Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Robert S. McNamara

Robert S. McNamara, former World Bank president, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Ford executive, and Army Air Force officer died on Monday. Obituaries for him have appeared a wide variety of venues, and they've been varied in content and in tone. Motor Trend focused on McNamara's years as an executive at Ford and his effect on the domestic automobile industry, Alternet rather unconventionally compared him to Hunter S. Thompson, and the New York Times published the sort of long, careful obituary one expects from the Grey Lady.

Most remembrances of McNamara highlight his position as U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and his role in shaping the United States's prosecution of the Vietnam War. Perhaps the best and most thorough examination of this aspect of McNamara's career is in Errol Morris's documentary The Fog of War. The film revolves around interviews with Morris conducted with McNamara, but it's more than a biography or a history of the war in Vietnam. Morris also lays out, through McNamara's reminiscences, a chilling account of the American bombing of Japanese cities during World War II, a discussion of innovations at Ford during the 1950s, and an analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Since news of McNamara's death broke, the list of holds on The Fog of War has skyrocketed from zero to (at this writing) 32. The film is definitely worth the wait, but if you're eager to learn more about Robert McNamara right now, you might want to start elsewhere.

You could begin with The Whiz Kids, John A. Byrne's biography of a group of ten influential businessmen – among them Robert S. McNamara. All ten were veterans of the Army Air Force's Office of Statistical Control, created in 1942 to gather and analyze information about military operations, improve efficiency, and streamline internal operations monitoring. Statistical Control worked on the principle that everything could be reduced to numbers, then analyzed and improved; a method that was wildly successful. After the war, the ten men who were the stars of this group applied en masse to the faltering Ford Motor Co., and were hired as executives. The Whiz Kids examines the business lives of all ten men, and teases out their philosophies of statistical analysis and business management, how and why their ideas worked at Ford, why they were eventually surpassed by others, and the influence they've had on the business world. This might sound like a dry set of topics, but instead it's a revealing and compelling look into the heart of how American business operated during the middle of the last century.

In 1960, Robert McNamara accepted the post of U.S. Secretary of Defense for President Kennedy, a position he held through the Johnson administration. It is in this job that McNamara gained most of his fame, through his role as "architect of the Vietnam War." In 1967, he commissioned a classified report on the history of U.S. decision-making about and military involvement in Vietnam, which became known as the Pentagon Papers when it was leaked to the press by researcher Daniel Ellsberg. The whole collection is long, and admittedly a bit dry, but volume five of the original 1972 book edition (pictured at left) consists of a whole series of interesting essays about Vietnam and American foreign policy during the Vietnam era, written by a variety of influential intellectuals of the day. Many profound and still-controversial questions are discussed, for example: What do the Pentagon Papers say about the structure of power in the U.S. government? Did the authors of the Papers actually do a good job of assessing the true history of the administration of the war? Had the government ever really had the interests of the Vietnamese people in mind?