Robert McNamara was one of the most remarkable figures in the US Government in the 1960s. He helped escalate the arms race - and then argued against it. He escalated the US's involvement in the Vietnam War - and then he later admitted it had been a mistake.

He was a good example of how some people are often a lot smarter after they leave office than when they are in office. At least he was good enough eventually to admit he was wrong - many politicians go through the rest of their life in a state of denial. McNamara had a brilliant career at university and then went into the US Air Force in World War II. His early peacetime life was in the Ford car company.

The 1961 Kennedy Administration wanted to recruit the "best and the brightest" and not necessarily just mates of the president or big donors to the party. McNamara - a Republican voter - had just become head of the Ford company when he was invited by the new Democrat President to become Secretary of Defence.

McNamara took over one of the world's largest organizations. He tried to make it a more cost efficient system.

McNamara as Defence Secretary is chiefly remembered for two big mistakes. First, he escalated the arms race. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race against Republican Richard Nixon claimed that the Eisenhower Administration (in which Nixon was serving as Vice President) had allowed the Soviet Union to pull ahead in the arms race and that there was now a "missile gap" in the USSR's favour. In fact that was a lie - the US well ahead.

But having stoked up the fears of the American public, the new Kennedy Administration then had to go ahead with a massive expansion of the arms race. Ironically McNamara's death on July 6, occurred as news emerged of the current Democrat President is visiting Russia to negotiate a reduction in the arms race.

In his later life McNamara joined others in opposing the arms race. The only occasion I met him was just over a decade ago when he was a member of the Keating Government's international Canberra Commission of distinguished figures to generate ideas on reducing the arms race (and I was a member of the National Consultative Committee on Peace and Disarmament). The Commission were in Canberra to present their final report to the Australian Government.

I thought it ironical that McNamara was now identified with those of us in the peace movement. But he told me that he regarded the level of the arms race as an unintended consequence of his decisions in the early 1960s. He had had no idea then of just how big the arms race could become.

The second big McNamara mistake was the Vietnam War. The Vietnam military operation the new Kennedy Administration inherited from the outgoing Eisenhower Administration was minute. Indeed the real worries were over the Cold War in Europe, notably Berlin. As we now know, McNamara developed later doubts while in office about whether the Vietnam War could be won - but he still proceeded with the escalation. He left office in 1968 and became President of the World Bank. He was a Christian and possibly he saw his time working for the poor (1968-1981)as a suitable penance for all his sins committed at the Pentagon.

His most constructive years were towards the end of his life when he reflected the errors of his time in office and he tried to encourage others to learn from them. He was a co-author of "Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing and Catastrophe in the 21st Century". This is still well worth reading. It is more than a book of the World War I Wilson Administration and his pioneering ideas on international co-operation.

One of the book's suggestions is the need for "empathy" - trying to look at a problem from the point of view of the other side. He admitted that this was one of the biggest failures of the Kennedy Administration. This doesn't mean being "sympathetic" to the other side, let alone surrendering to it. But at least get try to get inside the mind of the other side.

I think that a lack of empathy helps explain recent US failures in the Middle East. The Bush Administration failed to understand the complexities of Arab and Iranian politics and just blundered from one disaster into another. We need to see if the new Obama Administration will do any better.

The tragedy is that politicians may learn - but often only after the damage has been done and usually after they have left office. A new government then begins the process of repeating the old errors.

Keith Suter