Chapter Twelve

In Saigon, the Military Assistance Command now functioned as a powerful, organized, disciplined establishment which could control the loyalty of its people and churn out facts, statistics and programs to suit the whim of its sponsors at the Pentagon. It had defeated the protests of its own best people, it had determined that things were going well, that there was and would be optimism (at a Honolulu meeting in April 1963, Harkins was almost euphoric; he could not give any guarantees, but he thought it would all be over by Christmas. McNamara, listening to him, was elated—he reached over and reminded Hilsman that Hilsman had been there when it had all looked so black and that had been only eighteen months ago). So in early 1963 MACV had far more muscle than the comparatively frail civilian operation there; this had once bothered Ambassador Nolting but it no longer did, largely because he agreed with the conclusions of the military; he too saw the war through a military, not a political prism. In Washington, the dominant figure on Vietnam was not Dean Rusk, but Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; it was he who dominated the action, the play, the terms by which success in Vietnam was determined. In the growing split between the civilians and the military over Vietnam, McNamara was allowed to be the referee. In contrast, the people from State who, like Harriman, were challenging the military’s estimates, were placed in the position of being adversaries.

That McNamara’s role was major, that he was by default usurping the role of the Secretary of State, did not faze him. He was intelligent, forceful, courageous, decent, everything, in fact, but wise. Wherever there was a problem for his President, he would press on, the better to protect his superior, the better to take the heat. One reason he rushed forward on Vietnam was because he was haunted by the fact that he had performed so poorly during the Bay of Pigs episode (years later, this still remained something of a joke among Kennedy insiders, and after Edward Kennedy drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, among the many who rushed to the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport was McNamara; there he was greeted by the insiders’ good fellowship and jovial remarks about the arrival of the man who had handled both the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam).

He became the principal desk officer on Vietnam in 1962 because he felt that the President needed his help. He knew nothing about Asia, about poverty, about people, about American domestic politics, but he knew a great deal about production technology and about exercising bureaucratic power. He was classically a corporate man; had it been a contest between the United States and Hanoi as to which side could produce the most goods for the peasants of South Vietnam, clearly we would have won. If it had been just a matter of getting the right goods to the right villages, we would have won; unfortunately, what we were selling was not what they were buying. This man, whose only real experience had been in dealing with the second largest automotive empire in the world, producing huge Western vehicles, was the last man to understand and measure the problems of a people looking for their political freedom. Yet he was very much a man of the Kennedy Administration. He symbolized the idea that it could manage and control events, in an intelligent, rational way. Taking on a guerrilla war was like buying a sick foreign company; you brought your systems to it. He was so impressive and loyal that it was hard to believe, in the halcyon days of 1963 when his reputation was at its height, that anything he took command of could go wrong. He was a reassuring figure not just to both Presidents he served but to the liberal good community of Washington as well; if McNamara was in charge of something he would run it correctly; if it was a war, it would be a good war.

He could handle the military. That, of course, was the basis of his legend. Washington was filled with stories of McNamara browbeating the military, forcing them to reconsider, taking their pet projects away from them. Later, as his reputation dimmed and the defense budget grew (it was not just Vietnam, it was other projects as well), some of those who had been part of that Administration suspected that he had in no real way handled the military, but rather, that he had brought them kicking and screaming and protesting to the zenith of their power. At the very least, it turned out that he had controlled the military only as long as we were not in a real war and that the best way for civilians to harness generals was to stay out of wars. That wisdom would come later.

When McNamara entered the Administration in 1961, he had let his deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, handle Vietnam, a sure sign that it was not an important issue. As the importance and complexity of Vietnam began to be evident, he took it over himself, wanting to protect the President, sure of his capacity to handle it. He then began his series of flying trips to Saigon, the on-the-spot inspections in search of the truth, a brisk, confident McNamara on the move, being televised, seeing people (the dissenters carefully screened out), gobbling up the false statistics of the day. His confidence became Washington’s confidence; the people in the capital knew that this able, driving man could handle the war, could handle the military machinery. The truth was that he had no different assumptions, that he wanted no different sources of information. For all his idealism, he was no better and perhaps in his hubris a little worse than the institution he headed. But to say this in 1963 would have been heresy, for at that point his reputation was impeccable.

 

He was Bob, Bob McNamara, taut, controlled, driving—climbing mountains, harnessing generals—the hair slicked down in a way that made him look like a Grant Wood subject. The look was part of the drive: a fat McNamara was as hard to imagine as an uncertain one. The glasses straight and rimless, imposing; you looked at the glasses and kept your distance. He was a man of force, moving, pushing, getting things done, Bob got things done, the can-do man in the can-do society, in the can-do era. No one would ever mistake Bob McNamara for a European; he was American through and through, with the American drive, the American certitude and conviction. He pushed everyone, particularly himself, to new limits, long hours, working breakfasts, early bedtimes, moderate drinking, no cocktail parties. He was always rational, always the puritan but not a prude. And certainly not a Babbitt—if he could give up an earlier preference for academe to go into business, then at least he would not be a Babbitt. He sat there behind that huge desk, austere, imposing. A Secretary of Defense of the United States of America, with a budget of $85 billion a year, not to mention a generous supply of nuclear warheads at his disposal, was likely to be imposing enough, anyway.

One was always aware of his time; speak quickly and be gone, make your point, in and out, keep the schedule, lunch from 1:50 to, say, expansively, 2 p.m., and above all, do not engage in any philosophical discussions, Well, Bob, my view of history is . . . No one was to abuse his time. Do not, he told his aides, let people brief me orally. If they are going to make a presentation, find out in advance and make them put it on paper. “Why?” an aide asked. A cold look. “Because I can read faster than they can talk.” There were exceptions to this, and one of the most notable was his interest in 1966 in an electronic barrier for Vietnam as a means of stopping the infiltration (and thus the rationale for bombing); suddenly this took top priority and General Alfred Starbird, who was in charge of it, had access to him at any time and could always brief him orally. The boredom he showed when the JCS came over once a week was in sharp contrast to the interest he had when General Starbird was talking. Those who wasted his time—except of course those above him—would feel his cold stare, and this included almost everyone, even General Maxwell Taylor. The first time Taylor went over to see McNamara at the start of the Kennedy years, Taylor arrived a little early. He stood outside the Secretary’s office while McNamara waited for the exact moment of their appointment. When it came, Taylor was held up on the phone for a few minutes because the White House had called him. So McNamara waited for Taylor and finally Taylor waited for McNamara a bit more, and then he went in and was given one of the icier treatments of his life.

Time was of the essence, to be rationed and saved; time was not just money, it was, even more important, action, decisions, cost effectiveness, power. It became part of private Pentagon legend that if you really wanted to make a point with McNamara, the best way was to catch him on one of those long flights to Saigon or Honolulu, hours and hours aboard planes where there was nowhere else to go, no appointments waiting. There are those who remember well a scene in October 1966 when Daniel Ellsberg, who had already turned against the war, cornered McNamara on a plane, and crowding over the Secretary, served him all the dovish papers that Ellsberg had written and saved up. There was a feeling of slight amusement on the part of one witness because of the almost obsessed manner of Ellsberg, a Dostoevskyan figure, and the fact that McNamara had no place to hide.

McNamara, who was under such pressure, always tried to conceal it, to be cool, to control his emotions, though not always successfully, and there was somehow a price to be paid. He would, for instance, while he was in Detroit, grind his teeth in his sleep, wearing down the enamel until Marg McNamara realized what was happening and sent him to a dentist, who had them recapped (a New York dentist just so there would be no gossip in Detroit, gossip which might diminish his legend and thus his power; his legend was his power).

