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McNamara's War was the nickname for the Vietnam conflict that NBC anchor Brian Williams and ABC anchor Charles Gibson quoted in their obituary for that era's Secretary of Defense. "He became the architect of the Vietnam War," was the way CBS' David Martin put it in his for Robert McNamara, aged 93. NBC's Williams used John Kennedy's quote that McNamara was "the smartest man he ever met" and CBS' Martin called him "the best and the brightest of John Kennedy's New Frontier." ABC's Gibson acknowledged the "extraordinary accomplishments" of running the World Bank and modernizing Ford Motors. Yet he returned to that epitaph: "Everything is overshadowed by Vietnam."
Both ABC and NBC included a plug for Errol Morris' documentary on the dead man. In Fog of War, McNamara admitted he would have been tried as a war criminal for his fire bombing of civilians during World War II--would have, that is, if Japan had been victorious.
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