The death this week of Robert McNamara brought to the fore the two crucial international political issues involving his stewardship as secretary of defense under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

McNamara was forced out of the position by Johnson after his secretary had provided him with responses that conflicted with the president's on the subject of the sharply divisive Vietnam War.  

The former secretary in a revealing biography released in 1993, better than a generation after his Pentagon service, revealed his ultimate belief that the war could not be won.  

The reason why David Halberstam and other American reporters on the Vietnam scene at the time refused to provide McNamara for candor credit after the fact were burning memories of how he questioned the patriotism of their opposition to a war he later conceded to know at that same time to be a lost cause.