The Two McNamaras

I enjoyed reading Oliver Kim’s article on the two lives of Robert McNamara: one as US secretary of defense and chief escalator of the Vietnam War, the other as World Bank president and crusader against global poverty. He suggests that though it’s tempting to contrast these as different sides of the same man, they shared common threads: a drive for quantification, a bureaucratic command approach, and the ambition to reorganize large institutions. In Vietnam, he used the Hamlet Evaluation System, which graded 12,000 hamlets each month and fed the results into an IBM mainframe that invariably showed the US winning. At the Bank, he more than tripled the staff and turned an institution run by engineers into one run by economists; yearly lending grew from about $1 billion in 1968 to $13 billion in 1981.

In both eras, he seemed to focus more on what was easily measurable rather than strategically relevant. The North Vietnamese were willing to absorb losses that American planners had not anticipated, and land reform was not considered relevant until much later. The Bank did some good, virtually eradicating river blindness in West Africa, for example, but also drew criticism, with a culture of lending with little regard for how the money would be used.

Archives suggest that McNamara privately believed by November 1965 that the Vietnam War could not be won, but continued selling it publicly for years, boasting enemy body counts. Asked later why he stayed silent, he offered the excuse that his loyalty lay with the president. Oliver concludes, “if there is a thread we can trace through his career, from the Pentagon to the Bank, it is that no amount of technocratic skill can substitute for ethical judgment. McNamara was one of the 20th century’s great systems builders—a man who could tame vast bureaucracies, enlarge them, rationalize them. That doing what was right might require sometimes stepping outside the system simply did not compute.”