Former US defence secretary Robert McNamara, a leading architect of the Vietnam War, has died.
Mr McNamara was 93 years old.
Aside from his role as defence secretary, Mr McNamara also forged careers in industry and international finance.
He first came to prominence as one of the 'Whiz Kids' who revitalized Ford Motors after World War II and ended his public career as president of the World Bank.
But it is his role in the Vietnam War for which he will be best remembered.
Mr McNamara became to anti-war critics a symbol of a failed policy and pundits came to call the conflict in Vietnam ‘McNamara's War’.
He was named defence secretary by president John F Kennedy in 1961 and held the post longer than anyone before or since.
Robert McNamara had argued behind the scenes that the US must not slip quietly into the Vietnam war - that the decision must be brought before Congress and the issue debated openly.
President Kennedy initially authorised a small-scale increase in troop strength but, after his assassination in 1963, the new president bowed to pressure from his generals and began a major buildup that finally had more than 500,000 US troops in Vietnam.
Convinced the war in Vietnam could be ended by Christmas 1965, McNamara miscalculated resistance to US intervention both in Vietnam and at home.
In late 1967 he criticised the decision to bomb North Vietnam in retaliation for strikes on US bases in the south. President Lyndon B Johnson decided to remove him the following year, offering him the presidency of the World Bank.
He spent the rest of his life trying to explain the US role in Vietnam and apologising for his mistakes, becoming the subject of an Academy Award winning documentary, The Fog of War.
In the film, he discussed the difficult decision-making process during the Vietnam conflict as well as his Pentagon role in the Cuban missile crisis.
By the time the war ended in 1975 more than 58,000 US soldiers had been killed, as well as more than 3m Vietnamese from the North and South and around 1.5m Laotians and Cambodians.
