Robert McNamara

Robert Strange McNamara was born on June 9, 1916, in San Francisco, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, where his father was sales manager of a wholesale shoe firm.⁠[1][2]

He graduated from the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, in 1937 with a degree in economics and philosophy and received a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1939. After a year with Price, Waterhouse in San Francisco, he returned to Harvard Business School to teach in August 1940, remaining until 1943.⁠[1][3]

In early 1943 he entered the U.S. Army Air Forces as a captain, worked on the deployment of the B-29 bomber and served in India, China and the Pacific, leaving active duty in April 1946 as a lieutenant colonel.⁠[1][4]

In 1946 he joined the Ford Motor Company as manager of planning and financial analysis and rose through a series of top management posts, serving in the 1950s as general manager and vice president of its automotive division.⁠[1][3]

On November 9, 1960, the day after John F. Kennedy’s election, he became president of the Ford Motor Company, the first head of the company from outside the Ford family; the Defense Department’s Historical Office credits him with much of the company’s postwar expansion and success.⁠[1]

John F. Kennedy first offered the defense post to Robert A. Lovett, who declined and recommended him. Less than five weeks after becoming president of Ford, he accepted the cabinet post; he was sworn in as secretary of defense on January 21, 1961, and served until February 29, 1968, about seven years, longer than any predecessor.⁠[1][4]

He rejected a proposed reorganization that would have abolished the military departments, arguing instead for separate services under a unified defense policy.⁠[1]

Taking an active role in management and relying heavily on systems analysis, he introduced the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) developed under Comptroller Charles J. Hitch and used tools such as the Five Year Defense Plan. In 1961 he created the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Communications Agency and the Defense Supply Agency, and in December 1961 established Strike Command; he also ran a cost-reduction program that closed many unneeded bases, canceled programs including the B-70 bomber and the Skybolt missile, and backed the TFX, later the F-111.⁠[1]

Under the Kennedy administration’s policy of “flexible response” he rejected massive retaliation, set out a “no-cities” approach in a June 1962 speech at Ann Arbor, MichiganMichiganMichigan is a state of the United States nearly surrounded by the Great Lakes and made up of the Upper and Lower peninsulas; its capital is Lansing and its largest city is Detroit. It was admitted to the Union on January 26, 1837, as the 26th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 10,077,331.Open the full entry, and later adopted “assured destruction,” the ability to inflict unacceptable damage on an attacker even after a surprise first strike. By the end of his tenure the United States had 54 Titan II and 1,000 Minuteman land-based missiles and 656 Polaris missiles on 41 submarines. He opposed a major antiballistic missile system but eventually agreed to a “thin” version.⁠[1]

He later said that his principal regret was recommending the April 1961 Bay of Pigs operation to John F. Kennedy. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 he served on the Executive Committee of the National Security Council and supported the naval quarantine of Cuba. In April 1965 nearly 24,000 U.S. troops were deployed to stabilize the Dominican Republic.⁠[1]

Under John F. Kennedy the U.S. advisory presence in Vietnam grew from a few hundred to about 17,000; after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, U.S. involvement escalated sharply in 1965, with troop levels of about 485,000 by the end of 1967 and nearly 535,000 by June 30, 1968. He grew skeptical of the war and became increasingly reluctant to approve further troop increases.⁠[1]

In 1967 he commissioned a study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers.⁠[4]

On November 29, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his resignation; the Defense Department’s Historical Office attributes it to his disillusionment with the war, antiwar sentiment and disputes with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When he left office on February 29, 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson presented him with the Medal of Freedom and the Distinguished Service Medal.⁠[1][5]

From April 1, 1968, to June 30, 1981, he was the fifth president of the World Bank Group. In September 1968 he proposed doubling lending over the next five years; annual commitments rose from about $1 billion in 1968 to more than $13 billion in fiscal 1981, and staff grew from 1,600 when he arrived to 5,700 when he left.⁠[6]

His second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973, made rural development its centerpiece, and agricultural lending rose by more than 40 percent; education lending tripled during his tenure, and in 1970 the Bank made its first family-planning loan, in Jamaica. He urged governments to meet “basic human needs,” and the World Bank’s account treats his focus on people in “absolute poverty” as central to his presidency. In May 1980 the People’s Republic of China assumed its membership in the Bank.⁠[6]

Shortly after leaving the Pentagon he published The Essence of Security. In 1982 he urged a U.S. pledge of no first use of nuclear weapons in Europe and later proposed eliminating nuclear weapons from NATO’s defense posture. In 1995 he published his memoir In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, a critical account of his role in the Vietnam War. The documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara was released in 2003.⁠[1][7]

He died after a long illness at his home in Washington, D.C., on July 6, 2009, at the age of 93.⁠[1][5]

In 1940 he married Margaret Craig, a fellow University of California student, who founded the Reading Is Fundamental program in the 1960s and died of cancer in 1981. They had a son, Robert Craig, and daughters Margaret Elizabeth and Kathleen. In 2004 he married Diana Masieri Byfield in San Francisco.⁠[5][7]

BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry judges that he played a major role in U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. The Defense Department’s Historical Office biography notes that assessments of him ranged from praise to harsh criticism: one journalist called him a “human IBMIBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American information technology company, renamed in 1924 from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).Open the full entry machine,” while Dean Acheson wrote that, apart from General George C. MarshallGeorge C. MarshallGeorge C. Marshall (1880–1959) was a five-star U.S. Army general and statesman. He was Army chief of staff during World War II and later served as secretary of state and secretary of defense, and he received the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize for proposing and supervising the plan for Europe’s economic recovery, the Marshall Plan.Open the full entry, few department heads had so profoundly enhanced the security of the United States.⁠[2][1]

Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense: Official website: https://history.defense.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

World Bank Group: Official website: https://www.worldbank.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6]