts, he had continued to express public confidence that the application of enough American firepower would cause the Communists to make peace.

"We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of our country. But we were wrong. We were terribly wrong," Mr. McNamara, then 78, told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of the book's release.

He discussed similar themes in the 2003 documentary "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara." With the U.S. in the first year of the war in Iraq, it became a popular and timely art-house attraction and won the Oscar for best documentary feature.

In the Kennedy administration, McNamara was a key figure in both the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis 18 months later.

Mr. McNamara served as the World Bank president for 12 years. He tripled its loans to developing countries and changed its emphasis from large industrial projects to rural development.

Robert Strange McNamara was born June 9, 1916, in San Francisco to Robert and Clara Nell (Strange) McNamara. His father was the son of Irish immigrants and managed a wholesale shoe business.

In 1937 he graduated with honors in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. He enrolled at Harvard Business School and after two years there took a job with the accounting firm Price Waterhouse and Co. He returned to Harvard in 1947 to teach in the business school. In the same year he married his college sweetheart, Margaret Craig, who later became noted for creating Reading is Fundamental, a literacy program for poor children.

During World War II he taught young air officers, serving in England and India and achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel by the end of the war.

Following the war he took a job with the Ford Motor Company and in 1960 was named president of the company. Five weeks later newly elected President John F. Kennedy tapped him to run the Pentagon.

Mr. McNamara and his second wife, the former Diana Masieri Byfield, were married in 2004 in San Francisco.

Besides his wife, Mr. McNamara is survived by his son, Robert Craig, of Winters, Calif.; two daughters, Margaret Elizabeth Pastor and Kathleen McNamara, both of Washington, and six grandchildren.