Now that Robert McNamara is gone, it is worth looking back at his legacy, not the least of which was the emotional morass that he left behind.
He was despised by so many for what happened in Vietnam, and with such an intensity, that people even tried to assault him, as Paul Hendrickson described in his book The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War, recounting one night in September 1972 when someone recognized McNamara riding on a ferry near Martha’s Vineyard and tried to throw him overboard. Years later, the assailant told Hendrickson, "I just wanted to confront [McNamara] on Vietnam."
For a long time, it seemed unlikely that anyone would ever have that kind of evil-icon status, but more recently Donald Rumsfeld seems to have taken on that role. A commuter waiting for a bus at Dupont Circle recognized Rumsfeld in February and lit into him: “I became more vociferous and enraged the longer it went: mass murderer, traitor, torturer, rapist of children,” he wrote on his blog.
Neither McNamara nor Rumsfeld was the sole cause of the disastrous aspects of the wars, of course, but they are similar in the way they inspire ordinary people to just about lose it when they see them – an antipathy that seems to stay with them, as both men have demonstrated, long after they have left their positions of power.
--Tara McKelvey
