Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.He then proceeds to measure his hate for the man against that of David Halberstam, before finally ending on a happy note, retelling a story where an angry artists almost succeeded in drowning McNamara. I thought you had to wait until a man was buried before you pissed on his grave, but there we are.
McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.
Back in 1990 I had a series of strange phone conversations with McMamara while doing research for my book We Were Soldiers Once And Young. McNamara prefaced every conversation with this: "I do not want to comment on the record for fear that I might distort history in the process." Then he would proceed to talk for an hour, doing precisely that with answers that were disingenuous in the extreme — when they were not bald-faced lies.
But it does bring to mind the disease we have as a society to completely gloss over the sleazy, morally bankrupt, criminal actions, etc... of people who die when writing their obituaries. Everyone was generally a good person who loved their kids and worked hard, and any reference to scandal will be prefaced with the phrase "some disagreed..." or by use of the word "conflict." Only serial killers get described in apt terms. Meanwhile Michael Jackson gets the whole child rape and two decades of extreme bizarreness thing gets glossed over and Robert McNamara turns into some unimportant, uncontroversial, peripheral figure in the Vietnam war. Excuse me: Vietnam dispute. Just wait until Dick Cheney dies. You won't believe the glowing obituaries he gets when he finally shuffles off in 2075, or whenever that pact with Satan comes due.
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