Robert S. McNamara
It's hard for me to think of much positive to say about a guy who, when I was growing up, was responsible for directing the Vietnam War. It seemed at times as though we escalated our involvement in that war just slowly enough to make sure that the Soviet Union could keep up. A massive effort from the beginning might well have won the war because of our tremendous productive capacity.
Alternatively, if we had done nothing more than send a few thousand advisors and lots of material support, the worst that would have happened is that we would have had a few hundred combat deaths over a number of years before South Vietnam was absorbed.
A whole generation of Americans, including more than a few of my relatives, were turned into ferocious haters of the United States, and partisans of communism everywhere by that war. It managed to waste (and I mean waste) an enormous number of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars (when that was a lot more money than it is today), and much of American standing in the world. And in the end: Vietnam still fell.
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