Robert S. McNamara, RIP

While his name has become synonymous with limitless hubris in the making of public policy, Robert S. McNamara, who died on Monday at 93, actually embodied what many, maybe most, Americans claim to want in their public servants: the application of disinterested expertise to the task at hand, considerations of partisan advantage or interest-group benefit be damned. And that was at the root of both his notorious failures and the successes they have come to overshadow in the public mind.

Schooled in Taylorism at Berkeley and trained in the most up-to-date application of quantitative methods in his wartime service, McNamara was the archetypal number-cruncher in the high noon of American technocracy. His rise paralleled the faltering of ideology in postwar politics, and the ascendancy of the conceit that if intelligent enough men were placed in the right positions, enough data provided to them, and the process engineered with the requisite skill, then policymaking could be reduced to something approximating a precise science, a matter of mere technique. Government with the politics left out.

But this underestimated the extent to which the political, and indeed the human, permeate any contraption for the wise framing and execution of laws. And it was clear early on that McNamara was at his best where political considerations could be shoved to the margins. One of his early triumphs as a wartime statistician was devising a system for the optimal provision of supplies by air to the China-Burma-India theatre. So many aircraft, so many tons of supplies, the right formulae, and the optimal solution did indeed emerge. The method was inevitably less reliable when applied to the fire-bombing of Japan, where the numbers mattered, but no more than the imponderables of human resolve, on the part of both Japan's civilian population and its military oligarchy. If war, as the most familiar Clausewitzian axiom has it, is policy (politics) by other means, then McNamara's calculus was necessarily incomplete to the degree that it could not compute the political variables of ambition and sacrifice, fear and will.

As an executive at the Ford Company after the war, McNamara famously boasted that he knew next to nothing about cars, only the managerial techniques by which they were designed, built, and marketed. It is a canard that he supported the ill-fated Edsel, but his insistence on top-down decisionmaking, for all the efficiencies it generated in the short term, empowered the generation of executives whose insular self-regard would virtually sink America's auto industry.

On becoming John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, he readily admitted he knew no more about weapons systems and strategy than he had known about cars and trucks. But he was appointed to streamline the financing and administration of America's defenses by gimlet-eyed scrutiny of the defense budget, and to curtail the inter-service rivalries and political logrolling that had marred defense policy in the Eisenhower era. And he did so in large measure. The prerogatives of service chiefs and the whims of Congressional committees did count for less. But there were costs along the way. If the generals and admirals found it harder to give ignorant or self-serving advice, they had a tougher time getting a hearing when they had relevant wisdom to impart.

After Kennedy and McNamara, the Secretary of Defense would be the President's principal adviser on military matters, but it did not follow that his counsel was always sounder than that of the uniformed cicerones to whom earlier Presidents might turn. Different as the two men might be, Donald Rumsfeld was as self-assured and commanding as McNamara ever was, and on the costs and pitfalls of Invading Iraq, he proved less prescient than General Erik Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff he politically neutered when he publicly contradicted Rumsfeld's estimates of what the job would require.

On the making of America's actual strategy, McNamara had one major success to his credit, but a qualified one. At the dawn of the Kennedy administration, American nuclear plans called for a rapid resort to nuclear hostilities in the event of a Soviet thrust into Western Europe. McNamara knew such threats were losing the plausibility successful deterrence required in the face of America's own vulnerability in the coming age of the ICBM, and he sought credible conventional options for defending the Continent. If he was arguably right on the merits of pushing for stronger conventional defenses, his public insistence on the folly of small national deterrents as wasteful and ineffective complicated relations with all three of Britain, France, and West Germany. But as far as he was concerned, the task of educating America's allies in the realities of the nuclear age had been too long postponed, and could not await the politic moment.

Early on, he advocated a "no cities-counterforce" strategy, in which Soviet forces, not population centres, would be targeted, in the hope of producing similar restraint on the part of the enemy, and "bargaining pauses" in which one might step back from Armageddon. But he ultimately acknowledged that controlling the escalation of hostilities would prove harder in practice, and that the proposed strategy would not materially reduce American losses in a nuclear exchange. (To be sure, he was never a true believer in so-called "flexible response", which was mainly a rationale for strong central control of NATO's nuclear weapons in American hands; I explore this and related questions in the salient chapters of my doctoral dissertation, as yet unpublished.) From 1967 on, he openly espoused the doctrine of "mutual assured destruction" under which nuclear weapons were useful only for deterring each other, with their employment tantamount to mutual suicide. The world, as Peter Scoblic has argued, became modestly safer with the triumph of McNamara's assumptions about the ultimate unwinnability of a nuclear war.

