Robert McNamara paid for his mistakes

The death Monday of Robert McNamara at age 93 sent members of my generation scurrying back to our conflicted memories of long ago. McNamara embodied those conflicts. He was the most prominent member of the extraordinary cadre of confident, competent and ambitious young men who joined the Kennedy administration with the firm belief that they could make government work more efficiently and effectively. "The Best and Brightest," the title applied to them by writer David Halberstam, was in many ways appropriate. They were, as Kennedy said in his inaugural address, "tempered by war," but they were also prime examples of an educational and industrial meritocracy that developed after World War II. They really were "whiz kids" who had proven themselves in academia and industry.

As it often does, hubris humbled their confidence. McNamara and his aides reformed the Pentagon, finding efficiencies in purchasing and manpower. He also helped guide America through its closest encounter with nuclear war, the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. But his confidence and his sense of moral authority took a beating in Vietnam. After Kennedy was assassinated, McNamara and Lyndon Johnson enlarged the war, sending half-a-million U.S. servicemen to South Vietnam to battle a slippery insurgency. As more bombs were dropped and more Americans died, McNamara lost confidence in the U.S. strategy, which was essentially to kill more Vietcong and North Vietnamese than they were able to kill Americans and South Vietnamese. Remember weekly "body counts"?

McNamara left the Pentagon in 1968 after a long talk with Johnson — he said later he didn't know whether he resigned or was fired — and spent much of the rest of his life wrestling with the mistakes he saw in his Vietnam War strategy and tactics.

The lesson of McNamara's honorable service to his country should be that even the world's best management practices, moral certitude and intellectual brilliance cannot inoculate you against mistakes. Continuing to stand by those mistakes can be costly indeed.