Posted on 07/07/2009 10:52:19 PM PDT by Corky Boyd
Robert McNamara died Monday at the age of 93. Not a lot will be written about him because he is reviled by the left for his role in the Viet Nam war, and reviled by others for his mismanagement and failures. I am one of the latter.
McNamara throughout his career held himself in higher regard than those around him did. He felt his intelligence trumped all, even when he was barking up the wrong tree. Prior to being tapped by Jack Kennedy for Defense Secretary, he was President of Ford. He came to Ford as one of a dozen or so intellectuals Henry Ford II surrounded himself with when he realized he wasn’t the brightest bulb on the block. McNamara was largely responsible for the Edsel, a one size fits all concept the public would flock to because it was a Mercury sized product (big is better) that could be sold at a Ford price. It flopped and was killed in one of shortest...
(Excerpt) Read more at islandturtle.blogspot.com ...
Makes you wonder who President Nixon would’ve chosen to be DefSec in ‘61 had the office not been stolen from him...
This is one of them, the guy really stoops for it:
"Early in his tenure rumors abounded that McNamara wanted to eliminate the Navy’s aircraft carriers "
The guy slams McNamara for a "rumor".
C-Span just had a 2 hr interview with McNamara, taped in 1995, discussing Macs just released autobiography. Fascinating. Especially the lengths Mac went to to ensure that his co-authored autobiography was factually correct and unbias.
Reminded me of General Sherman's autobiography. He sent a manuscript to every general officer mentioned in the book and asked for comments. Where appropriate, Sherman footnoted where there was a difference then printed that persons response in toto in the footnotes.
Mac was a class act.
Two months before JFK died, on the Presidents orders, he pulled a thousand men out of Nam. A week later, at a congressional hearing, a senator accused him of being a communist sympathizer.
And this poor excuse for modern journalism has the nerve to talk about revisionist history.
yitbos
JFK was an American mistake. We’ve been screwed since Wilson.
No Republican today is as conservative as he was.
Kennedy was Bush 43’s tax cuts and foreign policy plus Clinton’s adultery and incompetence.
No Republican today is as conservative as he was.
___________________________________
If people would wake up to that fact, we’d be in better shape. Liberals are in deenial about how conservative JFK was compared to todays scum.
Probably Curtis Lemay. We would have gone into Vietnam in a big way sooner and by the time the '64 elections rolled around it would have been over.
That should be McNamara's epitaph.
“No Republican today is as conservative as he was.”
JFK? Seriously guys, no. He was really only marginally better. Had he served 8 years you’d probably hate him like Lyndon Johnson.
IF you mean Wilson? That’s similarly wrong. If FDR is the father of American socialism, Woodrow was it’s racist grandpa.
Very true. Something I've been saying for around 3 years now.
Which is quite ironic, and an example of the slow-creep to the Left that is occuring today. What qualifies as 'acceptable to conservatives' today would have been to the left of the Democratic party four decades ago. Think about that! A person like President George W. Bush only gets his extreme liberal record (I'm sorry, but apart from the fact he was strong on defence and anti-terror, Dubya is the most Liberal president before a certain big-eared fella came along) eclipsed by Obama. It takes a nutcase like Bambi to overshadow a supposedly Conserva ...erm ..Republican president's record.
It makes me wonder what will be the case four decades from now? If the slow-creep from the 60s to the naughts has come to this, then what will the slow-creep (or maybe not so slow ...) from the naughts to the 40s bring? With public schools and universities, the constant media precipitation, excessive group-think ....it might be that someone like 'Juan' McCain will end up seeming like the second coming of Ayn Rand, while Ayn Rand's writings will have been banned by then.
If anyone thinks that is too extreme, just have a look again at JFK vs Dubya.
Perhaps worse of all, JFK was the person most responsible for today's out of control open borders policies that turned parts of America into third world-like slums. JFK wrote the outline for what became the 1965 Immigration "Reform" Act, and his plan to open the floodgates was carried on by his brother Ted who put the finshing touches on the bill:
John F. Kennedy initially proposed an overhaul of American immigration policy that later was to become the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, sponsored by Kennedy's brother Senator Edward Kennedy. It dramatically shifted the source of immigration from Northern and Western European countries towards immigration from Latin America and Asia and shifted the emphasis of selection of immigrants towards facilitating family reunification.[57] John F. Kennedy wanted to dismantle the selection of immigrants based on country of origin and saw this as an extension of his civil rights policies.[58]
You think that's "more conservative than any Republican alive today?" Funny. Most of us Republicans around today see it is left-wing lunacy.
Ronald Reagan agrees that the RAT party "changed", (I don't, I think the majority of them have been socialist anti-american scum for at least the last century) but JFK was too liberal for Reagan EVEN when Reagan was still in the RAT party. Reagan was a "Democrat for Nixon" back in '60. Funny that Reagan didn't seem to fond of JFK's "conservative" platform. I watched the Kennedy-Nixon debates and it was clear to me that Kennedy was the more liberal candidate in that race, considerably to the left of Nixon. (which makes him pretty liberal given that Nixon was hardly a great shining example of conservativism)
If Massachuttes Democrat JFK is your idea of a great conservative icon, I'd hate to see your idea of "liberal".
IN A PIG'S VALISE! McNamara was the father of the "Proportionate Response" method of warfare.
By his own admission,he knew that the way we were fighting the war would insure that we would not win, yet kept going. This so that Lyndon (hopefully burning in Hell) Johnson could have his great society programs.
His death means another Vietnam era traitor dead.
Waiting on Hanoi Jane Fonda next.
Great article.
Thank you. It’s a keeper.
Compared to Richard Nixon, who even Noam Chomsky thinks was the last liberal president?
I was actually young in those days, but barely remember now. :)
Dean Rusk was the Sec of State throughout both JFK & LBJ’s terms. I can’t recall his role on the immigration “reforms.”
Noam is touched in the head if he doesn’t think Carter and Clinton were liberals.
I disagree with Reagan’s claim that the rat party left him and not the other way around, perhaps it was just a good line on his part. The anti-Americanism started with commie love in the 40’s but took predominance I think around Vietnam time, after he left that party. The socialism started in like the 1880’s cemented with the nomination of WJ Bryan in 1896. Since then there’s been 2-4 rats candidates that weren’t socialists. Judge Alton Parker in 1904 and John W. Davis in 1924 and possibly the vaunted Al Smith in 1928 who opposed the new deal. (and James Cox in 1920 was a Wilsonite on foreign policy but I don’t know if he was a socialist, probably was)
In 1948 Reagen was pimping Truman and Hubert Humphrey for Senate in Minnesota against http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJDhS4oUm0M
He changed his views, the rat party stayed the same.
Mac was fighting Nam after the Cuban missile crisis. Every step was with Rooskies threatening nukes and ChiComs threatening invasion.
yitbos
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.