What a strange feeling it is for those of our era to hear that Robert McNamara is dead. Widely reviled for the Vietnam War, he later expressed great ambivalence in the documentary "The Fog of War." He was a liberal, but of that time - for instance, as Secretary of Defense, he signed a directive that forbade military men and women from patronizing segregated establishments in the communities surrounding a military base - but continued the war long after he knew it was a lost cause.

Mr. McNamara is best remembered — and in some quarters still reviled — for the seven years he spent at the Pentagon and the part he played in waging the Vietnam War. The controversy that erupted in 1995 when he published his memoir, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” demonstrated the extent to which the scars he bore remained unhealed.

No one person can be assigned responsibility for escalating the US role in the conflict. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk: Each played his part. To many, though, it was “McNamara’s war,” as US Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon once put it.

“I don’t object to its being called McNamara’s war,” Mr. McNamara said during a 1964 press conference. “I think it is a very important war, and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.”

Those words would come to haunt him.

[...] Kennedy reportedly wanted Mr. McNamara to replace Rusk as secretary of state in his second administration. And Robert Kennedy said he and his brother speculated about supporting Mr. McNamara for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968.

The Kennedys were not alone in falling under the spell of the McNamara mystique. Johnson offered him the vice-presidential nomination in 1964. “He’s the best man available,” LBJ told a friend. When Mr. McNamara declined, Johnson pronounced him “No. 1 executive vice president in charge of the Cabinet.” He later awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

US Senator Barry Goldwater, who would become a harsh critic, initially hailed Mr. McNamara as “one of the best secretaries ever, an IBM machine with legs.” David Halberstam, who would later assail Mr. McNamara in his book “The Best and the Brightest,” wrote in 1963 that “McNamara may well be this country’s most distinguished civil servant of the last decade.”

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(Robert McNamara - Every time he opened his mouth, doom flew out)

To anyone of a certain generation, the name Robert S. McNamara will probably evoke the same (or very similar) reactions as this generations Donald Rumsfeld does.

Anger, bitterness, rage, betrayal - simmering arrogance, wrongheadedness and simple belligerence. All over a war that, like Iraq, should not have existed in the first place. And yet it was McNamara's insistence we wage it, even to the point of deceit.

I remember his "Mea Culpa tour" of the 1990's, begging forgiveness for his wrongdoings and his errors - saying in fact, The Gulf of Tonkin incident may not have happened. And some 60,000 casualties and untold wounded later . . . .

But as Joseph N.Welch once told Joseph McCarthy: "Your forgiveness sir, will have to come from a power other than myself".

And so here is a Press Conference, typical of the McNamara era during the Vietnam War, from February 7, 1965 - as the escalation and casualties mount. As we sighed and waited for our draft notices to appear.