What mattered, he argued, was not so much the numbers on each side as the survivability of one's forces in the face of a preemptive attack that they could deter, so that an uneasy equilibrium would replace ungoverned arms racing as the central trope of nuclear strategy. But if he was broadly right, McNamara characteristically erred in assuming that the Soviet leadership shared his views of what was rational; he did not anticipate the desire of at least some factions in the Kremlin, following the apparent climbdown that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis,
never to be caught in a position of nuclear inferiority again, or the subsequent growth in Soviet strategic forces not just up to, but beyond, rough parity.

At the outbreak of the Cuban crisis itself, he correctly observed that the Soviet missiles affected the strategic balance only at the margins; the only problem the United States faced, he confronted, was the modest political one of having been outfaced and defied in its own sphere of influence. But this was to understate the problem; if relative (and calculable )numbers of nuclear weapons mattered less, as he argued, then subjective judgments of resolve were the primary determinants of the credibility of security guarantees to allies, and so mattered more. Thus a great deal of the architecture of nuclear stability was at issue in the Caribbean, more than McNamara seems to have understood. His sense that escalation control might fail and events elude control did serve him well; he rightly argued that the course of early resort to bombing or invading Cuba, as some in the military proposed, was fraught with incalculable peril, and threw his weight behind a quarantine of Cuba as the initial response. After that October he resiled violently from his previous position that nuclear hostilities could be micromanaged. His intensified awareness that in a nuclear crisis events might prove resistant to rational direction, whoever was in charge, seems to have haunted him; thereafter he became more pessimistic about the chances of man's surviving to the end of the century, and his visceral horror of nuclear arms caused some of his subordinates to doubt whether his views were compatible with the dictates of his job.

It is not true that Vietnam was "McNamara's war." The most careful study of the decisions that put American troops on the ground and thus irrevocably staked American prestige on the outcome, that by Fredrik Logevall, notes that they were the personal choices of Lyndon Johnson, who feared as much for his personal reputation as that of his party or country. McNamara sought to ensure a diplomatic track was opened up, even though he was insistent that negotiations on terms other than those of thinly disguised Communist surrender had to await some improvement of fortunes on the battlefield, an improvement he could never contrive to bring about. At least from early 1965, he seems to have doubted that victory was likely, though he proved ingenious in devising quantitative measures by which it might be possible to conclude that the situation had ceased to deteriorate, or at least that the other side was losing more men. (If the precise calibration of military means to geopolitical end might not be possible with nuclear weapons, he seems to have thought it worth the trying at lower levels of violence.)

Here his reliance on data and intelligence served him worst of all; the inescapable ruler of events was that the North Vietnamese and their South Vietnamese allies were simply prepared to bear far higher losses than their adversaries in order to attain ultimate victory. When McNamara finally issued a hedged mea culpa in his 1995 memoir In Retrospect, he united in condemnation foes of the war and right-wingers who saw it as a winnable cause undone by political missteps. The former seized on his admission that he had never rated the odds of success as high as validating their claim the war should never have been fought, the latter concluded McNamara had never had the confidence in victory that might have led to its energetic prosecution. But as former Senator Eugene McCarthy (who almost unhorsed LBJ in the 1968 New Hampshire primary and compelled his retirement from office) observed, it seems unlikely that the American effort would have ended sooner had McCarthy resigned in protest or taken his doubts to the public; LBJ would have marginalized him as he did other in-house dissenters or pressed him to step down sooner than 1968.

And when McNamara resigned, he did so as a haunted man, prone to crying jags in his Pentagon office that caused colleagues to fret for his mental stability, and with his own family divided by the war. It is now the conventional wisdom that his subsequent work as dispenser of alms to the Third World in his role as President of the World Bank was atonement. But in some ways he had changed too little. While loans to developing nations rose from less than $1 billion a year to over $12 billion on his watch, his oft-proclaimed goal of triggering 5% annual growth in the world's poorest countries came to naught.

The preference for large-scale white elephants was all too reminiscent of the theories of economic modernization and nation-building he sought to apply in Vietnam, and too often in the latter case as well the money vanished into the pockets of corrupt dictators and larcenous officials. As ever, he was largely blind to the political, and thus the human, dimension.

There was something in McNamara's manner and appearance, the steel-rimmed glasses, helmet of shiny hair, clipped speech and army of charts (well before the age of the PowerPoint)that invited caricature. But as any viewer of the interviews by Errol Morris for his documentary The Fog of War can attest, he was no passionless calculating machine. Often close to tears of despair or guilt in his later years, he seemed then as much as the prisoner of his passions as he had once been of his delusive rationalism, unforgiving of himself if only because he was part of a world and a species that would not bend to logic's demands.