The career of former United States secretary of defence Robert McNamara, who died aged 93 on July 6, had few parallels in American history.
During his lifetime he was perceived as a high-flying academic, a widely admired business executive, a ruthless killer of innocent women and children, and the man who did most to alleviate the developing world’s chronic poverty. There was some validity in all these perspectives.
From his earliest years in San Francisco, McNamara was obviously exceptionally talented. He was one of the brightest pupils to come out of Piedmont High School, but the Depression left his family little money for his further education. When he discovered that tuition at the University of California, Berkeley, would cost only $52 a year, McNamara enrolled for courses in economics, mathematics and philosophy. He wrote later that ”the defining moments in my education came in my philosophy and mathematics curricula. The ethics courses forced me to shape my values; studying logic exposed me to rigour and precision in thinking.”
In 1939 he emerged with first-class honours in economics and, after securing a master’s degree from Harvard Business School, became an accountant with Price Waterhouse. But he had left such a strong impression at Harvard that in 1940 it invited him to join its faculty as assistant professor of accounting. That year, he married his teenage sweetheart, Margaret Craig.
War was already raging in Europe and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour came a year after McNamara assumed his new post. Poor eyesight precluded him from military service, but he volunteered to train air force staff in the statistical control of the nation’s vast programme to provide aircraft, munitions and crews for global warfare. The effectiveness of this work led to his transfer to Britain in 1943 to set up a control system for the Eighth Air Force’s bombing campaign in Europe. His skill in ensuring that planes were ready when needed, loaded with the appropriate bombs and with the required pilots, navigators, bomb-aimers and gunners won him the Legion of Merit and the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Just after the war had ended, Margaret contracted a severe case of polio that required medical treatment he could not afford. Instead of returning to Harvard, and with his reputation as an administrator, he joined nine of his military colleagues in a team offering management expertise to commercial organisations. Henry Ford II, whose motor company was in deep trouble at the time, took up the team’s offer and let its members loose on a root-and-branch shake-up of his firm. The so-called ”Whiz Kids” were deeply unpopular with other executives, but their reorganisation and decentralisation of Ford was later cited as one of the business triumphs of post-war America.
McNamara rose steadily up the company ladder: assistant general manager of the car division, group executive, and eventually the first non-member of the Ford family to become the company’s president. This attainment coincided with John F Kennedy’s election to the White House and, seven weeks after starting his new job, McNamara was offered a choice of posts in the new administration — Treasury or defence.
He opted to become defence secretary on the understanding that he could select his own senior staff, a promise Kennedy kept in spite of the political difficulties some choices presented. In fact, it soon became evident that the new Cabinet officer had much to learn about politics.
One of Kennedy’s major campaign issues had been America’s supposed ”missile gap” with the Soviet Union. McNamara, once confirmed by the Senate, conducted an urgent inquiry into how this gap could be closed. At his first press conference he was asked about his findings and responded briskly that the gap was really heavily in America’s favour. The Republicans went crazy, some even demanding that the election be rerun.
Such hiccups apart, the new secretary settled in to take control of the military bureaucracy that had burgeoned during the Eisenhower years. The Pentagon had 3,5-million people in uniform and one million civilian staff. Its annual expenditure was higher than the national budget of any other Nato country and it was a maze of warring fiefdoms. However, the strategic posture of this vast empire, which McNamara accused of ”buying every bright, shiny new gadget that comes along”, was to meet any external attack with massive nuclear retaliation. This doomsday approach made no sense to McNamara and he set about reorientating America’s defence policy and persuading other members of Nato to concentrate on building up their conventional forces.
He secured funds from Congress to augment US ground forces by 300 000 and to equip them for rapid deployment around the world. He also rationalised procurement policies to stop one service spending vast sums on items only marginally different from those used by another. Along with these changes he restructured the US nuclear arsenal to give the country what he called a ”second strike capacity”. The prospect of mutual annihilation, he argued, would effectively curb any temptation for Moscow to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack.
Not long after this realignment had begun, McNamara became increasingly embroiled in the war in Vietnam, stemming from Kennedy’s belief that America’s reputation with Nato and the non-aligned world would be undermined if it seemed unwilling to protect a small Asian nation from communist subversion. By the time of Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 this doctrine had brought 10 000 American ”advisers” to South Vietnam. When President Lyndon B Johnson took office, he retained McNamara at the Pentagon and repeatedly sent him to assess the military and political situation on the ground. As McNamara freely acknowledged later, his belief in the domino theory in South-East Asia — that a communist victory in Vietnam would lead to the successive collapse of all surrounding governments — was ”limited and shallow”.
America became mired ever more deeply in the conflict. A year into Johnson’s presidency the number of American troops had doubled. The following year saw a further fourfold increase and American deaths reached 500. By the time Johnson decided to leave the White House, more than 180 000 American troops were involved and 16 000 had been killed. (By the time of the Paris Accords in 1973, the American toll reached 58 181, the South Vietnamese army’s about 200 000 and the North Vietnamese army’s and Viet Cong guerrillas’ about 900 000. Vietnamese civilian deaths totalled more than one million.)
Anti-war movement
As the anti-war movement swelled, protesters began to dub the conflict ”McNamara’s war”. He was constantly reviled in public. Once, while lunching with his wife during a Christmas break in Colorado, another diner came to their table to scream: ”Baby burner. You have blood on your hands.”
He acknowledged in his memoirs, In Retrospect (1995), the emotional strain such incidents generated. In fact, his own disenchantment with the war was growing rapidly. He had argued for some time that only the Saigon government could offer a political solution. The Thieu regime’s continued vacillation and corruption convinced him that it was time for America to disengage.
On 1 November 1967 he expressed his reservations in a confidential memorandum to President Johnson. ”I never received a reply,” he recalled later. ”Four weeks later President Johnson announced my election as president of the World Bank and my departure from the Defence Department at an unspecified date. I do not know to this day whether I quit or was fired.”
In spite of the initial military resistance to his structural and doctrinal reforms at the Pentagon, his departure brought widespread expressions of regret. One of the most fervent came from the army’s chief of staff, General Harold Johnson, who said that McNamara was the only defence secretary who had ever actually run the Pentagon.
His tenure at the World Bank lasted for 15 years and was equally momentous. The organisation’s principal function is to provide cheap funds for developing nations which, at the time of McNamara’s accession, were directed primarily at large industrial projects. Unfortunately, the main effect of such schemes was to enrich local elites and leave millions as deprived as ever. McNamara set out to find new sources of revenue for the bank and to impose conditions on future loans to ensure their benefit was spread more equitably. He embarked on a strenuous campaign to raise money, not only from member countries but from the international capital markets and from the newly affluent Arab oil states.
The effect of his financial initiative was that an institution that had been lending about $1-billion a year when he joined was disbursing $12,5-billion a year when he left. The bank’s total commitment to developing nations rose in those 15 years from $13-billion to $92-billion.
He also shifted the emphasis of its funding from the grandiose to the practical. About 70% of the new loans went on projects designed to assist rural development. Even so, when he retired in 1981, McNamara said that the bank ”had barely begun to develop its full potential” and he spent his later years strenuously writing and lecturing about the dangers of world poverty.
He also continued as a campaigner for arms reduction. In a study published in 1990, he argued: ”We can enter the 21st century with a far more stable relationship between East and West and with a totally different military strategy … vastly smaller nuclear forces, conventional forces in balance and in a defensive, rather than offensive, posture.”
His wife, Margaret, died in 1981. In 2004 he married Diana Byfield; she survives him, along with a son, Craig, and two daughters, Margaret and Kathleen, from his first marriage. —