McNamara was President Johnson's right hand man during the Vietnam War. He's the one who told President Johnson about the attacks against American ships near Vietnam, and he's the one who whipped up Congress to vote for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution immediately afterwards.

So yeah, you could say that he was heavily in favor of the move to attack Vietnam. After all, U.S. forces had been attacked right?

Well, that's where it gets complicated. (And juicy.)

McNamara went through a personal reflection of sorts after the Vietnam War, and quite a lot of truth was revealed in the decades after. In 1995, for example, North Vietnam's defense minister Vo Nguyen Giap told McNamara that the second attack in the Gulf of Tonkin never happened.

(There had been some discussion in Congress in the '60s of the possibility that the attack hadn't happened, but as you know from the near-unanimous vote on Tonkin Gulf Resolution, all minds were clearly set on war.)

After the whole mess in Vietnam finally ended in the early '70s (60,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese dead, three countries bombed to oblivion), McNamara stated that it was all a mistake. He said:

"The fundamental issue of Tonkin Gulf involved not deception but, rather, misuse of power bestowed by the resolution." (Source).

So, it seems as though the same man who brought the original proposal to Congress reflected later that it was a bad idea. Hey, live and learn right? Or does that phrase maybe not apply when it involves thousands of lives…

To serve as a final compare and contrast, we might also wonder what would have happened if John F. Kennedy had still been president, instead of Lyndon B. Johnson. JFK was assassinated in 1963, but McNamara was his Secretary of Defense just as he was Johnson's.

In the 2003 documentary "Fog of War" McNamara says that:

"Kennedy hadn't said before he died whether, faced with the loss of Vietnam, he would withdraw; but I believe today that had he faced that choice, he would have withdrawn." (Source)

It's always tempting to "what if" the past, but remember that McNamara was the one who orchestrated the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and here, years later, he's almost saying he wished it had never happened.

We guess war takes its toll on those who make the decisions almost as much as those who pull the triggers.