Kevin Buckley was a reporter and Saigon bureau chief for Newsweek between 1968 and 1972. He is the author of Panama—The Whole Story (Simon & Schuster, 1991). He is a contributing editor of Playboy and an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

One of the great Vietnam War correspondents, former Newsweek Saigon bureau chief Kevin Buckley, on why Robert McNamara, who died Monday, was a descendant of the villain in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.