Sometimes, to those around him, he seemed so idealistic as to be innocent. He never talked about power and he did not seem to covet it. Yet the truth was quite different. He loved power and he sought it intensely, and he could be a ferocious infighter where the question of power was concerned. Nothing could come between him and a President of the United States unless it was a potential President; thus his dilemma in 1967, when he was torn between loyalty to Johnson and Robert Kennedy. For all his apparent innocence, he had triumphed in the ferocious jungle of Detroit automotive politics, he was acutely aware of how to gain and hold power. It was not, however, a quality which surfaced regularly; if anything, part of his strength appeared to be his capacity to seem indifferent, to seem almost naÏve about questions of power. One Defense Department aide who had visualized McNamara as the idealistic civil servant was stunned when he caught a glimpse of the other side of McNamara. The aide had been offered a job at the White House, and when he told McNamara about it, he was advised to refuse it because, McNamara said, though he was offered high visibility and glory, the job lacked real power. McNamara thereupon continued with a startling and brilliant analysis, department by department in the government listing, which jobs carried power in which department and why, and which jobs, seeming to have real power, in reality lacked it. He was, it seemed, a little less innocent and idealistic than the aide had thought.

That McNamara had such a good reputation in Washington was not entirely incidental—he knew about the importance of public relations, and played that game with surprising skill. Finding that his top public relations man at Defense, Arthur Sylvester, was a man of limited sophistication and ability, McNamara quickly learned how to use him to stand as a lightning rod and filter between the Secretary and the average working reporter, essentially to fend the press off and deflect the heat (leaving many reporters to wonder why a man as able as McNamara had a press aide as inept as Sylvester; the answer was that it was deliberate). At the same time he used Adam Yarmolinsky, a former Harvard Law School professor and a man with unusually good connections with the liberal establishment, to do the more serious job of protecting the Secretary’s image with major writers and columnists, and it was Yarmolinsky who would write the letters to the editor tidying up McNamara’s reputation after various critical articles.

 

If the body was tense and driven, the mind was mathematical, analytical, bringing order and reason out of chaos. Always reason. And reason supported by facts, by statistics—he could prove his rationality with facts, intimidate others. He was marvelous with charts and statistics. Once, sitting at CINCPAC for eight hours watching hundreds and hundreds of slides flashed across the screen showing what was in the pipe line to Vietnam and what was already there, he finally said, after seven hours, “Stop the projector. This slide, number 869, contradicts slide 11.” Slide 11 was flashed back and he was right, they did contradict each other. Everyone was impressed, and many a little frightened. No wonder his reputation grew; others were in awe. For it was a mind that could continue to summon its own mathematical kind of sanity into bureaucratic battle, long after the others, the good liberal social scientists who had never gone beyond their original logarithms, had trailed off into the dust, though finally, when the mathematical version of sanity did not work out, when it turned out that the computer had not fed back the right answers and had underestimated those funny little far-off men in their raggedy pajamas, he would be stricken with a profound sense of failure, and he would be, at least briefly, a shattered man. But that would come later. At his height he always seemed in control; you could, said Lyndon Johnson, who once admired him and trotted him out on so many occasions, almost hear the computers clicking away. But when things went sour and Johnson felt McNamara’s doubts, his tongue, always acid for those who failed him, did not spare his prize pupil. He would say to those around him, “I forgot he had only been president of Ford for one week.” Yet even then, when his tenure as Secretary of Defense was coming to an end and he knew that his policy had failed, even then his faith in his kind of rationality did not really desert him. The war was a human waste, yes, but it was also no longer cost-effective; we were putting in more for our air power than we were getting back in damage, ten dollars of input for one dollar of damage, and the one dollar was being put up by the Soviet Union and not North Vietnam, anyway.

He was an emotional man as well, weeping at his last Pentagon ceremony, his friends at the very end worried about his health, both mental and physical, about what the war had done to his ethical framework. The Kennedy people in particular worried about him. He was a close friend of the Kennedys’, gay and gregarious at dinner parties. Though not noted for his wit—no one had ever accused him of an overdeveloped sense of irony, which after all was to be found mostly in peoples and nations that history had defeated, and Bob was undefeated. He had a certain gaiety and ingratiating charm, an ability to talk about things other than shop. “Why is it,” asked Bob Kennedy, “that they all call him 'the computer’ and yet he’s the one all my sisters want to sit next to at dinner?” That loyalty to the Kennedy family, which had begun in 1961, endured through tragedy after tragedy. “Bob,” Ethel said to him after Chappaquiddick, “get up here, there’s no one here but women.”

It would not be surprising that in the latter part of the sixties, when a sense of disillusion with Camelot grew, that the Kennedy insiders in particular wanted to spare McNamara. They were by then quite willing to write off the war and the men who made it. Mac Bundy evoked no fondness, to say the least. He had given grants to Robert Kennedy’s staff after the 1968 assassination, but there were still bitter feelings about his serving as a conduit for Johnson during the vice-presidential squabble of 1964. And Johnson was no favorite, the Kennedys had never been generous to him, nothing he did would ever please them. Max Taylor had been a favorite and there was some personal loyalty still there, but Taylor’s strict adherence to the war, right through 1968, made it difficult to salvage him. With Bob McNamara it was different, he could still go out and play house games at Hickory Hill and they wanted to spare him from the responsibility; if McNamara had been in on the planning of the big escalation in 1965, and they doubted even that, then Lyndon had somehow pushed him into it. Bob, they thought, was always a little too eager to please (though at the time these events were taking place, George Ball would grow tired of having to repeat to his liberal friends that McNamara was fooling them; he might sound dovish around Washington liberals but he was rough as hell inside those meetings, and in 1965 he was always on the other side).

 

Bob McNamara was a remarkable man in a remarkable era; if at the beginning he seemed to embody many if not most of the era’s virtues, at the end of it he seemed to embody its pathos, flaws and tragedy. No one could doubt his good intentions, his ability, his almost ferocious sense of public service, yet something about him bothered many of his colleagues. It was not just Vietnam, but his overall style. It was what made him so effective: the total belief in what he was doing, the willingness to knock down anything that stood in his way, the relentless quality, so that other men, sometimes wiser, more restrained, would be pushed aside. He would, for instance, lie, dissemble, not just to the public, they all did that in varying degrees, but inside, in high-level meetings, always for the good of the cause, always for the right reason, always to serve the Office of the President. Bob knew what was good for the cause, but sometimes at the expense of his colleagues. And indeed, experienced McNamara watchers, men who were fond of him, would swear they knew when Bob was lying; his voice would get higher, he would speak faster, he would become more insistent.

He embodied the virtues Americans have always respected, hard work, self-sacrifice, decency, loyalty. Loyalty, that was it, perhaps too much loyalty, the corporate-mentality loyalty to the office instead of to himself. He was, finally, the embodiment of the liberal contradictions of that era, the conflict between the good intentions and the desire to hold and use power (most of what was good in us and what was bad in us was there; the Jeffersonian democracy become a superpower). It was always there inside his body, Bob conniving and dissembling to do good and to hold power at the same time. Later, near the end of his tour, he went to Harvard, where in another and gentler time he might have been revered, but where now he was almost captured by the radical students, a narrow escape. That night, when he was speaking to a group of professors, someone asked him about the two McNamaras, the quantifier who had given us the body count in Vietnam, and the warm philosopher of the Montreal speech, a humanistic speech which seemed to cast doubt on the nation’s—his own—defense policies. (When Johnson heard of the speech he flew into a rage, demanding to know who at the White House had cleared it, and when it turned out that it was Bill Moyers, this would speed Moyers’ own departure.) He answered: “I gave the Montreal speech because I could not survive in office without giving it, could not survive with my own conscience, and it gave me another ten months, but the price I paid for it is so high in the Congress and the White House, people who have assumed I was a peacenik all along, that if I had to do it over again, I would not give that speech.”

