One of the "best and the brightest" is gone.

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Robert S. McNamara, who died today at 93, may, in President Kennedy's estimation, have been the brightest of them all. He came to public service, as JFK's and later Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense, from the presidency of Ford Motor Company, where he and his fellow "whiz kids" succeeded with a new toolkit of statistical techniques that refined the earlier, blunter techniques of Fordism and Taylorism. He brought that toolkit to Defense, and to the conduct of the war in Vietnam, where the emphasis on statistics was reflected in the periodic "body count" reports. His decisions led to the death or maiming of many thousands, both American and Vietnamese.

He later acknowledged that "we were wrong" (he never said "I was"), in the apology shown in the video clip above.

Goh Nakamura performs Simon and Garfunkel's "America"

Last year I marked the Fourth here by posting a clip of Paul Simon singing "American Tune", which, I noted, had a melody that stems from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and which Bach got from an earlier work by Hassler (a factoid that has led many a web searcher to my blog). This year I'm captivated by the clip above of San Francisco musician Goh Nakamura performing on the street for a lunchtime crowd, doing "America", a song from Simon and Garfunkel's 1967 Bookends album.


Have a joyous Fourth.