28 placing apart the most obvious disingenuousness of McNamara’s declare approximately American readiness to make concessions within the lead-up to the conflict, allow us to specialise in the it sounds as if huge significance McNamara conspicuously and continually locations on notions of tragedy in his attempt to come back to phrases with, and elicit valuable classes from, his involvement within the Vietnam clash. This excessive point of highbrow and emotional funding invitations us to think about the character of the connection among McNamara and Robert Kennedy. To what quantity, if any, have been McNamara’s makes use of of tragedy motivated via the instance of Robert Kennedy? One can't the prospect that Robert Kennedy’s deeply own engagement with tragedy had a power upon McNamara. As a member of John F. Kennedy’s presidential cupboard, McNamara turned an admirer of Robert Kennedy in popularity of the latter’s the most important position in bringing a few profitable end to the Cuban Missile hindrance. 29 McNamara was once a typical customer to the socalled Hickory Hill seminars, casual per 30 days lectures provided via traveling literati THE POLITICS OF TRAGEDY eleven and intellectuals to management officers and Kennedy affiliates, at Robert Kennedy’s Virginia property. all through his tenure at protection below President Lyndon Johnson, McNamara remained on pleasant phrases with Kennedy, eating with him frequently and informally discussing the country of U. S. army and political efforts in South Vietnam. McNamara may have had considerable chance to develop into conscious either one of Kennedy’s flavor for the literature of tragedy and the Greek spirit and of the significance of this literature as a touchstone for Kennedy’s evolving feel of political vocation. McNamara’s offerings to start on reflection with an evocation of Aeschylean knowledge and to finish it with a “haunting” poem via Rudyard Kipling (“The Palace”), which takes up the subject of reworking defeated human aspirations into the muse for renewed human attempt, it seems that converge with Kennedy’s kind of expressing a sad sensibility. even as, and as we now have already mentioned, McNamara’s use of tragedy to evaluate and distribute accountability for the infliction of avoidable ache and affliction is considerably varied in substance from Kennedy’s. it sounds as if unwilling to concede that ego and personality instead of mind were on the middle of his mess ups in shaping coverage through the Vietnam struggle, McNamara writes the tragedy of U. S. army intervention in Vietnam as considered one of highbrow failure. Implicitly evoking the hubris that troubled Creon, king of Thebes, Kennedy’s quotation of Sophocles’s Antigone at Kansas country identifies overweening delight because the foundation of the tragedy of U. S. army involvement in Vietnam. 30 The strangely extreme and public engagements with notions of tragedy validated through Kennedy and McNamara display how major the legacy of Greek tragedy could be for the way political actors take into consideration enterprise, cohesion, and political id.