Robert McNamara Memories For Sale
These items would be fun to look through.
Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense during both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, turns out to have been a meticulous pack rat. Next month Sotheby’s is auctioning off his personal memorabilia, including letters, many of them annotated in McNamara’s own hand; photographs; the flag and globe from his office at the Defense Department; a collection of North Vietnamese propaganda; crib notes he made before appearing in “The Fog of War,” the Errol Morris documentary; and three albums containing the original drawings of editorial cartoons about him, a great many of them unfavorable.
A lot of McNamara material has already gone to presidential libraries, according to Selby Kiffer, senior vice-president of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s. The 600 or so items which the auction house will sell off in 100 lots are ones he chose to keep with him at his apartment in the Watergate and his house in Virginia.
The sale, timed to the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, will take place on Oct. 23, and the material will be on view beginning Oct. 16. Among the letters is one written to McNamara from Jacqueline Kennedy thanking him for his steadfastness during the crisis. “For a while I felt that I really knew what was going on — but that lovely illusion has evaporated,” it says. “A couple of days of your late night and early morning telephone calls to the president — and at the same hours finding [National Security Advisor] Mac Bundy in one’s bedroom — have completely unhinged me.”