In 1968 he had gone to the World Bank—a job which was the very antithesis of his previous position as head of the greatest war machine in the history of the world, an act which seemed to some to have a touch of penance in it. He was willing to reminisce with old friends about the Defense years, with the exception of one subject which never came up, Vietnam. It still caused him pain and would not go away; there were reminders everywhere of what it had meant. Nor was the split in his own family a unique illustration of what the war had done to this country, in home after home: in the Robert McNamara family there was Bob McNamara, who was one of the great architects of the war, while in 1970 one of the leaders of the California peace movement, attending rallies everywhere, radical, committed, was his young son Craig.

 

He was very much in place among the Kennedy people, for they were rationalists all; they did not really dissent from the Eisenhower years, but as they entered office, had pledged to make the new Administration more effective. They would speed it up, make it work better, cut the flab off. For the cool, almost British young President, he was an ideal Secretary of Defense. He was not of the Establishment in the sense that Bundy was, nor had he served it the way Dean Rusk had, clerking all those years first in the State Department, then at the Rockefeller Foundation. Detroit was not part of the Establishment, but it was part of the functional structure, a place to be watched, its figures scanned by the Establishment to be sure that it could still outproduce Moscow and Berlin in heavy cars.

But if he was not of the Establishment, he had done his time and served well under Bob Lovett in the Air Force during World War II. McNamara was a man to take note of even then; one was sure he would be seen again, and his uncommon qualities, the skill and perseverance, brilliance and selflessness were not forgotten, and fifteen years later when Lovett, who had turned down Defense himself, was asked for names, he immediately mentioned McNamara, whose bright future had been realized. McNamara had kept straight ahead and had gone on to greater things at Ford; they had just made him president. Actually, he had first come to public attention in 1947 (though not by name), his achievements boasted about in a Fortune magazine article on Lovett. When Kaiser wanted to ferry all cargo by flying boats to overseas bases, Lovett had proved that it would require 10,022 planes and 120,765 aircrews to move 100,000 long tons from San Francisco to Australia, whereas the same task was already being handled by 44 surface vessels manned by 3,200 seamen. As casualties rose during the war, the article pointed out, Lovett had instituted Stat Control (Statistical Control Office), a world-wide reporting service anchored by a battery of IBM machines which produced life-expectancy estimates for every member of every aircrew. The idea was to prove to an airman that he had a 50-50 chance to come home while the war was still going on, and an 80 percent chance for survival. Eventually it became so efficient that it could predict how many planes would be available in every theater every day for every operation. It was, said Fortune, “super application of proven business methods to war, and so successful that a few months after hostilities ceased, the Ford Motor Company hired the two principal operators.” Thus McNamara entered on the scene, an imaginative and able cog in an enormously successful machine: business methods applied to war.

After the 1960 presidential election, the call went out from the talent scouts to the Ford Motor Company. Actually they had made contact even earlier, during the campaign. Neil Staebler, chairman of the Democratic party in Michigan, had suggested to Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver that his friend Bob McNamara should head the businessmen’s committee for Kennedy-Johnson, a job for which they were not exactly overwhelmed with applicants. Staebler pointed out that McNamara typified the new liberal businessman with the broader horizon, had considerable prestige among his colleagues throughout the country, had voted for Democrats in the past and came from the prestigious house of Ford. Shriver, a big-game hunter, liked at least part of the idea, Ford, but thought if we go for Ford, we’ll go for the top, we’ll get Henry himself, a decision which lacked only Henry’s concurrence.

Somehow the McNamara idea was lost in the shuffle, but in December, Shriver, now in charge of the recruitment drive, called Staebler again: “How did your friend McNamara vote?”

“For Kennedy, I think.”

“Could you find out?”

“Why?”

“Because we want him in the Administration.”

Staebler warned Shriver that McNamara would not take the job. He was, said Staebler, the most conscientious of men, and now was just taking over a system built specifically around him. It was not just a question of replacing one man with another.

To Staebler, McNamara was different from the other auto executives. While the rest of the auto-making hierarchy was a solid Republican fortress, living in the same elegant suburbs, going to the same posh country clubs, McNamara was something of a maverick. He deliberately lived far from Detroit, in the groves of academe in Ann Arbor, his life style was different, and he had something of a sense of social responsibility. He supported Democrats from time to time, men like Senator Philip Hart and Congressman James O’Hara. He had not, rather vocally, supported Governor Soapy Williams, disliking Williams’ close ties to organized labor, and indeed there were those in Detroit who felt there was a surprising intensity to McNamara’s opposition to Williams, as though given a chance to vote Republican and be orthodox, he had seized it eagerly. He was liberal on most things, such as civil rights, but on labor, the great bugaboo in the auto industry, his views were surprisingly hard-line because labor kept interfering with his cost effectiveness and put constant pressure on the auto industry. McNamara and his Democratic friend Staebler used to argue regularly about labor’s productivity, about the fact that American labor costs were too high, and that we were losing our competitive edge. Bob was, after all, the statistician; even in the Air Force, labor’s role had been functional, not human, a factor rather than people.

Staebler did find out that McNamara had voted for Kennedy, and meanwhile the Kennedy people began checking with their people out in Detroit, getting political clearance. The chief of their people was Jack Conway, one of Walter Reuther’s brightest aides, a United Automobile Workers political officer. To Conway, McNamara was by far the best of the breed. McNamara had never participated in the annual salary negotiations with labor (he was in a different department), but the two had worked closely in 1959 and 1960 during a major overhaul of the Michigan tax system when the Democratic party and labor were trying to bring in a state income tax. At the start, Ford and McNamara had both been strongly against the tax, but at the end of six months of committee work, McNamara changed his views and opposed the official Ford position, a switch which made him few friends in the auto hierarchy. He was, thought Conway, an impressive man to work with, the mind was first-rate, the intellectual discipline awesome, but more, you could engage him even when you disagreed, and you could even change his mind because his ego was not involved in his earlier stand. As for McNamara, he was finally impressed by the equity of the labor people’s position. Conway had left with a strong and favorable impression of McNamara as a broad-gauged man, and he would help clear him later that year. McNamara was similarly impressed with Conway, and when he accepted the Defense job he asked Kennedy if he could offer Conway a job as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower. But President of the AFL-CIO George Meany, no lover of Reuther, heard about it and blew up, blocking the job and creating a rift between himself and McNamara.

He was called to Washington and met Kennedy, who immediately liked him and offered him either Treasury or Defense. The Treasury job had little attraction; he asked one member of the Kennedy team what the Secretary of the Treasury does, and was told that he sets the interest rates. “Hell, I do more at Ford about setting the interests than the Secretary of the Treasury,” he answered. He was bored with finances as an end in itself and felt more intrigued by Defense; one could serve more, contribute more, the challenge was greater. If one wanted a platform for national service, then Secretary of Defense under an activist President would be better than heading the Ford Motor Company. It was a better place to exercise power, to do more good, with greater visibility, particularly for someone who had always been somewhat uneasy in the automotive industry, his conscience never entirely at ease.

Their first meeting went very well; the puritan in McNamara made him ask Kennedy if he had really written Profiles in Courage, and Kennedy assured him that he had. McNamara expressed doubts about his training for the job; Kennedy answered that he knew of no school for Presidents, either. He demanded of Kennedy, and received permission, to pick his own men (much to the frustration of Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., who, having lent an honored name to the Kennedy cause by inveighing in West Virginia against Hubert Humphrey’s courage and patriotism, hoped to be Secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt had tipped off reporters to where McNamara was staying in Washington, in hopes that as they questioned him they would find out about his own job. Thus the reporters trapped McNamara: “I hear you’re going to name Frank Roosevelt Secretary of the Navy?” “The hell I am,” McNamara answered. “But he’s the President’s friend,” the reporter persisted. “I told the President I would pick my own men, and I’m not picking him.” Perhaps not always his own men, since the job went to John Connally of Texas, a close friend of the Vice-President’s).

