Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara passed away today at the age of 93. I vividly remember his appearance on Diane Sawyer’s Show, in the mid 1990s, when he cried and made his mea culpa, officially conceding that his Vietnam policies were terribly misguided. It was actually his first broadcast interview about Vietnam. It was quite impressive to see such a personality sob like a baby. His tears showed that he had a thread of dignity left. I would not imagine Dick Cheney going on TV and acknowledging his errors and crimes. McNamara was promoting a book he wrote, called In Retrospect, in which he analyzed the 1960s and the Vietnamese events in hindsight. I read the book in 1995. I was taking a class on American Foreign Policy, taught by Seyom Brown of Brandeis University, who was a guest professor at Harvard. The book was quite interesting but failed to adequately explain how those David Halberstam sarcastically called “The best and the brightest” committed so many huge blunders and lied their way out of it.
Diane Sawyer was one of Barbara Walters main competitors. Their interviewing styles were very different, Diane’s approach being softer and less blunt. I remember reading that while she was in College, Diane Sawyer dated Bill Bradley, who would become the famous basketball star and later a US senator who would run for the presidency in 2000. He ran an interesting campaign, was endorsed by respected political figures like the late Paul Wellstone, and by intellectuals like Betty Friedan and Cornel West. I followed his campaign closely. I was a bit disappointed when Bradley was defeated by Al Gore in the Democratic Primaries. Diane later dated Richard Holbrooke and ended up marrying movie director Mike Nichols, who directed many interesting movies like Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf in the 60s, and years later Working Girl, the remarkable Death and the Maiden, Regarding Henry, Primary Colours, and lately The world according to Charlie Wilson.