Assignment 1: Obituary

Robert McNamara died on July 06, 2009 at the age of 93. 

When browsing through the obituaries on the Economist, Robert McNamara’s name immediately caught my attention.  I don’t know much about him and was hoping to get more insight into his life. I am aware that he played a key role in the Vietnam War (known here as Chiến Tranh Mỹ) as Secretary of Defense, but nothing else. This assignment is sort of strange…  We’re learning about someone’s life by reading about them in death.  Sadly after reading the short and insufficient excerpt, I still know very little about the man.

After reading McNamara’s obituary, I felt bad for him.  The first three quarters of the piece in the Economist was on his life’s devotion to quantitative analyses.  I’m not sure that this is how he would have liked to have been remembered, maybe it’s that I wouldn’t want that for myself.  Towards the end of the obit, there was then the Vietnam War part of his life.  McNamara bore a great deal of responsibility for the deployment of U.S. troops and escalation of the Vietnam War.  By 1968, after having been called a “baby-burner”, having his son march against him in protest and losing his obstinate objectivity, he resigned from office. He came to realize that the soldiers drafted to fight in Vietnam were not strategy or statistics, but husbands, brothers, and sons.  He later wrote a memoir, remorseful and apologetic, confessing that he had not understood war.

Initially, this obituary didn’t really mean much to me.  It wasn’t until I read it a few times and sort of put myself into his shoes that any meaning began to take shape.  From what little I could pull from the obituary, I imagined McNamara to be a lonely man alienated by the war and plagued by his conscience.  He was at one point hated by the public and maybe even by his own son.  And although the public had reason to hate him, beneath the cold and calculating objectivity was a tortured old man.  For me, and it may sound really simplistic, but the lesson I learned is that we are all human.  Maybe some more so then others…  Cliché, but it’s easy to judge and it’s easy to hate, but it takes so much more to have empathy and to be compassionate.