Word: mcnamara
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...think he realized deep down that he is going to be remembered in history for his unfortunate contributions to the American role in Vietnam," Kalb said. "[McNamara] could have worked 50 years at the World Bank, and when he died, the lede would still say he was the man who failed in Vietnam...
...Nevertheless, others regard McNamara's legacy more favorably. Jack P. Ruina, an MIT professor who worked under McNamara as Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, said he was a "great admirer of [McNamara's]" even though he was "a little bit like a machine." And Graham T. Allison, a former dean of the Kennedy School and now director of the Belfer Center, noted in an e-mailed statement that President Kennedy regarded McNamara as his "most valued counselor" during the potentially disastrous Cuban Missile Crisis...
...Joseph S. Nye, another illustrious former Kennedy School dean who met McNamara in 1987 while working on an oral history project about the Cuban Missile Crisis, said that he had once thought of McNamara as "one-dimensional" and not to be admired. But later, through personal interactions, Nye said he found McNamara to be a man very interested in "moral questions" who genuinely cared about reducing poverty and nuclear risk...
...mistakes, and he wanted others to avoid those mistakes," Nye said. On a post to his blog on the Huffington Post, Nye wrote that "the lives of leaders are more complicated than I thought when I was an assistant professor," and that while part of him will never forgive McNamara for the consequences of his mistakes in Vietnam, McNamara has also earned his respect by trying "to come to terms with his actions and to help a younger generation to learn...
...McNamara's legendary quantitative approach to problem-solving was established long before he became the secretary of defense. After studying economics, mathematics, and philosophy at Berkeley, he earned his MBA at Harvard, where he explored systems analysis and the statistical techniques that he would later rely on in restructuring the Pentagon and managing the Vietnam War effort...