McNamara Memorabilia Goes for $1 Million at Auction

The personal memorabilia of Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was auctioned off at Sotheby's on Tuesday and brought in just over $1 million, a Sotheby's spokesman said. Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cuban missile crisis, in which McNamara played a crucial role, the sale - totaling $1,008,571 - far exceeded the pre-auction estimate.

A silver paperweight commissioned by President Kennedy to commemorate the missile crisis received some of the highest bids, and so did a pair of chairs from the Kennedy cabinet room, accompanied by a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy. All the items at the sale were ones McNamara, who died in 2009, had culled from his archives and chosen to keep with him at his apartment at the Watergate or his house in Virginia. Among them were three albums of editorial cartoons featuring McNamara, by no means all of them favorable, and the crib notes he used for his appearance in the Errol Morris documentary “The Fog of War.”