Why you picking on rummy he was a great man just kidding tough choice. They are both so much a like. I go with both.
That's because you continue to fail to understand what a kind, benevolent nation we really are. Oh, and Cheney was the worst, hands down. That son of a bitch killed my super tomcat!! Now the Navy has to fly around a gold plated POS named after an insect!!
Just so long as the Secretary of the Navy has equal footing, I'm cool. Let the Chair Force die on the vine.
I can understand Congress not declaring war in the nuclear age though. It helps to keep one more layer between a conventional conflict, even if it is a war, and total war, which these days means mass genocide.
I'd have to go with McNamara just because we've had more time to put his fuckups into perspective. And of course Vietnam was a much broader war, had a huge political impact, and killed 14 times as many Americans as Iraq did. We don't have the perspective to weigh everything Rumsfield did - hell I'd imagine there's a pretty good chance we don't KNOW everything Rumsfield did. But he certainly massively screwed the pooch by thinking he knew better than the War College and the Pentagon war planners. That kind of hubris is unforgivable. I don't think we'll be able to make an accurate call on that for another decade or so. James Forrestall wasn't a bad Sec of Def, but he sure had a weird death.
John Tower would have been fun if he had passed the nomination process. He was so drunk most of the time that he probably would have invaded Ontario just for the fun of it.
IIRC, his daughter that died in the plane crash with him was pretty hot. By the way, McNamara hands down. It wasn't just Vietnam. It was the way he handled the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Insisting on a giant ICBM force (that became vulnerable in only a few years) while neglecting U.S. bombers because "when he ran down the numbers, missiles were so much more efficient than bombers". And people bitching that Cheney killed the Super Tomcat. Hell, McNamara killed the B-70 Valkryie!!! One of the most magnificent aircraft of all time.
