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McNamara died at his home in Washington at the age of 93 after his health rapidly deteriorated, the Washington Post reported, citing members of his family.

Robert Strange McNamara left a lucrative job as the head of Ford Motor Company to become then president John F Kennedy's defence secretary in 1961, and shortly thereafter played a key role in two crises: The Bay of Pigs, the failed CIA-backed invasion of Cuba, and later the Cuban Missile Crisis.

At the same time, he was advising Kennedy to increase the role of the United States and would later do the same when Lyndon Johnson took over the White House following the death of his predecessor. The escalation would later evolve into one of the worst wars in US history, that claimed the lives of nearly 60,000 US soldiers and left a nation badly divided.

The conflict in Vietnam would later be dubbed "McNamara's War" and he became the peace movement's top villain. McNamara was famous for his penchant for strict quantitative analysis to measure progress, which allowed him to turn around Ford. But that approach became the focus of critics who alleged the statistical analysis used by McNamara to publicly argue the Americans were winning in Vietnam did not reflect the realities of war in Vietnam's jungles.

McNamara, the longest serving defence secretary ever, would later say that towards the end of his tenure he had begun to have deep reservations about the course of the war and advised Johnson to begin exploring peace negotiations.

Johnson, who had once held McNamara in the highest esteem, began to differ with his defence secretary on the best way forward, and by 1968 the president had shown McNamara the door with an appointment to head the World Bank, a job McNamara stayed in until 1981.

McNamara then focused his effort on helping developing countries, massively expanding the size of the World Bank and its capacity to issue loans during his 13-year tenure.

Despite his success, McNamara could not escape the ghosts of Vietnam. He generally refused to discuss the war after he left the Pentagon. He dodged questions about it during interviews, often saying his feelings about the conflict were personal and should remain private.

But he later changed his mind. In 1995 he published a controversial memoir called In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. In the book, where he admits, "we were terribly wrong", McNamara provided a candid account of the closed-door decision making that dragged the United States into the conflict.

In the preface, McNamara explained why he chose to go public with the book: "We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."

McNamara would also become a critic of future military conflicts. He warned against the first Gulf War in 1991, and sharply criticised former president George W Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In the years since his memoir, he organised seminars to discuss Vietnam, after including other key players in the policy, and met with his Vietnamese counterparts. He further outlined the fallacies of war decision making in the 2003 award-winning documentary "The Fog of War."

McNamara is survived by his second wife, Diana, whom he married in 2004. His first wife, Margaret, died in 1981 of cancer. They had three children together.