Robert McNamara
You won't find anything about it in the obituaries that ran yesterday, but the incident in Robert McNamara's life that always fascinated me was when a young anti-war protester tried and nearly succeeded in throwing the former Defense Secretary off the Martha's Vineyard ferry on Sept. 29, 1972. He had him over the side, but McNamara saved himself by clingling tightly to the railing until help arrived. He did not press charges, and the 27-year-old artist who had tried to kill him vanished.
But not entirely. Washington Post reporter Paul Hendrickson tracked him down and interviewed him for a 1995 book on McNamara. The artist still lives on Martha's Vineyard, according to Hendrickson, and has run into McNamara at least once over the years.
He had been consumed by rage over the 58,000 useless American deaths in the Vietnam War, of which McNamara was the chief architect and engineer. When he saw McNamara enjoying himself with friends on the ferry, he lured him out to the deck and tried to kill him. Such were the passions engendered by the Vietnam War.
If you want to know what McNamara was all about, watch Errol Morris' Academy Award-winning 2000 documentary, "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara." McNamara, by then in a repentant stage in his life, cooperated fully with Morris. The film is chilling. Watch it and then consider what happened to McNamara that day on the ferry.