Obit

In the last week or so we have seen the passing of two totally different but oddly, equally significant figures from the last 40 years - Robert McNamara and Michael Jackson - figures from wildly different backgrounds and accomplishments but both saddened me all the same.

For people around my age group, you couldn't help but be a fan of Michael Jackson. I grew up immersed in his music - the first two albums I ever owned were Thriller and Bad - I can remember going to the movies to watch the glorified music video that was Moonwalker, and making lame attempts at the Smooth Criminal lean (that link is totally cool btw) and of course moonwalking. But for me personally, after Dangerous (and the arrival of grunge!) Jackson's relevance dimmed somewhat and in a funny kind of way, for all intents and purposes, he passed away long ago which has meant his passing has had far more of a tragic tinge rather than a shocking one.

On Robert McNamara, upfront I'll say that I believe that ultimately the expansion into Vietnam was LBJ's doing but also that McNamara should have gotten the hell out of there far far earlier. For anyone who doesn't know, McNamara was Kennedy and Johnson's Secretary of Defence. He remains the longest ever serving Defence Secretary and up until Rumsfeld, the most controversial.

But he is also one of my all time favourite political figures - there is something beautiful in politics when someone so powerful openly acknowledges and discusses their failings. I maintain that he is one of the smartest people to have ever held a Cabinet position in the US (or anywhere probably) and to this day I have his eleven lessons pinned above my desk. I still think that his first lesson of war - to empathize with your enemy - to understand their thinking and where they are coming from is his most important and is so applicable to politics - yet tragically missing from so many political strategies. It was Kennedy and McNamara's empathy with Kruschev that avoided nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis and as he notes in the video below, it was the lack of empathy that allowed the Vietnam War to get so far out of control.

This is a clip from the fantastic 2003 McNamara documentary, The Fog of War. For anyone interested in conflict and politics its an absolute must watch - his insights into the WWII fire bombing of Japan is especially mindblowing.