So old McNamara has gone to his reward. I was rather surprised listening to the radio on the way in that they didn't say the words "war" and "criminal," since it's long been not a fringe but a legitimate mainstream question as to whether McNamara was such during the Vietnam years. He all but acknowledged it himself.

He did acknowledge it, in fact, in Errol Morris's amazing documentary "The Fog of War," but the admission there had to do with World War II and the civilian conventional bombing of Tokyo, of which he was an architect. The key reflection:

I don't fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. The US-Japanese War was one of the most brutal wars in all of human history – kamikaze pilots, suicide, unbelievable. What one can criticize is that the human race prior to that time – and today – has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it, "the rules of war." Was there a rule then that said you shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill, shouldn't burn to death 100,000 civilians in one night? LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

Well, the difference is that the winners make the rules, that's all.

It's been several years since I've seen the film, but as I recall (correct me if I'm wrong), he didn't quite cop to the charge re Vietnam. He drifted off into reflective silence. Is it possible to think that someone was probably a war criminal and yet also is in some regards a sympathetic or at least complex figure? McNamara did show some public remorse for his actions and was pretty clearly tortured on some level in his later years. I wouldn't put him in Kissinger's class, quite. Vietnam had many fathers, and life is complicated. The Vietnam "problem" dates back, if you really want to dig into it, to 1947, when Ho Chi Minh wrote at least two letters to then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson basically saying: Look, I'm in Paris now, but one of these days I'm going back to Saigon and I'm going to lead this nationalist movement for independence, and we'd like your support. Acheson never so much as wrote him back. That was the crucial error - America could have placed itself on the side of nationalist liberation movements rather than against them, and those movements (or many of them anyway) would not have been drawn to Moscow, possibly. And Acheson was normally more far-sighted - he was steadfastly against the CIA-led coups in Guatemala and Iran that the successor Eisenhower administration undertook. But he wasn't going to cross the French on Indochina for some reason. It's been a while since I've read all this, but it's likely the case that he needed French backing on some other matter, I guess. All this is fascinating history that's not often told. We think "Cold War" and we tend to think of hardened belligerence, but in fact there was - for a time - an intense debate in the US establishment about how that war should be prosecuted. Things might have been different, although it was probably inevitable that the hard-liners won.