Making Sense of a Senseless War

I guess I'm sort of a fan of Robert McNamara. "Thirteen Days" is one of my favorite movies, partly because I've always found the Cuban Missile Crisis interesting. And then I got a hold of a documentary that was essentially an extended interview with McNamara called "The Fog of War." It's broken up into different parts, with eleven lessons from his life.

He's a really interesting man. Very smart. He was hired to be the first President of Ford Motor Company not named Ford. And then Kennedy got elected a month later. JFK asked McNamara to serve as Secretary of Defense, and so he obliged. He's credited with helping our country avert Nuclear Holocaust with Russia, but also widely blamed for our intervention in Vietnam. He later went on to serve as President of World Bank, which is an international organization focused on reducing poverty in the world. Fascinating guy.

So anyway, here in this 3-minute clip, Robert McNamara explains the rationale behind the Vietnam War in a way I'd never heard before. It's just very interesting, thinking about how his generation was shaped by WWII. I'm mostly posting this here so I'll remember it & have an archive to go find it. But if you're interested, too, check it out. The good stuff starts at about the 1:34 mark:

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