Robert McNamara

The family had come out of the Irish famine around 1850, to Massachusetts and then to California, and his father sold shoes wholesale in San Francisco. He was an Eagle Scout and president of a boys club at Piedmont High, took Phi Beta Kappa at Berkeley in his sophomore year, rowed, and graduated in 1937 in economics with mathematics and philosophy. In the summer before his last year he shipped out as a sailor on the SS President Hoover and was aboard when Chinese aircraft bombed it near Shanghai. Harvard Business School gave him an MBA in 1939. After a year at Price Waterhouse he went back to Harvard in August 1940 as the youngest and highest-paid assistant professor the school had.

He entered the Army Air Forces as a captain in early 1943 and spent the war in the Office of Statistical Control under Curtis LeMay. He showed the Eighth Air Force's 20 percent abort rate was mostly fear, scheduled B-29s over the Hump, and analysed the jet stream in a way that pushed LeMay toward burning Japanese cities from low altitude. He left in 1946 a lieutenant colonel with a Legion of Merit, joined the Ford Whiz Kids, brought computers and trend analysis into Dearborn, championed the Falcon and the 1956 Lifeguard package that offered a seat belt as a novelty, and on November 9, 1960 became the first Ford president from outside the family since 1906. Kennedy offered him Treasury or Defense. He took Defense on January 21, 1961 and held it seven years, longer than anyone since.

In October 1966 he launched Project 100,000, which lowered the armed forces qualification standards and took in 354,000 additional men. Hamilton Gregory's study found they died in Vietnam at three times the rate of other Americans and came home to lower incomes and higher divorce rates. On November 2, 1965 the Quaker Norman Morrison poured kerosene over himself below McNamara's Pentagon window and burned to death. McNamara saw only the smoke coming off the parking lot and would not discuss it at home, partly because his wife sympathised with Morrison's feelings. His teenage son hung the American flag upside down in his bedroom and told his father he was ashamed of the country because of him. By 1967 McNamara was going days without shaving and his jaw would spasm for hours at a time.

He had commissioned the study that became the Pentagon Papers, and when a copy reached his World Bank office in April 1969 he said take it back. The bank kept him from 1968 to 1981, and he turned it toward poverty and river blindness while cutting off lending to Chile after meeting Allende in 1972 and restoring it after meeting Pinochet in 1974. A passenger tried to throw him off the Martha's Vineyard ferry in 1972. In Retrospect in 1995 called the war wrong, terribly wrong, and drew a firestorm of scorn. In The Fog of War he repeated LeMay's remark that had they lost they would all have been tried as war criminals, and agreed. He is at Arlington.

Robert McNamara's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Lifeguard safety package invention
  Put the seat belt into an American production car as an option 1956
• Ford Falcon other
  The compact he championed against the fashion for size 1959
• The McNamara Line other
  A sensor barrier ordered across the demilitarized zone in September 1966 1966
• Project 100,000 other
  Lowered the qualification standards and brought in 354,000 additional men 1966
• The Vietnam Study Task Force other
  Commissioned June 17, 1967 and finished in January 1969 - the Pentagon Papers 1967
• In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam book
  The memoir that called the war wrong, terribly wrong 1995

• 1937 aged ~21 Graduates from Berkeley in economics, with mathematics and philosophy
• 1943 aged ~27 Enters the Army Air Forces and joins the Office of Statistical Control under Curtis LeMay
• November 9, 1960 aged 44 Becomes the first president of Ford from outside the Ford family since 1906
• January 21, 1961 aged 44 Sworn in as Secretary of Defense
• August 5, 1964 aged 48 Testifies to Congress on the Gulf of Tonkin Thirty-one years later General Giap told him nothing at all had happened on August 4.
• November 2, 1965 aged 49 Norman Morrison burns himself to death below his Pentagon window
• June 17, 1967 aged 51 Commissions the Vietnam Study Task Force
• February 29, 1968 aged 51 Leaves the Pentagon for the World Bank
• July 6, 2009 aged 93 Dies at home in Washington at 5:30 in the morning, aged 93

• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. appointed him
• Lyndon B. Johnson 1908–1973
  36th President who signed the Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society programs. kept him, then eased him out
• William Westmoreland 1914–2005
  Commander in Vietnam whose attrition strategy and optimistic troop estimates collided with the Tet Offensive. commanded the war he escalated
• Robert F. Kennedy 1925–1968
  Senator and Attorney General whose 1968 presidential campaign was cut short by assassination. whose casket he helped carry in 1968
• Henry Kissinger 1923–2023
  National security adviser and secretary of state who shaped détente, China policy, and controversial Cold War interventions. inherited the war he handed on