Robert McNamara:THE CAREER of the former US secretary of defence Robert McNamara, who has died aged 93, 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 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, 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. He had left such a strong impression at Harvard, though, 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 Harbor 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, where he won the Legion of Merit and was awarded the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
After the war, 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 “whizz kids” were deeply unpopular with other executives, but their reorganisation and decentralisation of Ford was later cited as one of the business triumphs of postwar 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. Seven weeks after starting his new job, he was offered a choice of posts in the new Kennedy administration – treasury or defence.
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.
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.
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 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, their belief in the domino theory in southeast 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 a million.)
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 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 November 1st, 1967, he expressed his reservations in a confidential memorandum to 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.”
His tenure at the World Bank lasted for 15 years. 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.
The effect of his financial initiative was that an institution that had been lending about $1,000 million a year when he joined was disbursing $12,500 million a year when he left. The bank’s total commitment to developing nations rose in those 15 years from $13,000 million to $92,000 million.
Some 70 per cent of the new loans went on projects designed to assist rural development. Even so, when he retired in 1981, McNamara said the bank “had barely begun to develop its full potential”.
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.
Robert Strange McNamara: born June 9th 1916; died July 6th, 2009.