MCNAMARA AT WAR: A New History, by Philip Taubman and William Taubman
At the height of his power, Robert S. McNamara exuded control. As secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s, he appeared regularly before Congress and the press, brandishing charts and rattling off figures that invariably showed progress: progress in cutting costs, in deterring the Soviet Union, in prosecuting the war in Vietnam. Barry Goldwater called him a “computer with legs.” He had an answer, often numerical, to every question. George Ball, the Johnson administration’s in-house Vietnam skeptic, recalled that whenever he raised concerns, McNamara would “shoot me down in flames” with a barrage of statistics that seemed to appear from thin air.
Thus it was surprising when, in 1995, at the age of 78, he broke his decades-long silence on Vietnam with the publication of his memoir, “In Retrospect,” declaring in the preface that he had been “wrong, terribly wrong.” He didn’t stop with the book. In numerous public appearances, in a series of meetings with his former adversaries from Hanoi, and in Errol Morris’s sublime 2003 documentary “The Fog of War,” McNamara seemed at last to surrender to history’s judgment.
And yet, as the prolific authors (and brothers) Philip and William Taubman show in their thoughtful new biography, “McNamara at War,” their subject’s late-in-life appraisal of his actions was just as motivated by his mania for authority as everything that had come before it. They write that in obsessively returning to the same question — how could someone so smart, successful and patriotic help lead his country into such a costly debacle? — McNamara was seeking “retrospective mastery over what had eluded him and why.”
“Mastery” was the watchword of McNamara’s life until Vietnam. Born in San Francisco in 1916, he had an analytical mind that he honed at Harvard Business School, learning new accounting techniques for managing the large organizations that had begun to dominate American society. During World War II, he served as a “statistical control officer” in the Army Air Forces, where his Harvard training helped him make bombing campaigns more lethal.
After the war, McNamara and some of his fellow Army statisticians joined the Ford Motor Company, which was then reeling from years of mismanagement. Known as the “whiz kids,” McNamara and the other military number crunchers dragged Ford into the modern age, installing new financial systems and organizational structures that reversed the company’s slide. McNamara was the group’s standout, and he rose steadily through the ranks. The day after the 1960 election, he was named Ford’s president. Just a few weeks later, Kennedy asked him to lead the Pentagon.
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The post Robert McNamara Loved Efficiency. Then Came the Vietnam War. appeared first on New York Times.
