The death of this man would have remained unknown to me had it not been for the Courier Mail obituaries yesterday. With the absolute ridiculous hype about the death of a so called hero, McNamara’s death has gone almost unnoticed.

I won’t go through every moment of his life but he was absolutely hated by a lot of people for a lot of years as a major supporter of the Vietnam war. I am sure like all of us he is guilty of making mistakes, however my belief is that he may have been a little over blamed in the role he is perceived to have played in mongering the Vietnam war.

He was been portrayed in a few movies; JFK and 13 Days (both I recommend) to name a few but it was his feature in the 2003 documentary ‘Fog Of War’ that most interested me. A movie I have watched a number of times and recommend it to anyone who has any interest on how the world works and what forces drive some of the decisions we all live with. A meeting with former Vietnamese leaders years after the war indicated just how unfortunate some of these events were. Misunderstandings were at the absolute core and unfortunately resulted in much suffering on both sides.

Obviously a highly intelligent individual who in the end was humble enough to admit that he did the best he could with the information he had at the time.

There is no key to knowledge of this world
There is just life experience…
Any experience you can gather from the history of others…
Careful consideration…
Common sense…and
In the end an ounce of luck

He left us with far better ‘lessons’ than the above, but it is the best I can come up with for the moment. It is a shame his death was totally overshadowed by the death of someone who taught us very little.

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