Having accepted the job, McNamara went back to Detroit to get clearance from his boss, Henry Ford II, who, less than enthusiastic, let him go, for in giving the presidency to McNamara, a system and accounting man rather than a traditional auto man, he had based an entire production system around one highly specialized individual, and the functioning of that system was very much dependent on that one person. Now he was losing the man and keeping the system. In the meantime McNamara talked with past Defense Secretaries and other experts, and showed up a week later in Washington thoroughly prepared; in that short time he had mastered what the main issues before him were and singled out the major areas of work. He already seemed unique in his grasp of the situation, his control, discipline and energy. The Kennedy people, who were having the normal trouble trying to change from seeking office to assuming office, were impressed by the new Secretary, who seemed to be out and running while they were still in the standing start. He had developed that capacity at Ford, to prepare himself so thoroughly in the more intricate areas (his control of the most abstract figures was formidable) that other men, mere mortals, came away quickly impressed.

He managed to pick an uncommon group of bright, fast, analytical, self-assured men who in part helped lead us into the war in Vietnam, but who, unlike other layers of the Washington bureaucracy, would turn and help lead the fight to extricate the country from the war. It was said that in the Kennedy-Johnson years, the three places with the most talented people were the White House under Bundy, the Justice Department under Robert Kennedy, and the Defense Department under McNamara.

Even in the beginning he was completely sure of what he wanted to do, sure of the kind of people he wanted. While the talent scouts under Yarmolinsky were putting up different men, one of them had called Cyrus Vance at his New York law firm, because Vance was the kind of good, sound lawyer you put in a new Administration, and asked if he would like to be in the Defense Department. Vance said yes, as a matter of fact, he would. What kind of job, Cy? A service secretary job, I guess. What service? asked the talent scout. The Navy, I suppose. I was on a destroyer during the war—and so it was decided that Vance would be Secretary of the Navy. McNamara flipped through his dossier and said yes, this man has impressive credentials, but all my service secretaries have to have administrative ability of some kind, and this man doesn’t. So Vance was given the job of general counsel to the Defense Department. Everyone else in the Administration was still learning, but McNamara already seemed to know, already the confidence was there. From the very start, he was an active, decisive Secretary of Defense, and this was not lost on John Kennedy.

Theirs was a relationship which was to continue with mutual admiration and ease, and McNamara was one of the few people working for Kennedy who crossed the great divide and became a part of his social world. Midway through the Kennedy Administration, in fact, a reporter working on a magazine article would ask McNamara who his friends were, and McNamara would answer, well, he had lots of friends. “But whom do you call when you want to relax and chew the fat or have a beer?” And McNamara answered, “The Kennedys—I like the Kennedys.” He had left Detroit, though, at an enormous financial sacrifice, perhaps a loss of as much as $3 million (he had somewhat less than $1 million to his name when he went to Washington). At the time, one block of stock options was about to mature in just a few weeks and Henry Ford graciously suggested he delay two weeks in selling, but that would have interfered with his swearing-in ceremony and McNamara played by the rules. Besides, he was always far more interested in power than money. Power to do good, of course, not power for power’s sake.

 

His growing up had been simple—and enviable. Good parents. Good values. Good education. Good marks. He was born in San Francisco in 1916, the son of Robert J. McNamara and Claranell Strange (thus the middle name, Robert Strange McNamara, upon which his critics would so joyously seize in later years). His father, who married late, was fifty when Bob was born; he was a sales manager for a San Francisco wholesale shoe firm. Father Catholic, mother Protestant, McNamara a Protestant. (Later, during the height of Lyndon Johnson’s love affair with McNamara, the President thought of the Secretary of Defense as a vice-presidential possibility and called around to Democratic pols with the idea. “You could even see Lyndon thinking it out—the Protestants will assume he’s a Protestant, and the Catholics will think he’s a Catholic,” one White House aide said.)

When he and his sister were small, the family moved across the Bay to an area of Oakland which featured a particularly good school system. They lived in Annerly, a nice middle-class section. More than forty years later his teachers would remember him with pleasure. Bob was always well behaved, never pushy, his work always ready in case you called on him; he prepared beautiful books on foreign countries—if only there had been more like him. On to Piedmont High, a school of high standing, where he received excellent marks. He was a doer, no jarred nerves, joining all the right clubs, honor societies, the yearbook, the glee club, president of a secret fraternity pledged to service. He was a very good student but not yet exceptional; an early IQ test put him above the norm, very bright but not exceptional.

From Piedmont he went to Berkeley at a time when Robert Gordon Sproul was turning it into a great university (McNamara greatly admired Sproul, and some friends felt that one of his secret ambitions was to leave Ford, if not for government service, then to head Berkeley). At Berkeley he was remembered as a student with a broadly based education and interests. His proficiency in math was beginning to show through, and his own grades came so easily that he had time to read and work in other courses. His professors assumed that he would become a teacher; he did not seem to have the kind of drive, the hustle, which one felt went with a business career; he seemed a little more scholarly. Those were good years, summers spent gold mining (unsuccessfully), climbing mountains, a sport which he quickly came to love, learning to ski, which he went at in typical McNamara style: find out your weaknesses and work on them, and then keep working on them. Man could conquer all by discipline, and will, and rationality.

From Berkeley he went to Harvard Business School, where he was an immediate standout. His unique ability in accounting control became evident, and he began to work at applying that talent to management techniques. He graduated, moved back to the Bay area to work for Price Waterhouse, and in 1939 started seeing an old friend named Margaret Craig. When he was asked back to Harvard Business to teach accounting, he married Marg (whom everyone would consider a good and humanizing influence on McNamara; much of what was good in Bob, friends thought, came from Marg’s generous instincts). At Harvard he was a particularly good teacher, well organized, with good control of his subject and enthusiasm for his work, but he was restless. World War II was approaching and he wanted to play his part; the Navy had turned him down because of weak eyes. He was trying to join the Army when Harvard Business School went to war.

 

Robert Lovett, the World War I aviator, had stayed in Europe after the Armistice. He had been plagued with a bad stomach, had lived far too much on baby foods, and thus had forsworn most of the social life that a well-connected young banker might be expected to enjoy. Instead he devoted himself to the political study of a decaying Europe and a military study of what the Hitler build-up would mean, particularly in the way of air power. He predicted accurately the fall of France, saw the rot in the fiber there, and sensed that it would be a war that no one could contain, in which air power, an embryonic factor in the first war, would become the decisive factor. He returned to America in 1940, and as a private citizen, while the rest of the country slept, he made his own private tour of all U.S. airplane factories and airfields to find out what America’s air needs and resources were, and he was shocked by the inadequacy of what he saw. He foresaw vast possibilities for American air power, given our industrial base; American industry could flex its muscle and build the greatest air force in the world, which would wreak massive saturation bombing against the enemy’s industrial might. He had met James Forrestal through banking connections, and Forrestal, then Undersecretary of the Navy, sent him to see Robert Patterson, Assistant Secretary of War, where Lovett quickly became a special assistant, then Assistant Secretary for Air, and where his own private planning saved the United States vital time. When this country finally entered the war, some progress had been made in spite of ourselves. But it had not been easy; Lovett could not even find out how many airplanes there were in the country. Charles (Tex) Thornton, one of Lovett’s aides, would remember that when they started in 1940, Lovett asked to see the Air Corps plan. There was much stalling, but Thornton insisted, the Air Corps plan, the overall plan for the defense of this country, and for its offense as well. The military kept delaying and delaying, and finally they brought down a plan for the aerial defense of New York City, with the dust still on it, apparently designed more to fight off the Red Baron than the new massive waves of air power being fielded in modern warfare.

