User:Favoir Andrews/sandbox

McNamara 's foreign policy implications came in an environment plagued by the pervasive politics of masculinity surrounding issues of national security and foreign policy decision making. The culture of masculinity that encapsulated the environment around Vietnam policy has been attributed to comparisons between their Ivy League credentials. Robert McNamara was part of this culture fostered in the elite and prestigious colleges or Universities of the USA and in some cases, the UK, such as Harvard, where McNamara attended to obtain his MBA; other advisors such as McGeorge Bundy attended Harvard, and Dean Rusk was an Oxford graduate. These highly educated men are argued to have contributed to the idea that '' Participation in war has, in the Western tradition, been a basic constituent of ideologies of elite masculinity and of male citizenship and political power.  . This elite culture or  patriotic brotherhood of warrior-intellectuals' are said to have contributed to the escalation of the war in Vietnam through this lens of masculine culture to be a hero, with war being seen as the primary vessel obtain such a quality.

A problem that is attributed to McNamara is that he was overly concerned with who was essentially tougher when it comes to foreign relations, especially war. This claim came to fruition with the advice that he gave to both President Kennedy and President Johnson, which was very much in favour of going to war in Vietnam and Senator Bill Russell describing him to Johnson as opinionated as hell and that he had made up his mind on this''. McNamara also found himself amongst some students protesting the war which lead to him breaking his customary relaxed persona and shouting on top of a car in which he questioned the manliness and toughness of the students, not grasping that the students doubted his humanity, not his machismo , thus contributing to the idea that people in positions such as McNamara were compelled to view masculinity as the key factor in situations such as conflict and war.