Robert McNamara

A year after I arrived in the US, I was walking around Dupont Circle in Washington, DC when I ran into Robert McNamara face-to-face. I remember that I froze. It felt very odd and a bit disturbing for me: here was the man who throughout my growing-up years in Lebanon, stood for the evil of Western powers: first as the head of the American war machine in Vietnam, and then as the head of the World Bank. I remember that I thought that I should not be running into Robert McNamara: that I should not see him. I thought that people like that one should not encoutner in life. But it was less disturbing for me than the one time I sat in the Boston metro car facing Amram Mitzna (just months after he left his positon as the colonial administator of the West Bank).