McNAMARA, Robert Strange

(b. 9 June 1916 in San Francisco, California), secretary of defense during the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson (1961–1968) who became known as one of the leading architects of the war in Vietnam.

The son of Robert James McNamara, sales manager for a wholesale shoe company, and Claranell Strange, McNamara was a frail child with a bright mind. The hallmarks of his persona—a first-rate intellect matched with unwavering discipline—were apparent early in his life. He was reading at a high school level when he entered first grade, and was active in student government at Piedmont High School. He studied economics and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at the end of his sophomore year. He received a B.A. with honors in 1937, and married Margaret McKinstry Craig, a schoolteacher and fellow Berkeley student, on 13 August 1940. They had three children.

McNamara attended the Harvard School of Business and received an M.B.A. in 1939. He studied the principle that a company would be more efficient and therefore successful if its managers could master the flow of information—in a corporate setting, this meant statistics. In his 1995 book In Retrospect, McNamara wrote: "To this day, I see quantification as a language to add precision to reasoning about the world." This philosophy would shape his public life, and not always for the better. When the United States entered World War II, McNamara was rejected for active duty owing to nearsightedness. He remained at Harvard as an assistant professor until 1943, when he took a leave of absence and went to England. There he set up a statistical system for the Eighth Air Force to manage the flow of personnel and equipment. Within the year he earned a captain's commission and eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was a natural at planning, logistics, and operational analysis, able to digest massive quantities of information that would have choked a lesser intellect.

After the war McNamara was recruited to join a team of nine other statistical experts, known as the "Whiz Kids," who were hired by Ford Motor Company in 1946. They addressed the company's slipshod management and accounting practices, implementing their statistical control methods and reviving Ford's ailing fortunes. McNamara earned a reputation for "knowing where every buck is spent." Rising rapidly through the company, he succeeded Henry Ford II as president on 9 November 1960—becoming the first head of Ford Motors from outside the Ford family.

Yet McNamara would lead Ford for only one month. In late 1960, when President-elect John F. Kennedy asked the legendary Washington power broker Bob Lovett for cabinet recommendations, the first name that came up was McNamara's. Before agreeing to the position of secretary of defense, McNamara made it clear to Kennedy that he had no intention of being a passive observer. He intended to coordinate the services, reducing waste and duplication. This was music to Kennedy's ears; he wanted to run foreign policy and military affairs from the White House. For the position of secretary of defense, he wanted someone who could hold the reins on the world's largest bureaucracy.

McNamara clearly understood his charge, telling a New York Times reporter in January 1961 that his main task was "to bring efficiency to a $40 billion enterprise." On 21 January 1961 McNamara was sworn into office, and his first act as secretary was to streamline the Pentagon leadership, eliminating some assistant secretary posts and creating a new office of management planning. He used systems analysis to determine the cost-effectiveness of new weapons systems and insisted on allocating budget funds based on functionality rather than branch of service, stressing "commonality" when possible. In the past, civilian control of the military had been true only in theory; McNamara made it a reality. This added to his legend in Washington—the man who saved Ford Motors had now tamed the roaring military. He was, in the words of the journalist and historian David Halberstam, the "can-do man in the can-do society in the can-do era."

The determination of McNamara and Kennedy to treat the Pentagon as just another organization, however, turned out to be appallingly shortsighted. As secretary of defense, McNamara inevitably would become a top adviser on foreign affairs and the man who would orchestrate any U.S. military action—the government's "general-in-chief." However, nothing in McNamara's background prepared him for these tasks; indeed, his almost evangelical belief in the power of fact and reason was poorly suited to the swirling ideological passions of the cold war era. In retrospect, it appears inevitable that McNamara would fail. McNamara was also a victim of domestic political machinations. Although it had been seven years since the Senate censured Senator Joseph McCarthy for his anti-Communist crusades, the issue was still alive as far as Kennedy was concerned—owing in large part to his narrow victory over Republican Richard M. Nixon in 1960. Both Kennedy and his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, were wary of being labeled "soft on Communism."