Thornton was someone that Lovett immediately liked. He came from a small Texas town, was ambitious, bright and pleasantly extroverted; he quickly became one of Lovett’s top deputies. Together they decided that in order to harness American industry for the great war effort, they needed first and foremost a giant statistical brain to tell them who they were, what was needed, and where. They asked Harvard Business School, the most logical place, to train the officers they needed for statistical control. This brain trust would send the right men and the right supplies to the right places, and would make sure that when crews arrived at a base there were enough instructors. It was a symbolic step in America’s going from a relatively sleepy country toward becoming a superpower (a step which the acceleration in air power and air industry would finalize). We were already so big that our problem primarily concerned control as well as careful and accurate projection of just how powerful we were. (It was significant that twenty years later, when we were an acknowledged superpower, when Kennedy looked for a Secretary of Defense he turned to someone who was not really a production man, but the supreme accountant, determination of what we needed being more essential than the qualities of the old-style professional production man who ramrodded manufacturing schedules through, who went by instinct, and who knew nothing about systems control.)

The Business School accepted the proposition, and a group of the best young teachers was sought out. McNamara, who was already anxious to go into the service, agreed to become a teacher in the program. He was so effective, such an immediate standout, that Thornton soon pulled him from Harvard and attached him to the Army Air Forces. Finally, for the first time, McNamara had something upon which to fasten that energy, that drive, that curious cold passion. Those traits which would eventually be part of the legend began to emerge; until then he had been just another bright young man, intelligent and hard-working. Now he had a cause and a field to operate in. Thornton would recall that the young McNamara of those early days was strikingly similar to the mature McNamara: the same discipline, the concentration, the relentless work all day and night (“I’m sure that now that he’s at the World Bank, only the Bank exists, and Defense is behind him, just as when he was at Defense, Ford was behind him, and when he was at Ford, there was really nothing else but his work,” he would say).

Thornton sent him first to England to work out problems on the B-17 bomber program, finally got him a commission as a temporary captain in the Army Air Forces. But when the B-29 was being developed, he was pulled from other programs. This was to become the major project for the Air Force, the long-range bomber which was to prove so vital during the last year of the war, but first it needed to be organized and systematized. Other men would make their reputations on the development of the B-29, but Thornton later claimed that the genius of the operation was the young McNamara, putting all the infinitely complicated pieces together, doing program analysis, operation analysis, digesting the mass of facts which would have intimidated less disciplined minds, less committed minds, making sure that the planes and the crews were readied at roughly the same time. Since all this took place before the real age of computers, he had to work it out himself. He was the intelligence bank of the project, and he held the operation together, kept its timing right, kept it all on schedule. It was an awesome performance for a man not yet thirty.

McNamara had planned to go back to Harvard after the war. Challenges fascinated him, but not worldly goods or profit as ends in themselves. So why not return to Harvard, the teaching of those beloved statistics, it was amazing what statistics had done, it was awesome to imagine what they might do in the future. The life style of Cambridge appealed to him; he could enjoy the university atmosphere, he could talk with men who were in other fields and still involve himself in statistics. But Thornton, more outgoing, more entrepreneurial, a man with more imagination than the somewhat reserved McNamara, had other ideas. To Thornton the Air Force had not just been a part of a vast and impressive wartime enterprise but something more, a case study in instant corporate success. From a standing start, the Air Force quickly became cranked up into a supercompany, the most powerful and the most complicated industrial force in the world. It had gone from 295 pilots trained in the year before Pearl Harbor to 96,000 the year after, planes built, flight crews trained, all dovetailed. It had been a staggering task and an enormous success. And they had done it, not by the tired old men who had headed prewar companies, but by this group of talented young people that Thornton and Lovett had created, fresh young minds with modern skills, not tied to the myths, the superstitions and the business prejudices of the past.

Now, Thornton knew, there would be a reconversion from military to civilian production, and the business world would be filled with new opportunities. He took stock of his team: they were without doubt the most talented managerial team of the century, young men who had gained twenty-five years of experience in four years. Under normal business conditions they might not have attained comparable positions of power and influence until they were nearly fifty, by then having picked up all the old prejudices and undesirable traits of their predecessors. Thornton, the oldest and the most senior, was thirty at the time. None of the young men had any real ties to previous jobs; to go back to what they had been was like a general becoming a corporal.

Thornton began to think of the possibility of selling them as a group, all that expertise and managerial talent bound together. It was not just that they could bring a better price as a group, but more important to Thornton, if they were to accomplish something, really create something new and bold in the business world, then their chances were far greater as a group (“If you went in with one or two people you could get lost or chewed up; if you were going to convert a relatively large company quickly you needed a group,” he would recall). When he talked it over with his team, they were enthusiastic. Only McNamara had serious objections, he wanted to return to Harvard. The idea of business did not excite him. But there were financial problems: he had come down with a mild case of polio, and Marg with a more serious case, necessitating considerable doctor bills. (“I said, 'Bob, you’ve got those doctor bills and you can’t go back there to Harvard on twenty-six hundred dollars a year,’ and he thought and said, 'I guess you’re right,’ and he was on board,” Thornton said.)

There were two immediate possibilities; one was Robert Young, the railroad man, and the other was the Ford Motor Company. Thornton went by to see Young, who offered him a job and said he could bring two or three men with him. And then there was the Ford Company, which seemed to offer the most challenge. It would have to be retooled and reconverted; they knew that financially it had not done well, though they did not know how badly it had done during the last twenty years, showing a profit only once since 1927, in the year 1932. The old man’s long-time associate, Harry Bennett, had just been ousted and the reins taken over by Henry Ford II, their own age—he was twenty-eight—who now desperately needed to modernize the company that his grandfather had founded and then let slip. They sent Ford a cable which said in effect: Bright young management team, ran Air Force, ready to work. Thornton made an early contact; eight of them went out there and impressed Henry Ford and the deal was set. Ford told Thornton to set the salaries; they ranged from $10,000 to $16,000. Thornton gave McNamara the second highest salary. The group became the famous Whiz Kids: Thornton, McNamara, Arjay Miller, J. E. Lundy, Charles Bosworth, Jack Reith, Jim Wright, Ben Davis Mills, Wilbur Andreson and George Moore. It was an extraordinary decision for young Ford to make; however, at that bleak moment in his company’s history he had nowhere to go but up. He was reaching beyond the normally closed auto business for a group of non-auto men, whose experience was not in the failure and stupidity of war, but rather in the technology of it, and indeed the technological success of war. Their chief lesson had been that you could control an organization by converting an abundance of facts and figures into meaningful data and then apply them to industrial production; these men were purveyors of what would be a new managerial art in American industry.

The Ford Company practices, both in production and in personnel, had an almost medieval quality to them. Under Henry senior and Harry Bennett the policies of the company were singularly primitive. The public was a problem, the unions were a problem, the bankers were a problem. If Ford built a car, it was the public’s responsibility to like it. No modern managerial group was being trained. The company had no credit. Henry Ford’s only son, Edsel, had tried to fight the policies, but Bennett destroyed him. After the family revolt which resulted in Bennett’s expulsion, young Henry had inherited the shell of a company, the name and perhaps not that much more, at a time when General Motors seemed to employ the most up-to-date production and managerial techniques. Young Henry needed, above all else, instant executives; the company was losing $9 million a month. But he needed, as one friend would admit, two levels of management. One now, instantly, and one to come along. In hiring the Whiz Kids, he was taking care of the future, the near future, but the future nonetheless, so he shrewdly covered all bets and hired a senior level of management from General Motors, men in their late forties and early fifties who could go to work that day and help train his new intellectuals in the auto business. This was to be known in automotive circles as the Breech-Crusoe-Harder group, headed by Ernie Breech, then forty-nine, who had been at General Motors for most of his adult life, and was at the time president of GM’s subsidiary, Bendix. He brought with him Lewis Crusoe, another high General Motors executive, now retired, and Delmar Harder, former chief of production of GM.

