May He Rest in Darkness

[midcan5]

This is a tough piece but interesting. History is created sometimes by people in the background of power.


'McNamara: From the Tokyo Firestorm to the World Bank' By Alexander Cockburn

"Robert McNamara, who died yesterday, July 6, served as Kennedy’s , then as Johnson’s defense secretary. He contributed more than most to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went on to run the World Bank, where he presided over the impoverishment, eviction from their lands and death of many millions more round the world.

Just as George Kennan, one of the architects of the Cold War, helped bolt together the ramshackle scaffolding of bogus claims that provided the rationalization for Harry Truman’s great “arms scare” in 1948, launching the postwar arms race, McNamara tugged his forelock and said “Aye, aye, Sir” when Kennedy, campaigning against Nxon in the late 1950s attacked the Eisenhower/Nixon administration for having allowed a “missile gap” to develop that had now delivered America naked and helpless into the grip of the Soviet Union.

This was the biggest lie in the history of threat inflation and remains so to this day. At the moment when Kennedy, McNamara at his elbow, was flaying the Eisenhower administration for the infamous “gap”, the U.S. government from its spy planes that the Soviet Union had precisely one missile silo with an untested missile in it. The Russians knew that the US knew this, because they were fully primed about about the U-2 spy-plane overflights, most dramatically when U-2 pilot Gary Powers crashed near Sverdlovsk and told all to his captors."

Alexander Cockburn McNamara: From the Tokyo Firestorm to the World Bank

 

[mal]

Fuckin' DemocRATS!...

Thanks a lot JFK and LBJ!...



peace...

 

[Baruch Menachem]

Nah, this isn't a democrat issue. This is just plain sleaze.

I am sort of glad he worked on the US side rather than for the Soviets or for the Iranians. That would have been even more of a disaster.

MacNamara is the fundamental problem of the over large state. He is an aparatchik who gets where he wants to be by telling the boss what he wants to hear, while causing hell to those under his authority. He would have been just as happy and just as dangerous working for a republican, and he would have been as much a disaster.

During the Watergate years HR Halderman got a lot of bad press, but Nixon hired him to be pretty much the non MacNamara. Nixon knew the danger of the bubble around the white house, and Halderman was there to break it.

Of course, Nixon also hired the likes of Colson and John Dean, who were both MacNamara lite.

Pity life isn't much like literature. In Othello, Iago died in the last act. In real life, Iago lived to a ripe old age.

 

[Tech_Esq]

Nah, this isn't a democrat issue. This is just plain sleaze.

I am sort of glad he worked on the US side rather than for the Soviets or for the Iranians. That would have been even more of a disaster.

MacNamara is the fundamental problem of the over large state. He is an aparatchik who gets where he wants to be by telling the boss what he wants to hear, while causing hell to those under his authority. He would have been just as happy and just as dangerous working for a republican, and he would have been as much a disaster.

During the Watergate years HR Halderman got a lot of bad press, but Nixon hired him to be pretty much the non MacNamara. Nixon knew the danger of the bubble around the white house, and Halderman was there to break it.

Of course, Nixon also hired the likes of Colson and John Dean, who were both MacNamara lite.

Pity life isn't much like literature. In Othello, Iago died in the last act. In real life, Iago lived to a ripe old age.

So was it all the throws of an unsophisticated and newly powerful US as it emerged from WW II. Prior to WW II, Washington was a sleepy southern town. Afterward, it was the capital of the free world. The inhabitants were drunk with power and had no historical foundation for how to use the power properly. Yes?

 

[Mad Scientist]

I don't know. I've seen "Fog Of War" twice now and I fail to see what the Vietnam generation is so pissed about.
He was reluctantly brought into the Kennedy administration, continued under the Johnson administration and was fired for what I view as disagreeing with Johnson in Vietnam policy. In fact, it looks like he told Johnson exactly how he viewed things and that just seemed to chap Johnsons' ass.

You Libs hated him because he was Anti-Communist?

The Vietnam vets hate him for the "Mattel" M-16? WTF?

I heard him make some statements in that documentary that I'm sure you Libs would agree with. One of which was "The US should never act unilaterally with Military force".

I just don't get all the hatred toward him.