Word: mcnamara
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...interview at Berkeley, McNamara said that he "wanted nothing more in the world than to go back to Harvard at the end of the war." But in 1966, McNamara was greeted at Harvard by hundreds of virulent anti-war student protesters when he came to deliver the first speech at the newly created Kennedy School Institute of Politics. When he refused to debate an anti-war spokesman brought on campus by Students for a Democratic Society, McNamara was blockaded in Quincy House and was forced to sneak out using decoys and underground steam tunnels...
...Daniel Ellsberg '52, the government insider who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971 and exposed the knowledge that top officials had believed early on that the Vietnam War could not be won, had mixed feelings about McNamara's career...
...think his overall role is considerably misunderstood," Ellsberg said. "Certainly he did have great influence on the bombing of North Vietnam, which was tragic and criminal...it's fair to say we were all participants in war crimes. I was a minor one, McNamara was a major one, as well as Johnson...
...also said that he believed McNamara knew the war was futile early in his Pentagon career, and that McNamara worked diligently inside the government to limit bombings and prevent the conflict from escalating into nuclear war with China...
...Nobody was more important than McNamara, other than [President] Johnson, in getting us into Vietnam. But no official worked more effectively inside to limit and eventually try to end the war than McNamara," Ellsberg said. But McNamara could have even been more effective if his concerns were aired publicly, Ellsberg added, comparing McNamara's role in Vietnam to that of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in the recent Iraq...