Robert Strange McNamara (; June 9, 1916 – July 6, 2009), also known by his initials RSM, was an American businessman and government official who served as the eighth United States secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968 under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson at the height of the Cold War. He remains the longest-serving secretary of defense, having remained in office over seven years. He played a major role in promoting the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy analysis.
McNamara graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Business School. He served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. After World War II, Henry Ford II hired McNamara and a group of other Army Air Force veterans to work for the Ford Motor Company, reforming Ford with modern planning, organization, and management control systems. After briefly serving as Ford's president, McNamara accepted an appointment as secretary of defense in the Kennedy administration.
McNamara became a close adviser to Kennedy and advocated the use of a blockade during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy and McNamara instituted a Cold War defense strategy of flexible response, which anticipated the need for military responses short of massive retaliation. During the Johnson administration, McNamara presided over a build-up of U.S. soldiers in South Vietnam. After the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, the number of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam escalated dramatically. McNamara and other U.S. policymakers feared that the fall of South Vietnam to a Communist regime would lead to the fall of other governments in the region.
McNamara grew increasingly skeptical of the efficacy of committing U.S. troops to South Vietnam. In 1968, he resigned as secretary of defense to become president of the World Bank. He served as its president until 1981, shifting the focus of the World Bank from infrastructure and industrialization towards poverty reduction. After retiring, he served as a trustee of several organizations, including the California Institute of Technology and the Brookings Institution. In later writings and interviews, including his memoir, McNamara expressed regret for some of the decisions he made during the Vietnam War.
Robert McNamara was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Clara Nell McNamara (née Strange) and Robert James McNamara. His father was sales manager of a wholesale shoe company, whose family was Irish and, in about 1850, following the Great Irish Famine, had emigrated to the U.S., first to Massachusetts and later to California.
McNamara graduated from Piedmont High School in Piedmont, California, in 1933, where he was president of the Rigma Lions boys club and earned the rank of Eagle Scout. According to McNamara, scouting helped him set his values and was where he first developed an interest in public service.
McNamara attended the University of California, Berkeley and graduated in 1937 with a B.A. in economics with minors in mathematics and philosophy. He was a member of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his sophomore year, and earned a varsity letter in crew. McNamara was an ROTC Cadet in the Golden Bear Battalion at U.C. Berkeley. McNamara was also a member of the UC Berkeley's Order of the Golden Bear, a fellowship of students and leading faculty members formed to promote leadership within the student body.
In 1937, McNamara took a summer job as a sailor on the SS President Hoover. He was aboard when the Chinese Air Force bombed the ship near Shanghai Harbor. He was not injured.
McNamara then attended Harvard Business School, where he earned a M.B.A. in 1939. Immediately thereafter, McNamara worked for a year at Price Waterhouse, a San Francisco accounting firm. He returned to Harvard in August 1940 to teach accounting in the Business School and became the institution's highest-paid and youngest assistant professor at that time.
Leading into World War II, McNamara had two deferments from the draft—a family deferment due to having a minor child and an educational deferment, as he was teaching in an Officer Candidate School at Harvard.
Following his involvement in a Harvard program to teach analytical approaches used in business to officers of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), McNamara relinquished his deferment and entered the USAAF as a captain in early 1943, serving most of World War II with its Office of Statistical Control. One of his major responsibilities was the analysis of U.S. bombers' efficiency and effectiveness by establishing a statistical control unit under the command of Curtis LeMay, first in the Eighth Air Force in Europe and then the Twentieth Air Force in India, China, and the Mariana Islands. McNamara was able to show that the nearly 20% abort rate of Eighth Air Force bombers was largely due to fear, which prompted LeMay to personally lead missions (to McNamara's admiration) and threaten courts martial. McNamara devised schedules for the XX Bomber Command B-29s doubling as transports for carrying fuel and cargo over the Hump (the airlift route during the war), and his analysis of the jet stream on XXI Bomber Command operations influenced LeMay's decision to begin low-altitude firebombing raids against Japan. During the war McNamara developed a negative view of the majority of officers (LeMay was an exception) because they largely refused to cooperate with his analytical work. He left active duty in 1946 with the rank of lieutenant colonel and with a Legion of Merit.
In 1946, Tex Thornton, a colonel under whom McNamara had served, put together a group of former officers from the Office of Statistical Control to go into business together. Thornton had seen an article in Life magazine portraying the Ford Motor Company as being in dire need of reform. Henry Ford II, himself a World War II veteran from the Navy, hired the entire group of ten, including McNamara.
They helped the money-losing company reform its chaotic administration through modern planning, organization, and management control systems. Because of their youth, combined with asking many questions, Ford employees initially and disparagingly referred to them as the "Quiz Kids". The Quiz Kids rebranded themselves as the "Whiz Kids".
Starting as manager of planning and financial analysis, McNamara advanced rapidly through a series of top-level management positions. McNamara had Ford adopt computers to construct models to find the most efficient, rational means of production, which led to much rationalization. McNamara's style of "scientific management" with his use of spreadsheets featuring graphs showing trends in the auto industry were regarded as extremely innovative in the 1950s and were much copied by other executives in the following decades. In his 1995 memoirs, McNamara wrote: "I had spent fifteen years as a manager [at Ford] identifying problems and forcing organizations—often against their will—to think deeply and realistically about alternative courses of action and their consequences". He was a force behind the Ford Falcon sedan, introduced in the fall of 1959—a small, simple and inexpensive-to-produce counter to the large, expensive vehicles prominent in the late 1950s. McNamara placed a high emphasis on safety: the 1956 Lifeguard options package available on full-size Fords introduced the seat belt (a novelty at the time), padded visor, and dished steering wheel, which helped to prevent the driver from being impaled on the steering column during a collision.
In 1958, as VP of Operations, McNamara recommended discontinuing the unprofitable Lincoln line. After the Lincoln line's very large 1958, 1959, and 1960 models proved unpopular, McNamara pushed for smaller versions, such as the 1961 Lincoln Continental. This resulted in rising sales.
On November 9, 1960, McNamara became the first president of the Ford Motor Company from outside the Ford family since John S. Gray in 1906.