"...attempted to do some good in the last 25 years."
Actually since the time he went to the World Bank, so more like 40 years. That record plus In Retrospect may or may not do something to salvage his reputation in the eyes of history.
The LeMay quote has achieved wide circulation but I think it oversimplifies the issue. Total war, as practiced by 20th century industrial powers, does not lend itself to clear dividing lines between what is military and what is not. Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, a figure of considerable distaste these days (to put it mildly) was under no illusions about what he was doing to Germany: "The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive ... should be unambiguously and publicly stated. That aim is the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers and the disruption of civilised community life throughout Germany. It should be emphasised that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories." As he said to General Ira Eaker, his US counterpart, "You destroy a factory and they rebuild it. In six weeks they are in operation again. I kill all their workmen, and it takes twenty-one years to provide new ones." Perhaps Dresden was an outlier, but with regard to Germany's principal industrial cities, was he wrong to see these, and a large % of their occupants, as legitimate military targets? Was the situation any different in Japan, where war-related light industries and fabrication facilities were scattered across large urban areas amid residential areas housing workers and their families? Historians have looked at these questions, and I believe the answers are not as clear-cut as MacNamara would have them.
So much ink has been spilled on the Allies' WW2 bombing of enemy cities that I'm not sure it's worth going into it again. However, I believe Harris was wrong to see German cities as legitimate military targets, esp. after the U.S. entered the war. The bombing might have been less unjustifiable when Britain was facing Germany more or less alone in a period of "supreme emergency" (Churchill's phrase, via Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars) and had few if any other means of striking back. The period of supreme emergency ended, I would argue, when the U.S. entered the war (or perhaps earlier,after the Battle of Britain) but of course the bombing policy did not change. The destruction of Dresden, Hamburg and other German cities killed tens of thousands of civilians and whether it shortened the war at all or substantially helped the Allies' war effort is so unclear that historians are still debating the issue. Just b/c Arthur Harris understood what he was doing does not mean he was right.
I'll let someone else address the bombing of Japanese cities, though I believe this was, if anything, more destructive and less discriminate.
To me, the interesting point is that McNamara saw himself as a potential war criminal.
As for as his time at the World Bank, McNamara presided over the institution in a period when it fully made the transition from funding Western European reconstruction (as it had in the 1950s and early 1960s) to fighting poverty in the "third" and "fourth" worlds. He also helped introduce some modest environmental reforms.
Then again, the Bank in the McNamara period was notorious for funding centralized high-profile projects that were both environmentally and socially destructive. Too few had the kind of positive effect on development that the institution was overtly seeking.
Bruce Rich tells the story in Mortgaging the Earth.
Rational Choice theory was all the rage in the 1960's. Subsequently this has been brought down to earth by Chaos and Complexity theories. McNamara may have been a victim of his times when these newer disciplines were unavailable.
Well, chaos and complexity (and a lack of rationality) certainly represents the Bush years.
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