Robert McNamara

American secretary of defense (1961-1968)

• Born: June 9, 1916
• Birthplace: San Francisco, California
• Died: July 6, 2009
• Place of death: Washington, D. C.

As U.S. secretary of defense, McNamara achieved great notoriety as the architect of American strategy during the buildup of U.S. forces in Vietnam. In the civilian sector he was instrumental in transforming Ford Motor Company in the decade following World War II and in revising operations of the World Bank during the 1970’s.

Early Life

Robert McNamara (MAK-nah-mar-rah), the son of a salesman and a homemaker, was born in San Francisco, California. Several years later the family moved across the San Francisco Bay to Oakland, where McNamara attended public schools. A gifted student, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, upon graduating from high school, and studied economics, mathematics, and philosophy. After earning his undergraduate degree, he enrolled at the Harvard School of Business and received a master’s degree in business administration in 1939. He returned to California to work for Price, Waterhouse, a major accounting firm, but the following year he accepted an appointment to the faculty at Harvard.

When the United States entered World War II, McNamara was among a group of Harvard faculty selected to assist the military in developing systems for managing logistics and operations in overseas theaters of battle. When hostilities ended, McNamara’s military superior, Colonel Charles Thornton, convinced Ford Motor Company to hire his entire team to turn the struggling company around. Beginning at Ford in 1946, McNamara quickly rose to controller and, in 1960, president, the first from outside the Ford family to hold that title. Only weeks later, however, he accepted the offer of U.S. president-elect John F. Kennedy to join the new administration as secretary of defense.

Life’s Work

McNamara brought to the Pentagon a penchant for quantitative decision making. He believed that by applying the tools of business management he could control not only logistical but also military operations within the armed services. Convinced that rivalries among the services were causing considerable overlap and unnecessary expenditures, he instituted in 1962 the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System, a management tool designed to analyze the effectiveness of ongoing and future operations.

McNamara next insisted on the drafting of the Five Year Defense Plan, tying both strategic and routine operations to budget estimates so that the true costs of national defense could be readily identified. He also made changes to operations involving acquisition of new weapons systems, insisting that all decisions be supported by quantitative data, thus minimizing the importance of experience, a quality historically valued by those in uniform. He raised the ire of service chiefs by canceling or curtailing favorite programs. Despite his predilection for cost-cutting, however, the Defense Department budget rose notably during his seven years in office, from approximately $48 billion in 1961 to $75 billion in 1967.

As the president’s chief adviser on national defense, McNamara applied the same quantitative skills to analyzing potential threats and opportunities that he brought to his handling of internal operations at the Pentagon. He was not a strong supporter of Kennedy’s decision to endorse an invasion of Cuba in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, but he eventually acquiesced to the plan that ended disastrously for the United States. On the other hand, he was a principalarchitect of the president’s strategy in facing down the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the Soviets secretly placed missiles in Cuba. McNamara’s careful management of the naval blockade influenced the Soviets to back down and remove their arsenal, thereby averting a showdown that could have led to another world war.

McNamara was guided in these actions by his belief that the country was better served by replacing its policy of massive nuclear retaliation against any enemy threat with one of flexible response in dealing with communist aggression throughout the world. He did not feel that every act by the Soviets or the Chinese should be met with a counterforce that might launch a nuclear conflict. Under his direct supervision, the country’s nuclear strike capability was modernized, with emphasis being placed on airborne and sea-launched missiles as a principal means of delivering nuclear weapons to strategic targets.

However, McNamara joined Kennedy in believing that the United States had a vested interest in supporting limited wars in countries where communists were attempting to seize control. For that reason, he was an ardent supporter of Kennedy’s plan to aid the government of South Vietnam , which was being threatened by communists receiving support from the government of Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam. Initially, McNamara promoted a plan to provide supplies and military advisers to the Saigon government to help the South Vietnamese ward off the communist aggressors. After Kennedy was assassinated in November, 1963, McNamara encouraged Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson , to commit additional combat forces to stop the infiltration of troops from North Vietnam into the south. He also urged the new president to begin bombing targets in North Vietnam as a means of discouraging that country from continuing to support the communist forces in the south.

By 1965, McNamara was advocating the widespread use of U.S. ground combat troops. To measure the military’s progress in defeating the enemy, McNamara ordered the development of a sophisticated data collection and analysis system, so that senior leaders would have a measurable way to gauge success. Unfortunately, the highly complex system masked the nature of the situation on the ground. For two years nothing the United States did including an intense campaign to bomb sites in North Vietnam had any noticeable effect on the North Vietnamese or the Viet Cong, the communist rebels in South Vietnam. Nevertheless, as late as 1967, McNamara endorsed the request of General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, for a massive troop buildup that would bring significantly more Americans directly into the fighting.

By 1967, however, McNamara began to have doubts about the ability of the United States to win the war, and he expressed his concerns in a private memorandum to the president. Johnson was committed to a military victory, however, and sometime during that year he decided to ease McNamara out of the Defense Department by designating him as the new president of the World Bank, an international organization created after World War II to provide loans to countries in financial distress. McNamara left his position at the Pentagon on February 29, 1968, and assumed his new position with the World Bank in April.

McNamara’s thirteen years at the World Bank were certainly more quiescent than his tenure at the Pentagon. He transformed the World Bank into a vibrant actor for social change in a number of developing countries. Under his leadership the agency’s budget for loans increased from $1 billion to $12 billion, and his personal involvement in seeking to improve the lives of the world’s poor was noted by leaders around the globe. Upon his retirement in 1981, he remained active in business and philanthropic ventures, serving on a number of corporate and nonprofit boards. He engaged in several writing projects as well, publishing his controversial memoir In Retrospect in 1995 to explain his position on the events of the war in Vietnam.

Significance

Unquestionably, McNamara’s activities as secretary of defense had a material effect on the country’s growing immersion in what some considered the nightmare war in South Vietnam. Convinced that he could manage military conflicts in the same way he managed production of automobiles, McNamara became the symbol of a government divorced from reality and unwilling to heed the increasingly hostile mood of a populace tired of an unpopular war.

However, McNamara’s efforts to streamline procurement of materials and his insistence that rivalries among the services be subordinated to the military needs of the country helped to transform operations at the Pentagon and modernize military operations. Furthermore, his service at the World Bank was important in making that organization an international force for development throughout the world.

Bibliography

Blight, James G., and Janet M. Lang. The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, based on a film documentary, supplemented by documents and interviews with individuals involved in managing the country’s war effort. Includes a chronology of McNamara’s life and an annotated bibliography.

McNamara, Robert S. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times Books, 1995. McNamara’s memoir explaining his role in the Vietnam War, offering observations on his failures and those of others that prolonged the war and led to civil strife in the United States.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The McNamara Years at the World Bank. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Collection of McNamara’s major policy addresses given during his term as president of the World Bank. Outlines the major social and political issues in which he became involved while in office.

Roherty, James M. Decisions of Robert S. McNamara: A Study of the Role of the Secretary of Defense. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1970. Explains how McNamara’s reliance on quantitative decision making influenced his actions in a number of areas, using examples drawn from defense-related issues not directly connected to Vietnam.

Shapley, Deborah. Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. Biography based on public records and interviews with McNamara and dozens of his associates. Provides a balanced account of his contributions and failures in the auto industry, as secretary of defense, and at the World Bank.

Twing, Stephen W. Myths, Models, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998. Contains a chapter outlining McNamara’s work as secretary of defense, emphasizing his handling of issues related to the Cold War and the conflict in Vietnam.