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By the time he left in 1968, McNamara knew the war to be unwinnable - he now says. But he did not speak up in 1969, as Richard Nixon prepared for four more years of combat; or in 1975, after America’s humiliating exit from Saigon; or through the 1970s, when Vietnam veterans were being reviled; or through the 1980s, when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was being built and campaigns for reconciliation were underway. He remained silent in 1988 and 1992, when first Dan Quayle and then Bill Clinton were raked-over for having avoided combat at a time when McNamara believed - secretly - that combat was futile.
At any of those moments McNamara could have helped his country - saving lives, reducing recriminations - by saying that he had changed his famously powerful mind about Vietnam. And at every moment he failed to speak…. - James Fallows, Too Late to Say You’re Sorry,” April 11, 1995.
He did not serve himself or his country well. He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool. -David Halberstam
In our business, we are lucky if we make the right decision 51% of the time. What I have noticed about Bob McNamara is that he makes an awful lot of right decisions. -Henry Ford II
[L]ogic forced McNamara to conclude that the United States would never benefit from using nuclear weapons against a nuclear-armed adversary. Doing so would be suicidal. -Peter Scoblic, on McNamara’s advocacy of disarmament and role in popularizing the notion of ‘mutually assured destruction’.
He [McNamara] focused the Bank on poverty reduction, he brought Communist China into the Bank, he introduced the practice of five-year lending plans, he significantly increased the Bank’s budget, he grew staff from 1600 to 5700, he favored sector-specific research, he raised money from OPEC, he strongly encouraged “scientific project evaluation,” and he started a largely successful program to combat “river blindness”; the latter may have been his life’s achievement. -Tyler Cowen
Posted on July 8, 2009
