Rev. Danny Fisher

The Washington Post is reporting that Robert S. McNamara, “the former secretary of defense whose record as a leading executive of industry and a chieftain of foreign financial aid was all but erased from public memory by his reputation as the primary architect of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam,” has died today at age 93. McNamara was the subject of one of best and most important films I have ever seen: Errol Morris’ 2003 Academy Award-winner The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. The film is essential viewing for anyone trying to come to grips with the thinking of those leading us into war, and I highly recommend it. I would echo the sentiments of Entertainment Weekly writer Marc Bernardin, who, in noting the death at his PopWatch blog, writes:

Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara has died at 93, and with him goes a certain perspective on the 20th Century: the perspective of a man intimately involved in the military actions that defined both America and the world. World War II, Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam — they all transpired on his watch.

In 2001, McNamara sat down with documentarian Errol Morris for a series of conversations that would examine the lessons he’d learned over the course of that life — lessons like In Order to Do Good You May Have to Engage in Evil, Empathize with Your Enemy, Proportionality Should Be a Guideline in War — and the result was the exemplary, Oscar-winning film, 2003′s The Fog of War. Some have called McNamara a warmonger; a monster; an unethical, immoral machine. The question of whether he was a necessary monster isn’t one for me to answer, but listening to a man like this take his own measure is transfixing. His vantage point on history was unrivaled.