Robert McNamara passes away (obits here and here) unlamented in this space. Ditto in Bob Herbert’s New York Times column.

Long after the horror of Vietnam was over, McNamara would concede, in remarks that were like salt in the still festering wounds of the loved ones of those who had died, that he had been “wrong, terribly wrong” about the war. I felt nothing but utter contempt for his concession.

The same cannot be said of some other supposedly diehard opponents of the Vietnam War.

In December of 2003 McNamara came to Boston for a Kennedy Library Forum with New York Times columnist Frank Rich and documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (transcript here), who had just released “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.”

In the SRO audience that day were assorted paleoliberals and goo-goos and New Frontierniks and dewy-eyed nostalgics who reminisced about The Best & The Brightest without a wisp of irony.

Their reaction to McNamara’s weepy performance?

Warm, enthusiastic, enthralled.

I kept thinking, “It’s bleeping Robert McNamara. What’s wrong with you people?”

Robert S. McNamara – the S stood for Strange, oddly – was the Typhoid Mary of the 1960s. You can find his fingerprints all over the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, the Gulf of Potemkin – make that, Tonkin – escapade, and, of course, the travesty of the Vietnam War.

There’s not a wet eye in my household now that he’s gone.