Remembering Robert McNamara

by Jonathan Schell

I first met Robert McNamara in the summer of 1967. The meeting had been arranged by Jerome Wiesner, then the provost of MIT. I had just returned from a trip to South Vietnam, where, as a reporter for The New Yorker, I had witnessed the substantial destruction, by American air power, of two provinces, Quang Ngai and Quang Tinh. Flying in the back seat of Forward Air Control planes--small Cessnas that coordinate the bombing and strafing runs by radio contact with both ground forces and the bomber pilots--I measured the keep reading here..