Shortly after his election, Kennedy was briefed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about an operation initiated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to undermine the Cuban regime of Fidel Castro. Determined to show muscle on the Communism issue, Kennedy decided to proceed with plans to launch a small invading force comprising CIA-trained Cuban exiles. McNamara agreed to the plan. On 17 April 1961 nearly 1,500 Cuban expatriates stormed the beaches at the Bay of Pigs. The mission was a tactical and political disaster. The insurgents were defeated in three days, and the Cuban populace rallied around Castro. When he left office in 1967, McNamara told reporters that his greatest regret was the Bay of Pigs, a policy that "could have been recognized as an error at the time."

Failure in Cuba necessitated an even harder line for the new administration, both to fend off domestic critics and to demonstrate toughness to the Soviet Union. As Halberstam wrote, the Bay of Pigs was "a shattering event" that would go on to "seriously disturb the balance of the first two years of the Kennedy Administration." In Vienna, in June 1961, the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev blustered his way through a meeting with Kennedy, making it clear that he thought the U.S. president was weak and indecisive. On 13 August 1961, seeking a solution to the dramatic flow of refugees out of Communist East Berlin to capitalist West Berlin, Khrushchev erected the Berlin Wall. Kennedy was forced to accept this unilateral action as a fait accompli.

The attention of the U.S. government then fell squarely on the previously obscure nation of Vietnam. Kennedy believed that the cold war would be fought and won, not in direct conflict with the Soviet Union but indirectly, in the Third World. He favored a military policy known as "flexible response," which would allow the United States to confront Communist aggression on a smaller scale, anywhere in the world. McNamara implemented this policy for Kennedy, strengthening conventional fighting capacity, expanding troop levels dramatically, and creating a counterinsurgency force, known as the Green Berets, that could stamp out revolution whenever and wherever it arose. Vietnam would be the ultimate test of this policy.

Vietnam turned out to be a poor test case. While North Vietnam was Communist, the opposition to Ngo Dinh Diem, the nationalist leader of South Vietnam, was an ambiguous mix of Communists and nationalists. Nevertheless, Diem referred to his opposition as "Vietcong," or Vietnamese Communists. This analysis was dubious at best. As the historian Stephen Ambrose writes, "Diem was incapable of distinguishing between Communist and anti-Communist opposition to his government." McNamara, like others in the administration, repeatedly fell prey to poor analysis of Southeast Asia generally and Vietnam specifically. McCarthy's "Red" baiting had another lingering effect on Kennedy's foreign policy—the State Department was purged of most of its experts on China. Compounding the problem, Vietnam policy had always been seen through a French prism. Until 1954 the U.S. Embassy in Paris had handled U.S. policy in Vietnam; afterward, French speakers with backgrounds in European affairs staffed the embassy in Saigon and the Vietnam desk at the State Department.

Finally, there was a tendency in the Kennedy administration to close ranks among senior officials when important decisions were made—thereby banishing country or regional experts, who resided at lower levels of government. McNamara was no doubt comfortable with this arrangement; describing his theory of corporate management, he once said, "I have always believed that the more important the decision, the fewer people should be involved in the decision." As a result, the administration seized on the so-called domino theory—in which South Vietnam was the linchpin to preventing a Chinese Communist takeover of Asia—without considering that Vietnam and China had been rivals for hundreds of years before the introduction of Communist theory.

McNamara made the first of many visits to Vietnam in 1962. By that time the United States had more than 10,000 military "advisers" there. (In 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower had declined to intervene in Vietnam, but had sent the first wave of U.S. military and economic advisers.) McNamara saw nothing to dissuade him from the belief that superior troops, training, and firepower inevitably would win the battle, presumably without much difficulty. On that first trip, when U.S. involvement was still at a minimum, McNamara said, "Every quantitative measurement we have shows we're winning the war." He failed to take into account intangible, human factors, such as the presence of a more determined foe, fighting to defend home soil—the elements that the German theorist Carl von Clausewitz had called the "friction" of war more than a century earlier. This failure was to be McNamara's Achilles' heel.

In August 1962 the Soviets began to build ballistic missile sites in Cuba. Like most Kennedy administration foreign policy decisions, the response to this development was handled in the White House, with the president surrounded by a relatively small circle of senior advisers. In this case, the results were a textbook example of how to manage foreign policy in a crisis. The president's team, known as the Executive Committee, or Ex Comm, patiently and deliberately debated their alternatives while the fate of the world hung in the balance and events on the ground shifted constantly. McNamara sided with the president in advocating a blockade of Soviet ships carrying offensive weapons to Cuba in October 1962. Over the more hawkish advice of the generals, who felt that the Soviets would understand only force, the blockade was ordered, and a standoff on the high seas ensued. The Kennedy administration was criticized for its confrontational, "warlike" attitude. Yet in the end, Khrushchev blinked first, ordering Soviet ships back to Russia. It was a great victory for the Kennedy administration, a decisive escape from the most dangerous crisis the world had ever known.

