Robert McNamara

Robert S. McNamara, the brainy Pentagon chief who directed the escalation of the Vietnam War despite private doubts the war was winnable or worth fighting, died Monday at 93.

McNamara revealed his misgivings three decades after the American defeat that some called "McNamara's war."

"We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of our country. But we were wrong. We were terribly wrong," McNamara told The Associated Press in 1995, the year his best-selling memoir appeared.

Closely identified with the war's early years, McNamara was a forceful public optimist. He predicted that American intervention would enable the South Vietnamese, despite internal feuds, to stand by themselves "by the end of 1965." The war ground on until 1975, with more than 58,000 U.S. deaths.

By the end of his Pentagon tenure, McNamara had come to doubt the value of widespread U.S. bombing, and he was fighting with his generals. President Lyndon Johnson lost faith or patience in him; McNamara would later write that he didn't know if he quit or was fired.

Reticent, McNamara long resisted offers to give a detailed accounting of his role in Vietnam. His son, who had protested the war his father helped to run, once said it was not within McNamara's "scope" to be reflective about the war.

McNamara's eventual mea culpa won him admiration from some former opponents of the war. Others said it was not enough, and three decades too late.

McNamara's book, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," appeared in 1995. McNamara disclosed that by 1967 he had deep misgivings about Vietnam — by then he had lost faith in America's capacity to prevail over guerrillas who had driven the French from the same jungle countryside.

Despite those doubts, he had continued to express public confidence that the application of enough American firepower would cause the Communists to make peace. In that period, the number of U.S. casualties — dead, missing and wounded — went from 7,466 to over 100,000.

McNamara wrote later that he and others had not asked five basic questions: "Was it true that the fall of South Vietnam would trigger the fall of all Southeast Asia? Would that constitute a grave threat to the West's security? What kind of war — conventional or guerrilla — might develop? Could the U.S. win with its troops fighting alongside the South Vietnamese? Should the U.S. not know the answers to all these questions before deciding whether to commit troops?"

He discussed similar themes in the 2003 documentary "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara." With the U.S. in the first year of the war in Iraq, it became a popular and timely art-house attraction and won the Oscar for best documentary feature.