The arrival of the GM executive group, which the Whiz Kids had not known anything about, slowed down the latter’s takeover of Ford (Thornton, restless, left after a year and a half for Hughes Aircraft, where he sensed greater possibilities, finally ending up at Litton Industries). But the system worked very well for Henry Ford. The young men were scattered throughout the company (with McNamara and Arjay Miller, who succeeded McNamara as president of Ford, working in finance). There they worked to convert the incredibly archaic, helter-skelter operation of old Henry to the new classic corporate style used at General Motors, with its highly accountable decentralized units, the different company operations turned into separate profit-and-loss centers where each executive would be held directly responsible, and where slippage and failure would be quickly spotted. The lead of General Motors in that postwar period was enormous: Ford had very little in the way of a factory, its machinery was badly outdated, not easily retooled. In contrast, GM had converted to war production, but it had been very careful to establish in its factory and production lines the kind of systems that could be easily converted to peacetime production. Chevy thus had a massive lead; it could bring out a car for much less than it actually did, but if it lowered its prices it would kill Chrysler and bring the wrath of the Congress down for antitrust. (“Don’t ever hire anyone from the auto industry,” Gene McCarthy, one of McNamara’s severest critics later said of him. “The way they have it rigged it’s impossible to fail out there.”) So Chevy kept its prices higher and produced a much better car than Ford. The true difference between Ford and Chevy then was reflected in the used-car market: a two-year-old Chevy sold on the used-car market for about $200 more than a two-year-old Ford, a very considerable gap.

The prime aim of the two new management teams at Ford was to close the gap. Here Breech and McNamara combined their talents; they had to figure out how to produce a car that was at least partially competitive with Chevrolet, and at the same time make enough profit that could be plowed back into the company to build the desperately needed plants. They could not do it by borrowing from the banks, Ford’s credit rating simply wasn’t good enough, so they did it by skinning down the value of the car, mainly on the inside where it wouldn’t be seen. Ford had always been known for styling and speed, so they kept that, and worked on having a modern design, with a zippy car, good for the youth market, though eventually, and sometimes not so eventually, the rest of the car would deteriorate (as was also reflected in the used-car price). The Ford buyers seemed to know it, but curiously enough, continued to buy Fords. By these means Breech got the money to buy and modernize the plants, while it was McNamara’s particular genius to raise the quality without raising the cost, a supreme act of cost effectiveness. This was, of course, McNamara’s specialty, and he had a bonus system to reward stylists and engineers who could improve the car without increasing the cost. The McNamara phrase—it came up again and again at meetings, driven home like a Biblical truth—was “add value rather than cost to the car.” And slowly he and Breech closed the gap on the used-car differential while at the same time modernizing the company.

It was at Ford during this period that McNamara was being converted from a bright, hard-charging young statistician into a formidable figure, a legend, McNamara the entity, someone to respect, someone to fear, a man who rewarded those who met his standards handsomely, and coldly rejected those who did not.

If someone were to be driving with McNamara during work hours, he would see it: Bob was driving, but he was thinking of grilles that day, only grilles existed for him, cheap ones, expensive ones, flashy ones, simple ones, other cars rushing by on their way to lunch, on their way home, and Bob running it through his mind, oblivious to oncoming traffic, frightening his companions. Bob, watch the road, one would say, and if he were in a good mood, he might apologize for his mental absence. McNamara never stopped pushing; in those days he was watching Chevy—how was Chevy doing? The night each year when they got hold of the first Chevy, everyone gathered around in a special room and broke it down piece by piece into hundreds of items, each one stapled to a place already laid out for it, and they concentrated on it—no brain surgeon ever concentrated more—everyone muttering, wondering how Chevy had done this or that for a tenth of a cent less, cursing them slightly—so that was how they had done it!

When Thornton left, there was considerable curiosity as to who would emerge as the top Whiz Kid; it soon became clear that it was McNamara. He symbolized a new kind of executive in American business (later one friend would call him “dean of the first class of American corporate managers”), men who had not grown up in the business, who were not part of the family but who were modern, well educated, technicians who prided themselves that they were not tied to the past but brought the most progressive analytical devices to modern business, who used computers to understand the customers and statistics to break down costs and productions. At Ford what distinguished McNamara was the capacity to bring a detailed financial system to the almost total disorganization of the company. He was brilliant at systematizing, telling Ford where it was going before it got there. He set up a corporate accounting system which reduced the element of surprise in the business. His system of rewards for reducing costs provided incentive (though occasionally, in the view of his critics there, the system backfired, the rewards going to people and ideas whose efficiency would be only short-range).

He rose quickly because he was moving in something of a vacuum. Henry Ford was new and unsure of himself, particularly in the field of financial systems. To an uneasy, uncertain Ford, McNamara offered reassurance; when questions arose he always seemed to have the answers, not vague estimates but certitudes, facts, numbers, and lots of them. Though his critics might doubt that he knew what the public wanted or what it was doing, he could always forecast precisely the Ford part of the equation. He had little respect for much of the human material he found around him, the people who claimed, when he reeled off his overwhelming statistics, that they had always done it the other way in the auto business. Such people, when they challenged him, were often proved wrong. Slowly he surrounded himself with men who met his criteria, men who responded to the same challenges and beliefs, and he would respect their judgments. This was a formative experience in his life, because years later, when the doubters about Vietnam began to express themselves, they at first tended to be people who did not talk his language and who were very different from his kind of people. They did not think in terms of statistics, or rationalizing systems, and they did not support their judgments with facts as he knew them, but rather by saying that it did not smell right, or that it just did not feel right; he would trust his facts and statistics and instincts against theirs just as he had before at Ford when confronted by the businessmen who had doubted his facts and charts.

 

In Detroit he was the odd man in. The auto world is a very special segment of America, with the normal American exaggerations blown even larger. Like a mini-Texas. It is a world closed in, auto men talk to other auto men, auto traditions passed on in generations of families. Ford people living among Ford people, General Motors among GM people. A Ford country club. A General Motors country club. Cocktail conversations about cars and the company. Dinner conversations about cars and the company. There is a self-belief that what they are doing is not only good for America, it is America. In this atmosphere McNamara was the last puritan. He came to it, met it on his terms, never really changing, conquered it by sheer mathematical and tactical ability, rose to the highest position, a penultimate corporate victory, forcing the head of the company to adjust an entire system to his style. McNamara was never of Detroit and never really of the auto industry. They were backslappers, good fellows, and he was never one for slapped backs, his or theirs. While they frolicked, he plowed through the unabridged Toynbee. Even his public relations man was different; other PR men specialized in expense-account lunches, plush trips, the usual lures to wine and dine and con journalists; McNamara by contrast paid a very handsome salary to a man named Holmes Brown because Brown was very good, knew a lot about the auto industry and was well informed. Brown’s treatment of reporters was considered unusually Spartan by Detroit standards. McNamara preferred to live in Ann Arbor among the eggheads, many of them liberals and Democrats (at Ford executive meetings Henry Ford would occasionally mention contributions to the Republican party and then note with a certain distaste that “Bob here will probably give to the Democrats”), reading books, buying paintings. When the dealers and their wives showed up every year, the head of Ford would traditionally show them around while the wife would take care of the ladies for a day. Normally it meant fashion shows with mink coats. Under Marg McNamara they went for a tour of the University of Michigan cyclotron. Indeed it was said that the McNamaras deliberately managed to be elsewhere when Henry and Ann Ford gave great gala parties for their daughters.

