Robert McNamara

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Robert McNamara

Office: Secretary of Defense
Age: 46
Time in Office: 1961-1968
Born: 1916
Died:
Born in San Francisco, Robert McNamara graduated form the University of California at Berkeley in 1937. Two years later he earned a graduate degree in business at Harvard and began a three-year stint teaching there. In 1943 he received a captain's commission in the U.S. Army Air Corps where he worked on developing logistical systems. In 1946, he was released from active duty as a lieutenant colonel and went to work at the Ford Motor Company. Hired as a "Whiz Kid" to save the company, McNamara started on a team of statistical control experts. His rapid rise through the company culminated in his appointment as president in 1960 -- the first not to be a member of the Ford family.
After only one month as president of Ford, McNamara became the Secretary of Defense for President Kennedy. During his years at the Defense Department he helped change America's nuclear strategy from that of massive retaliation to flexible response and second strike counter-force. McNamara also shaped U.S. policy regarding Vietnam. In 1968 he resigned as Secretary of Defense and became president of the World Bank where he remained until his retirement in 1981.
McNamara was one of the most important players in the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a member of the Executive Committee, he was initially a forceful proponent of an air attack on Cuba, but then along with Robert Kennedy and Theodore Sorenson, he quickly changed his mind to support a blockade. Kennedy, Sorenson, and McNamara were some of the President's most trusted advisors, so when they backed a quarantine, the President considered it a viable option. On October 18, McNamara pointed out that an air strike could never be "surgical," as Secretary Rusk liked to call it, and that, "once you've started a shooting war, there's little you can do to stop it."
McNamara's most crucial role was managing the quarantine and reining in the military. President Kennedy relied heavily on his Secretary of Defense to control the military's leaders who uniformly advocated stronger action. After the crisis Kennedy remarked this about McNamara: "The military are mad. They wanted to do this [invade]. It's lucky for us that we have McNamara over there [in the Department of Defense]."
According to one historian McNamara "was aggressive, a speed-reader and characterized by toughness, quickness, fluency, competence, incorruptibility, and force of personality." There was a feeling among some Kennedy advisors that McNamara was not politically skilled and relied too heavily on logical analysis. His reasoning ability, however, was his most important asset to EX-COMM.
McNamara is also one of the most articulate and forthright proponents of the view that crises cannot be "managed," and is well known for his argument that nuclear weapons serve no purpose.