I give the man props for genuinely being sorry but that does not absolve him from the damage that he's done. I'd hate to have been in his shoes though, I can't imagine what that kind of guilt would do to your nights rest.

If so, you need to put things in perspective, imho.

The total number of Vietnamese who were killed was to the tune of 3 million. That's a "semi-Holocaust". No one would compare a software glitch to the Holocaust, right?

People want to make McNamara out to be Evil with the big e. I think he probably wasn't. His actions later in life point to this. The idea is that if we accept that people make mistakes (sometimes HUGE ones) we can prevent a few of them in the future by learning from the past. If we'd really listened to McNamara its quite possible we might have avoided Iraq. If we just call him evil and forget about it, we miss the wisdom.

Sadly, McNamara would probably have been remembered as a great man had he left his office after JFK was killed. After all, McNamara played an important role in nuclear deterrence, during the Cuban missile crisis, etc. Too bad he was foolish enough to help start an unwinnable, useless war in Indochina.