Robert Strange McNamara, one of the “Best and the Brightest” of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, died at his home early this morning. He was said to have suffered from a long illness but a cause of death was not given.

McNamara was an architect of the Vietnam War and a principal figure in the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) and Cuban missile crisis (1962). In 1995, at the age of 78, he told The Associated Press: “We… acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of our country. But we were wrong. We were terribly wrong,” as detailed in his book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. An Academy Award-winning documentary of McNamara’s life and times, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, was released in 2003.

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