Robert McNamara died in his sleep at the age of 93, something he prevented a lot of people from doing. A so-called “Whiz Kid” when he was hired by The Ford Motor Company, he went on to be Secretary of Defense for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and President of the World Bank. Two things followed him throughout his career: a legendary ability to calculate and a line of cars with their lights on.
Robert McNamara studied systems analysis at Harvard Business School and applied it to the firebombing of civilians during World War II. He didn’t learn defense that way, but he learned the value of a good offense from Army Air Forces General Curtis “Bomb ‘em into the stone age” LeMay, perhaps the most offensive general since Philip “The only good indian is a dead indian” Sheridan. Then, he went to work for Henry Ford.
Not directly, since Ford retired a year before McNamara started and died a year later, but he worked in his shadow. A very dark shadow. Henry Ford hated Jews. He hated them so much that he published the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a dubious text claiming to be a plan by Jews to take over the world. He also published The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which he wrote himself. Both documents were widely circulated in Nazi Germany, earning Ford a medal from Adolph Hitler. (He accepted.) Robert McNamara must have found this shadow cool and inviting because he worked at The Ford Motor Company for fourteen years, rising from manager of planning and financial analysis to President. He’d only been President for five weeks, however, when the son of Joseph P. Kennedy offered him a job.
Joseph P. Kennedy was a bootlegger, stock market swindler, movie producer and, like Henry Ford, a raging anti-semite. (He never received a medal from Adolph Hitler, but there were rumors of a job offer.) All of which conspired to keep him out of political office, an ambition that would later be fulfilled by his sons. Among them, John F. Kennedy. Handsome, charming and not-too-bright, JFK won, under dubious circumstances, a close and hotly contested election to become President of the United States, a job for which he had only meager qualifications. (Hmm, where have I heard that before?) President Kennedy asked Robert McNamara to be his Secretary of Defense and before you can say, “Napalm”, MacNamara was back firebombing civilians again - this time in Vietnam. What’s more, he was working with his old pal, General Curtis LeMay.
After five years of bombing Vietnam without success, Robert McNamara began to doubt the wisdom of it. What’s more, he harbored growing doubts about a positive outcome to the war. A year or so later, he shared those doubts with the current President, Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson, in turn, shared his doubts that McNamara should continue as Secretary of Defense. Six months later, President Johnson announced that Robert McNamara was resigning to become President of the World Bank. Before you think that moral authority or, at least, a degree of character is necessary to help the world’s starving masses, you should know that, twenty years earlier, the same job was held by John J. McCloy.
As Assistant Secretary of War during WWII - and, thus, McNamara’s boss - John J. McCloy refused to bomb the gas chambers at Auschwitz or the rail lines leading up to them. He claimed it was beyond the range of allied bombers even though they were flying over the concentration camp on their way to more distant targets. Once, they even bombed Auschwitz by accident when they were aiming for the factory next to it. He was also one of the principal figures behind sending Japanese-Americans to internment camps. After the war, as High Commissioner for Germany, he engaged in the wholesale pardoning of convicted Nazi war criminals including the industrialist, Alfred Krupp. What’s more, he was one of the loudest voices against reparations to the Japanese-Americans who were sent to internment camps.
After thirteen years, Robert McNamara retired from The World Bank and from public life. Looking back on his career, two things are immediately clear: one is that he served the most powerful business and political leaders of his day; the other is that he enabled more jerks than a serial bride.
But wait, you say, didn’t he save the world during the Cuban missile crisis? Yes, against great opposition, Robert McNamara convinced President Kennedy not to start a nuclear war. What was the alternative? Destroying all human life as we know it? If anything, we should be wondering what Kennedy and his advisors (Hello, Curtis) were thinking. Robert McNamara preventing nuclear war is like the President pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving. It doesn’t mean he’s a nice guy.
Ahh, but he dared to oppose President Johnson on the Vietnam War and paid the price. Yes, he spoke up – after a while. We don’t know exactly when McNamara started having doubts about the war, but the record shows it to be around a year before he spoke to the President. We don’t know exactly how many lives were lost during that period, either. But someone knew.
If Robert McNamara is to be remembered as anything besides a bureaucratic blight or Agent Orange in wire-rim glasses, it will be as a brilliant man with no imagination. A sharp, but dull, guy, who could think of a million ways to go from A to B, but couldn’t even imagine C. Especially when it stood for consequences.
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