July 08, 2009
Robert McNamara: A Life Ill Spent
Robert McNamara died Monday, drawing the usual plaudits in obituaries on the pages of the sundry Times -- New York, Chicago, Los Angeles -- as well as the deep-inside-the-beltway Washington Post, mainly lauding him for his work since leaving the Johnson Administration, and especially for his '90s-era mea culpa for Vietnam.
Columnist Mickey Kaus wasn't impressed by McNamara's change of heart back in '95, tagging the beancounter with responsibility for a variety of ills.
Has any single American of this century done more harm than Robert McNamara? No one comes readily to mind.
Yes, Lyndon Johnson bears greater responsibility for the damage done the nation by the Vietnam War.
But McNamara is a Renaissance man. Before he helped ruin the American polity, he helped ruin the American economy, pioneering at Ford the bloodless, numbers-oriented management methods that helped bring so many corporations to their knees.
After Vietnam, as head of the World Bank, he helped ruin the entire world's economy, shoveling out billions of dollars to fund failed "development" projects. It's a tough record to match.
Some critics credit McNamara with fixing Ford, becoming the first man to lead the company without bearing the family name, but he was also the first man to lead the company who didn't seem to like -- much less love -- cars.
McNamara famously designed a car while sitting in church, sketching it out on a piece of paper. When he turned it over to the engineers, it didn't have anything approaching a picture of the vehicle; rather, it was a list of specifications: length, weight, cost. McNamara couldn't care less with how it looked, sounded, smelled or drove like.
Is it any wonder so-called whiz kids like McNamara and his ilk started nickel and diming the American auto industry into utter crapitude?
David Halberstam, in his book "The Reckoning," detailed the rise and fall of Ford. One story recounted Ford trying to fix a problem with their cars rusting. According to the engineers, the paintbooths were too small for the oversize cars coming off the assembly line, preventing the paint from being applied properly, as well as not being able to cure completely. The solution was to build bigger paint booths.
McNamara, the quintessential accountant, nixed the idea as too expensive. His solution? Cut the cars in half, paint the smaller pieces separately, then weld them back together.
The engineers were, to put it mildly, aghast.
Speaking of Halberstam, he figures in Joe Galloway's essay on McNamara's passing, which opens with this Clarence Darrow quote: "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.
McNamara was the original bean-counter — a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.
Back in 1990 I had a series of strange phone conversations with McNamara while doing research for my book We Were Soldiers Once And Young. McNamara prefaced every conversation with this: "I do not want to comment on the record for fear that I might distort history in the process." Then he would proceed to talk for an hour, doing precisely that with answers that were disingenuous in the extreme — when they were not bald-faced lies.
Upon hanging up I would call Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam and run McNamara's comments past them for deconstruction and the addition of the truth.
The only disagreement I ever had with Dave Halberstam was over the question of which of us hated him the most. In retrospect, it was Halberstam.
When McNamara published his first book — filled with those distortions of history — Halberstam, at his own expense, set out on a journey following McNamara on his book tour around America as a one-man truth squad.
McNamara abandoned the tour.
Whatever good McNamara may have accomplished during his long life -- and some might argue you'd have to go all the way back to his work with the Army Air Corps during WWII to find anything praiseworthy -- it pales beside his negligible accomplishments at Ford, the Pentagon, and beyond.
While Galloway, Kaus and Halberstam were very, very harsh in their judgements, I don't think they were wrong. History will also judge McNamara harshly, rightly so, in my humble opinion.
Posted by Mike Lief at July 8, 2009 08:17 AM
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Comments
"Pathetic" is too harsh to describe the DTS. "Unnecessarily old-fashioned" would be better. How could they think a 4-speed automatic transmission is still competitive?
Posted by: The Little Coach at July 10, 2009 10:01 AM
Donald Rumsfeld and Robert McNamara are one and the same. They both sold lies to wage a needless war.
Posted by: Shrimp Gumbo at July 11, 2009 07:20 PM