Robert McNamera

The Vietnam War. Missed it.

I was born a little too late to have any direct memories of this very unfortunate part of American History. I once had a very smart, but underachieving substitute history teacher who remarked that the history we live, and in particular, the more immediate history from the first ten years of our lives, is a massive blind spot. It was probably more true back then, when text books were woefully out of date and we didn't have the internet and we routinely ate dirt to survive. Oh, wait that was the thirties. Nevermind.

Forget about text books and internet for a moment. Even with those things, recent history isn't really history yet, and everybody takes for granted that if they lived through something (even if they were five) they MUST know about it. So, hence the blindspot. And, since I am not a big book reader, all I have to go on is Oliver Stone movies and long-haired "Nam" vets who talk my ear off down at the Pensacola American Legion. Believe it or not, this is absolutely true. My mom used to tend bar there. They served cans of beer. I'll leave it at that.

So, guilty as charged, this McNamera death was a good excuse for me to do a little homework on the Vietnam War. Call me lazy, but Wikipedia is a pretty damn good place to start. Then, I ended up at this site, which besides having amazing pictures, had a map of Vietnam. One look at the map sort of tells you why there would be a war in the first place. It looks like a "3" with thickness on the extremities and thinness in the middle. So, it isn't surprising that Vietnam has had a history of north and south tensions. I also can't understand how the hell Chile ended up like that, but now we are worlds away from Robert McNamera.

McNamara was responsible for a number of other things besides our greatest military failure. He was responsible for the 4 seater Ford Thunderbird. He was responsible for redefining the mission of the World Bank to focus more on developing the third world. He was largely responsible for JFK's burial in Arlington National Cemetary for greater public access. Oh, and he is responsible for the bespectacled walnut farmer, Robert Craig McNamara. But, he will forever be memorialized as the tragically misguided architect of Vietnam.