There are new reports out that Bobby Kennedy had a long, torrid affair with Jackie, his brother’s widow. 

Try as we might, we never seem to escape from the Kennedys’ America. 

Michael Jackson dies. Iraq burns. Iran seethes. 

And yet, someone out there still apparently cares that Bobby might have had a dalliance with Jackie.

The great Irish-American political dynasty has been in the news for another reason, which had nothing to do with vaguely incestuous, adulterous affairs.

Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara -- widely considered the architect of America’s disastrous Vietnam War policy -- died at the age of 93. 

He was an important public figure, but the fact that the U.S. is currently mired in another military venture abroad made the lessons of McNamara’s long life all the more relevant.

There has been some confusion about McNamara’s roots. Several sources (among them good ol’ unreliable Wikipedia) have noted that both of McNamara’s parents were of British ancestry. 

Not so. His father, Robert James McNamara, was the son of an Irish Catholic immigrant. He married a Protestant, with the decidedly un-Irish name of Claranell Strange.

McNamara took his mother’s maiden name as a middle name, giving future critics plenty of material to work with.

McNamara’s Irishness was never a very prominent part of his public life. At the height of his influence in Washington, Lyndon Johnson even saw McNamara’s mixed religious background as a plus. 

According to David Halberstam’s famous book “The Best and the Brightest,” Johnson thought of recruiting McNamara as a vice president. 

“The Protestants will think (McNamara’s) a Protestant and the Catholics will think he’s a Catholic,” one source told Halberstam.

Initially, though, McNamara was recruited by the very Irish Kennedy administration, which was headed by the famous playboy president but also included the brooding Bobby and a host of Hibernian operatives, among them

Lawrence O’Brien, Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers.

Arguably the single issue which united these Irish Catholic Americans – at a time when the Roman Church was still viewed with suspicion - was anti- Communism. 

This was an issue that allowed Irish Catholics to finally feel fully “American.”

Let’s not forget, the Kennedys were quite tight with the most famous Commie hunter of them all, Joe McCarthy. Bobby even worked for the much-despised Irish-American senator from Wisconsin.

It was in the name of anti-Communism that the Kennedy administration began meddling in Vietnam. And it was McNamara who remained in charge of the doomed operation when LBJ became president.

There’s almost no point, now, trying to persuade people that the JFK administration should bear plenty of blame for the Vietnam mess. 

JFK partisans always point to the famous interview the president gave in which, before things really heated up in Vietnam, he said it is “their war.” Which is to say, not America’s war to fight. 

The only trouble is that in a much less famous segment later in the same interview, JFK vowed to fight on in Vietnam in the name of battling Communist aggression.

In the end, thousands of Americans and many more Vietnamese died in the debacle. 

McNamara, later, began to speak publicly about the monumental errors he had made. He later served as president of the World Bank and is credited by some for promoting a more effective form of development in poor countries.

He even became a high profile critic of the Iraq War. 

McNamara’s Irish Catholic dad would have known that his son, having made his confession, was now performing penance.

But it’s important to add that McNamara was doing so not merely for his own sins, but for the others -- many of them Irish Catholic -- who contributed to

America’s stained legacy in southeast Asia. 

Of course, many Irish Catholics, from the Berrigan brothers to Eugene McCarthy, tried to combat the excesses of America’s anti-Communist crusades.

Also, there’s no point in rewriting history, as the New York Post did when it said McNamara “fell under the sway of those media and cultural elites whose drumbeat of pessimism helped undermine his honorable effort in Vietnam.”

No, McNamara was a sinner alright. But he was not alone.