Robert Mcnamara Dead, Report

Monday, July 6, 2009 at 9:13 pm

Robert Mcnamara Dead,Washington Post, which is reporting that Robert McNamara, who served as defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was one of the top architects of the U.S. war in Vietnam, died Monday. He was 93.

The deeply controversial McNamara, who served as head of the World Bank after stepping down from his Pentagon post at the height of the Vietnam war, died at home in his sleep, the daily reported.

He also had a brief but storied career as an executive at Ford, where as one of the automaker’s “Whiz Kids” he rose rapidly through the ranks, in 1960 becoming its first president outside the Ford family.

Robert Strange McNamara was born in San Francisco June 9, 1916, to Robert James McNamara, a wholesale shoe salesman, and the former Clara Nell Strange, both of British ancestry.

Mr. McNamara married Margaret Craig, a fellow student at the University of California, who died of cancer just before he left the World Bank. They had a son and a daughter.

And in 2004, at age 88, he married his Italian-born sweetheart, Diana Masieri Byfield in Assisi, Italy.