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Robert McNamara dies

Started by Weatherman, July 06, 2009, 10:07:02 AM

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CountDeMoney

#15
July 06, 2009, 05:03:31 PM
Well, that's a body count of one he can definitely rely upon as accurate.


RIP and a big fuck you, RANDboy.

Habsburg

#16
July 06, 2009, 07:02:53 PM
 :(

Loved him, will miss him.

Neil

#17
July 06, 2009, 07:27:54 PM
A shame to see someone of that era go.  There can't be many of them left anymore.  That said, the refusal (and that of his superiors) to take a hard line in conducting the Vietnam War was regretable, and will always stain his record.
I do not hate you, nor do I love you, but you are made out of atoms which I can use for something else.

grumbler

#18
July 06, 2009, 07:32:54 PM
I think his silence didn't do him any good, but what can you do?

Still, there is that tape of his conversation with Kennedy in which he insists that a US troop withdrawal timeline must be issued very soon.  This was in 1963.

He certainly fucked up a lot of things, but his motivations were not evil or venal.  He honestly did believe that the US and USSR were on a hair-trigger (and he knew that Polaris did not work), so he operated out of fear and with a desire to minimize the chances of a nuclear war.

His over-reliance on technology bit him in the ass many, many times, and his arrogance and control-freak nature meant his subordinates feared to tell him when things went wrong.  Still, not a criminal, just flawed.
The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.   -G'Kar

Bayraktar!

Razgovory

#19
July 06, 2009, 08:14:01 PM
Well the flexible response was a good doctrine.  We could have depopulated most of central Europe.  That would have been win-win.
I've given it serious thought. I must scorn the ways of my family, and seek a Japanese woman to yield me my progeny. He shall live in the lands of the east, and be well tutored in his sacred trust to weave the best traditions of Japan and the Sacred South together, until such time as he (or, indeed his house, which will periodically require infusion of both Southern and Japanese bloodlines of note) can deliver to the South it's independence, either in this world or in space.  -Lettow April of 2011

Raz is right. -MadImmortalMan March of 2017

Syt

#20
July 07, 2009, 12:28:34 AM
Quote from: Neil on July 06, 2009, 07:27:54 PM
A shame to see someone of that era go.  There can't be many of them left anymore.

Kissinger is still alive. According to a documentary from a few years back he regularly meets with personal friend and former chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
—Stephen Jay Gould

Proud owner of 42 Zoupa Points.
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