On 22 November 1963 President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The newly inaugurated president Lyndon Johnson urged McNamara to remain at the Pentagon. Johnson accelerated the pace of events in Vietnam with his determination to "win the war." On 2 August 1964 the president received reports that North Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin had attacked U.S. destroyers. Johnson seized the opportunity and pushed a resolution through Congress—the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—that effectively gave him a blank check to broaden the war effort as he saw fit, without congressional interference. McNamara was one of the key lobbyists on the resolution and later admitted that he misled Congress about administration war aims.

In late 1964 McNamara supported the administration's determination to conduct an air war against North Vietnam—the systematic bombing lasted into early 1965. On 8 June 1965 Johnson authorized U.S. troops to engage in ground combat. Public opinion began to turn against the war. In this growing crisis, McNamara relied on what he knew best, data. Many of the photographs of McNamara in this period show him poring over endless volumes of statistics. He was constantly in the country, talking to soldiers, conferring with commanders, assessing the situation. Yet in gathering his research, he was too willing to accept military reporting that conformed to his relentless optimism. If he was played for a fool, he played right along. McNamara never sought independent corroboration of data. He went before the country and reported that indicators were good. While Johnson had his domestic policies to insulate him from Vietnam, McNamara had nowhere to hide. He became a focal point for antiwar protesters, vilified as a "murderer" and a "baby burner." Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, one of two dissenting votes on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, referred to the escalating conflict in Vietnam as "McNamara's war." These charges deeply hurt him and contributed to his growing disenchantment with the war effort.

McNamara began to focus his energies on a negotiated settlement to end the conflict. Hoping to draw the North Vietnamese to the table, he proposed, and Johnson reluctantly accepted, a thirty-seven-day pause in bombing during December 1965 and January 1966. Nothing came of it, and McNamara began to fall out of favor with Johnson, who wanted a decisive victory. The president began to rely more and more on the hawkish advice of generals in the field. McNamara began to think about leaving the Pentagon, finding a position that would allow him to test his evolving theory that "security is not military hardware" but rather "development." In April 1967 he requested that Johnson nominate him for president of the World Bank, a position that would be vacant at the end of the year. Johnson accommodated his wishes. McNamara assumed the presidency of the World Bank in January 1968 and held the position until 1981. McNamara received the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction from Johnson in 1968 for service to his country.

The legacy of McNamara is long but decidedly mixed. One of the best minds of his generation, a corporate titan, and chief architect of the turnaround at Ford Motor Company, he was also responsible in part for the escalation of the Vietnam War, an ill-conceived and poorly executed endeavor that cost more than 58,000 American lives. The specter of this war still hangs over U.S. public life and U.S. foreign policy. His legacy is one of great potential gone awry. At the first cabinet meeting for the incoming Kennedy administration, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was immediately taken with the men that would make up Kennedy's brain trust, the men whom Halberstam ironically labeled "the Best and the Brightest." Johnson was dazzled; each one was smarter than the next. The most impressive was McNamara, "the fellow from Ford with the Stacomb on his hair." Johnson passed his impressions on to Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. His response was prophetic: "Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once."

McNamara reflected on his role in Vietnam in In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995). There are several full-length biographies, including Henry L. Trewhitt, McNamara: His Ordeal in the Pentagon (1971), and Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara (1993). Works about McNamara's political beliefs include William W. Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy (1964), and James Roherty, Decisions of Robert S. McNamara: A Study of the Role of the Secretary of State (1970). McNamara also features prominently in the vast literatures of the Kennedy presidency, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War, including such classics as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965); Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1969); David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972); and Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (1983). Articles about McNamara's work in the 1960s include "Confessing the Sins of Vietnam," Newsweek (17 Apr. 1995), "McNamara's Final Surrender," National Review (25 Dec. 1995), and "McNamara's Vietnam War Reconsidered," Society (1 Sept. 1998).

Timothy Kringen