More Losses

Perhaps unsurprisingly, people didn't stop dying.

In an attempt to get away from the unseemly circus surrounding the death of Titans and Ravens quarterback Steve McNair, if nothing else, I'd like to write a word or two about Robert McNamara, who died today at the age of 93.

McNamara was born in 1916 and came of age during the Great Depression in Oakland, California. He was a "whiz kid" with numbers, and got his MBA at Harvard Business School, where he was hired as an assistant professor one year later. He also joined the military as an analyst (he had been ROTC undergrad at Berkeley), studying effectiveness of various military efforts, such as Curtis LeMay's B-29 bombers in China during WWII. He later became the first non-Ford to be president of Ford Corporation, where he excelled during the postwar boom years, and then became Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, where is largely viewed as responsible for the Vietnam War's early years. He then led the World Bank, and remained active in politics as a champion for various positions. He is, as one might imagine, a figure who engenders mixed feelings.

I wasn't alive during the Vietnam War, and I've never as an adult had to deal with an existential threat like Communism was (I don't think terrorism represents such a threat), so I don't have much to say on McNamara's war management. Others who are more informed will say it better, and I trust the dialogue on that to be robust. I think it is important to note that his departure from Lyndon Johnson's cabinet in 1967 was after many disagreements with LBJ over Vietnam. Most accounts have McNamara as believing that the correct course of action was to reduce bombings, fortify the boundary between North and South Vietnam, and switch strategies. Johnson and the Joint Chiefs disagreed. Various obits, like the Post's, declaring him "Architect of the Vietnam War," might be right in some sense, but the Vietnam War is defined culturally by its end, which McNamara likely would have handled differently.

But what I want to focus on is McNamara's more lasting - and less discussed - legacy, that of systems analysis. McNamara believed that the effectiveness of programs, military and otherwise, had to be examined in context, and evaluated based on objective cost-benefit analysis. This belief and the system of measurements he put in place at Defense and, later, the World Bank, are in many ways the basis of the way we look at policy today.

Some criticize this calculated examination of being heartless and missing intangible benefits and costs, and those criticisms are not without merit. But the idea that policy should be determined and implemented based on results is, for someone like me, a good one, and an important one. My biggest criticism of the Bush Administration was the stubborn refusal to consider reality as a concern. Whether it was hiring people based on politics rather than ability, implementing programs based on belief rather than results, or just the idea that "we said so" is a worthy reason, I think the failures of the last 8 years show us what happens when one ignores measurables altogether in favor of gut plays and intangible arguments.

The World Bank, for McNamara, was an attempt to revive a reputation that had fallen far, and he believed strongly in it. His efforts dramatically reduced River Blindness worldwide, and set a standard for spending the World Bank's money in ways that would help in actual, concrete ways. When Paul Wolfowitz went to head the World Bank a few years ago, many made the analogy to McNamara, and, while I see the similarites in the situations, the men were really very different. While McNamara believed in study and results, Wolfowitz is an ardent ideologue who very much believed that the Iraq, Afghanistan, and preemptive war were worth any cost. McNamara was in some ways the opposite, a man who believed in results above all, perhaps to a fault. Because of that, he was extremely skeptical of nuclear weapons. He opposed an anti-ballistic missile installation because it was too expensive and, he thought, would result in Russia further escalating its arsenal. And then he joined other national security figures signed a letter urging the US to restrain from nuclear action if hostilities in Europe escalated.

Again, I did not live through the Vietnam War, and perhaps anyone who ran Ford during the postwar years would have done well. In fact, I feel strange obitting him, since I'm sure I'm focusing on some smaller things, so if you've got a moment, please leave a comment telling me all I'm missing. But McNamara, for all his negatives, also had the quality I prize most in people, which is the ability to admit when they are wrong. He saw what no one else in LBJ's war council saw, which is that the strategy in Vietnam was not working. The fact that it was largely his strategy that was failing makes that position all the more impressive.