But it was more than just a stylistic difference with Detroit, it was something far deeper. In business philosophy as well as personal life McNamara was a puritan, and the auto business is not the place for a puritan, nor is it necessarily the place for someone who has an abiding faith in man as a rational being committing rational acts. The buying of a car is not necessarily a rational act; it takes more than the transportation aspect to sell a car. Detroit is and always has been happiest when it can foist on a potential customer more than he needs, adding chrome, hard tops, soft tops, air conditioners, speakers, extra horsepower. McNamara was different; he thought the customer should be rational, and worse, in the eyes of some colleagues, he thought he was rational. The auto industry essentially believes the buying of a car is an impulse; McNamara insisted it was a rational decision. It pained him to approve a convertible, the idea that a customer would pay $200 more for a dangerous car that would deteriorate more rapidly offended him (after he left Ford and they made a convertible version out of his beloved Falcon he wrote a rare message to a friend at Ford: “You must be crazier than hell”). He believed deeply in the simple utilitarian car, that it was a raw, functional thing, that man seeks the highest form of efficiency without grace, and without psychological feelings at all. His opponents in the auto industry argued that this is not the way the world is, and in particular, it is not the way the auto industry is; man will opt for comfort and status every time, and has since men flaunted better-looking horses and carriages at one another.

But it was as if McNamara felt that there were certain things which were good for people and other things which were bad, and he would be the arbiter, he knew better than they. It was, said one friend, a quiet kind of arrogance. One of his colleagues thought he should have been the head of production at the Moskva works in the Soviet Union, the utilitarian man producing the utilitarian car for the utilitarian society, no worry about frills there. If he hadn’t gone to work at Ford, thought another, he’d still be teaching at the Harvard Business School, probably happier, driving a VW to work and laughing like hell at all the fools around him with their big cars and automatic transmissions. He not only believed in rationality, thought a friend, he loved it. It was his only passion. “If you offended it at a meeting, you were not just wrong, you had violated something far greater, you had violated his sense of the rational order. Like offending a man’s religion.” If you did show a flash of irrationality or support the wrong position, he would change, speaking faster, the voice like a machine gun, cutting into you: chop chop chop. You miscalculated here. Chop. You left this out. Chop. You neglected this. Chop. Therefore you’re wrong. Chop. Chop. Chop.

He was a powerhouse at those meetings, driving things through, always in great command, doing his own homework, never respecting those who did not (later when he was at the Pentagon a general would turn at a meeting and ask a colonel for the answer to a question, and it would be the general’s last appearance around McNamara). His power was facts, no one had more, and no one used them better, firing them out, one after another, devastating his opponents (though sometimes friends would feel that there was a missing piece, that sometimes this brilliant reasoning was based, yes, on a false assumption). He was, if anything, too strong a personality; he so dominated meetings that other men felt submerged and suppressed. Sometimes his meetings seemed to less friendly eyes to have a sham quality. There would be a meeting, say, to plan a car, its style, content and prospective price. McNamara would arrive at the meeting with his own homework done, his own decisions made, so that he came with a fixed position. He would seemingly defer to the others, ask what they thought, yet there was an overpowering personality and ego there. He perhaps did not mean it to be that way, but despite the appearance of give-and-take, the whole thing would become something of a sham, the classic Harvard Business School approach with loaded dice.

Those who attended the meetings learned to play the game; the McNamara requests to speak freely were not to be taken too seriously. He would telegraph his own viewpoint, more often than not unconsciously, in the way he expressed the problem, and in particular he would summarize in an intimidating way, outlining point by point, using the letters of the alphabet, A through J, if necessary, and his position always seemed to win out in the summation. If you dissented or deviated, he listened, but you could almost hear the fingers wanting to drum on the table; if you agreed and gave pro evidence, he would respond warmly, his voice approving in tone. Gradually those who disagreed learned their lesson, and just as gradually he would reach out to men who were like him until he was surrounded by men in his own image. Those who knew him well could tell when he was angry, when he was going to explode. He would become tense, and if you looked under the table you could see him begin to hitch up his pants, a nervous habit, done because he knew he could not control his hands if they were on the table. The more restless he became, the more his antagonist assaulted his senses, the higher the pants would get, showing thick hairy legs. On bad days the pants might reach to the knees, and then suddenly he would talk, bang bang bang. You’re wrong for these reasons. Flicking his fingers out. One. Two. Three . . . He always ran out of fingers.

Though he was often blamed for the Edsel (particularly by Barry Goldwater in 1964), he had remarkably little to do with it; the car was essentially antithetical to his position. The old GM people at Ford had long wanted to emulate the GM pattern, a different car in each of several different markets, different stalls in the market place (Ford-Mercury-Lincoln dealers were together, whereas the GM lines were sold separately). Finally they saw their chance: upgrade Mercury and slip the Edsel in between. The decision was made in 1955, a prime year, but the car came to fruition in 1958, which was a bad auto year, post-Sputnik, the worst year, for instance, Buick had. When the Edsel went bad, Lewis Crusoe had a heart attack, and McNamara was put in charge of all the car divisions. He consolidated some of the other divisions and put a stop to the Edsel.

Instead of playing games with consumer tastes, he spent those years fighting the battle to keep the prices down and the cars simple, fighting with the other people at Ford, fighting with the dealers. Always trading and swapping to hold the line. The dealers wanted more frills. The dealers wanted a crank on the front-window vents. And McNamara would say, all right, you can have that, but we’ll have to take all the chrome off the car. Some of the men fought about the width of the car, wanting it wider so it could be a hard-top, which entailed a wider frame. McNamara would listen and tell them (words which would be remembered long after), “If you persist in demanding this, I’ll have to take the car away from you.” The men around him began to shade things in talking to him, not really lies, just a certain hedging of the truth to please him. For instance, McNamara wanted a two-speed automatic transmission, so he promoted a design which would perform as well as a three-speed but cost less. There were considerable doubts that the two-speed would work as well, but he was finally given assurances that it would; the engineers wanted it to work because he wanted it to work, because there would be bonuses and smiles of approval, but sadly it never did; it performed durably but sluggishly, just as his critics had predicted.

Yet he was good at Ford, no mistake about that. He brought his system to that declining empire at just the right time; they held the line, they did not decay and collapse as they might have, and they finally grew back, in part owing to his enormous drive and pressure, his utilitarian view, probably perfectly suited to what Ford needed and could afford at the time. His greatest triumph was the Falcon, the vindication of his years at Ford, the definitive utilitarian car, the direct descendant of the Model T, his ultimate contribution to cost effectiveness, a car low enough in price to compete with foreign imports but large enough to transport an American family around. He did not want a revolutionary car, just a classic, simple car. It was a great success, though not as great as McNamara had hoped; he envisioned a million in the first year, and it went instead to 600,000. Its success was to come just before he left Ford; it enabled him to gain the presidency, and he left on a note of triumph. But after he left, Lee Iacocca, who would eventually succeed him, said that Bob McNamara had damn near ruined Ford by pushing that Falcon, too simple a car, with too small a profit for the company. Iacocca symbolized exactly the opposite of McNamara in the auto world. For instance, he brought racing to Ford, and Henry liked that, Henry pictured with his pretty new wife in Europe after having virtually bought Le Mans, an invasion of American power and industry somewhat short of that flashed on D-Day. McNamara hated all that, hated racing, and now here was Henry and the Ford name advertising for it. Lee brought in the Mustang, a car designed for the American consumer in just the way McNamara’s cars were not. They had looked at the design and thought, we have a doll of a car and people will buy it, and now let’s figure out how to build it. Lee liked bigger, plusher, flashier cars, and to him the Falcon was a reminder that Ford might be growing customers for GM, bringing them into auto consumption, and then as they grew wealthier, turning them over to GM, which was stronger in the middle range of cars. So Lee was critical of McNamara, and so occasionally was Henry Ford, now more confident, now more his own man, and sometimes given to making statements which indicated a measure of disenchantment with McNamara, that perhaps the good old-style auto people were better than the new intellectuals.

 

It is not easy being a puritan in Babylon, living the private life of a puritan but competing with the other Babylonians in the daytime pursuit of profit and growth, and the Ford McNamara was an immensely complicated man. He would have been a simple man had he stayed on in a university, taught there, lived there, sent his students out in the world a little better for their experience with him, but essentially one man, no difference between the theory and practice of McNamara. But this was different. He who had little material drive of his own was committed to making it in the world of profit and excess and, indeed, greed (to hold power he had to be, above all, a successful businessman, and his power stemmed from his ability to do the job, to cut corners, to make profits).

