Robert McNamara
Robert McNamara
Robert Strange McNamarawas an American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, during which time he played a major role in escalating the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Following that, he served as President of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth9 June 1916
CitySan Francisco, CA
CountryUnited States of America
Let's go in, let's totally destroy Cuba.
They'll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you're going to destroy nations.
Rationality will not save us.
There is no more important task in a democracy than resolving the differences among people and finding a course of action that will be supported by a sufficient number to permit the nation to achieve a better life for all.
The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.
It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.
Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, should or could be the global gendarme.
...but highly placed sources within the Kennedy Administration disagreed: "[T]he assumption that the strategic nuclear balance mattered in any way was wrong... As far as I am concerned, it made no difference... If my memory serves me correctly, we had some five thousand strategic nuclear warheads as against t heir three hundred. Can anyone seriously tell me that their having three hundred and forty would have made any difference? The military balance wasn't changed. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now..."
It is true that at the time [1962] we had a strategic nuclear force of approximately five thousand warheads compared to the Soviet's three hundred.
I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.
Engagement is the conscious inhabitation of your body and mind. Practice is happening when your open awareness is moving with, in and through your embodied activity. Intrinsic to practice is your conscious participation with your life. Engagement is the conduction of your free and open awareness through your activities, whatever they may be.
I like to run down to the beach and have a little swim in the nude in the morning.
We bought products off a man who was licensed to sell them. They're telling me that there were certain products he wasn't able to sell. I only bought products that were advertised for sale to everybody.
Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.