So the ferocious businessman of Detroit was the humane citizen of Ann Arbor: he read the right books, went to local art openings in Ann Arbor, and supported the local cultural affairs, which always needed supporting. Marg belonged, of course, to the local UN group, and Bob and Marg were both members of a book club, which met once a month. Each person picked a book for a meeting, then all of them read and discussed it (with no more than two drinks at the meetings). Bob’s book was Camus’ The Rebel. His intellectualism was even then a little self-conscious; it wasn’t so much that he was philosophical as he liked to be philosophical, he liked to improve himself (he was the final self-improvement man; he read an essay because it was an essay to be read), the man with the five-foot shelf of Great Books. Later, when he arrived in Washington, all that intelligence and force made some of the capital’s more skeptical residents feel that there was a gee-whiz quality to his intellectual pursuits, McNamara a little self-conscious about intellectual pursuits, a part of the Great Book crowd . . . Bob and Marg to be improved . . . he had just talked to Barbara Ward and she said this and that. At the Robert Kennedy’s Hickory Hill seminars, which were a symbolic feature of the vastly overrated New Frontier culture, more chic than substance, the women had to be either very pretty, or Mrs. Longworth, McNamara was a constant and deadly earnest student. He took the seminars more seriously than anyone else, always doing his homework, always asking a serious question.

As there was later in Washington, there was something of a split in the personality during the Detroit years, a switchover after 6:30 p.m. There was the driving, relentless, cost-effective executive of Ford during the day and the resident philosopher of Ann Arbor in the evening, one cold and efficient, the other warm, almost gregarious. It was as if he compartmentalized his mind; the deep philosophic thoughts were important, but they were not to be part of the broader outlook; if perhaps he were to stand for some of the good things in business he would do it after he took control of Ford. Subvert them first and then announce who you are. If later the immensity of the contradictions between his liberal instincts and the war in Vietnam would cause him grief, similarly the difference between his sense of social conscience and the enormous needs of great industry caused him problems earlier. It was as if the contradictions of our age were all within him. At Ford he could be an advocate of consumer rights, hating the way the parts system worked, with dealers forcing spare parts on customers (the dealers, of course, loved this because they could charge high labor rates for repairs). Although McNamara despised this system, he was also very much a part of it, because it was, yes, cost-effective, very lucrative, and the dealers in those years did not get the choice items from Detroit unless they sold the requisite number of parts to their customers. (Years later at the Pentagon he would be a symbol of an attempt to control the arms race and at the same time one of the world’s great arms salesmen to other countries because it cut Pentagon costs, was good for the budget, looked good on the Hill, made the President smile.)

McNamara believed in car safety and thought it was important, yet he never really pushed it until 1956 when Ford was flat beaten by Chevy; Ford was in the last year of a three-year cycle and Chevy had a hot new car, a sharp new style, a V-8 engine, and Ford was dead and they all knew it. Since the Ford people realized that there was little in the way of options, they decided to sell safety; it was not often, one of them said, that you got to be on the side of both God and profits. It was McNamara’s idea and decision. He had long been concerned about safety and wanted to bring it in; yet it was also a last-minute decision and a desperate one. They added some safety latches, a deep-dish steering wheel, crash padding in front, and called in J. Walter Thompson to do the campaign. The theme was that Ford was safe and safety was good for you, something that sounds mild to the uninitiated but which was revolutionary at the time. When the cars came out, Chevy was, predictably, a great success; the Ford was a bust and McNamara’s job even seemed to be on the line.

Then he caught the flu and went to Florida for a rest. While he was gone some of the General Motors executives and some of their old friends at Ford tried a coup against McNamara. Apparently high GM officials called Henry and said—look, this is serious, you’re ruining the auto industry, you’re selling death, the image you’re projecting is violent and ugly (cars, after all, were for pleasure and brought happiness. On the television commercials, handsome young men drove new cars and they met good-looking young women). With Henry’s sanction a group of the old GM people took over some of McNamara’s functions. It was, in effect, a takeover; he was, in fact, close to being out. But he rose from the ashes, saved not so much by the generosity of Henry Ford, or the Ford power structure, as by the 1957 Ford and by the much despised dealers, who knew they had a hot car (this was one of the two years while he was at Ford that Ford beat Chevrolet) and were willing to stay with the ’56 in order to get the ’57. So Ford decided to cut back on the ’56 and minimize its losses. The new advertising was changed to style, performance, and yes—you could barely hear it—safety. It was not untypical of McNamara at Ford, and later at Defense, that he started with good intentions, touched with a certain expediency and a little dissembling, and ended up not with a success, but with something even worse, for it became part of the auto mythology that safety does not sell, safety is bad and hurts business. It would take another decade and an outsider named Ralph Nader who did not worry about hiding his intentions or making it in the business world, to put the full moral pressure on the auto industry to bring some safety and consumer reforms.

 

When McNamara went to Washington, most of his friends in Ann Arbor felt that he left with a sigh of relief, that he had never really liked the auto industry, never found enough fulfillment (they thought also that Marg had always felt that selling cars was a little unbecoming, a little unsavory). It was as if, once he had found that he could make it at Ford and win, he was bored with the world, with the other men who could talk only about cars. It was as if, presented a challenge, he had mastered it in order to give himself credibility and respectability in the world of business (thus, if you were a success in the business world, met payrolls, made profits, you were a serious person, and your social and other opinions took on a more serious nature; you were not a simple do-gooder who has never lived in the real world). He made money for Henry not because he was interested in profits but because his power was based on his relationship with Henry, and Henry had charged him with this, thus it was his responsibility to make profits. (In 1955 he was asked to give the commencement address at the University of Alabama, and he wrote a speech which said finally that there had to be a higher calling for a businessman than simply making money. One of the Ford officials saw the advance text and insisted that the passage come out; McNamara was very bitter and thought of canceling the speech. “Damn it,” he told friends. “I’m making more money for them than they’ve ever had made before. Why can’t they leave me alone?” But friends told him that the Ford people had not said he couldn’t say this, they had simply refused to permit it in the advance text. So he went down to the commencement and when he got to the controversial passage in his speech, he shouted it out so that it could be heard all the way back to Detroit.)

When he was offered the Defense job, his close friends felt they would not really be surprised if he accepted; he had, they thought, been looking for a larger and more satisfying stage. The only thing which would make him stay would be a sense of responsibility to Henry, certainly not to himself. There were people at Ford who were pleased, feeling as they did that the company under this coldly driving, efficient man had been too stifled. In Ann Arbor the pleasant liberals in his book club were pleased too, to see this humane man that they admired so much take on such an important new job as Defense. One of them, Robert Angell, the head of the sociology department and a member of McNamara’s book club, who had admired the breadth of McNamara’s mind, went to his classes that morning and instead of beginning with the regularly scheduled work, he talked movingly about McNamara, how lucky the country was to have this kind of man in such a difficult job, a man who was far more than a businessman, a real philosopher with a conscience and a human sensitivity. Later, when the Bay of Pigs happened, Angell and the others would receive something of a shock—how could Bob be involved in something like this? Angell, a very gentle man, decided, talking with some of Bob’s other friends, that they had made Bob go along. And then McNamara went to Vietnam and came back, and Angell turned on his television set and there was Bob talking about putting people in fortified villages, and Angell wondered what had happened to Bob, he sounded so different. And his friends in Ann Arbor would watch him with his pointer as he crisply explained where the bombs were falling. In 1965 Angell would duly set off for the first teach-in against the war, held at Michigan, and he and the other friends would always wonder what had happened to Bob; they heard that Marg had been sick, that the war had torn Bob up, but they would not talk about it with him because Bob did not come back to visit them.