About Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara recently passed away at 93. He had spent the last decades of his life trying to explain his behavior as Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Most people remember him as a prime mover in the Vietnam war. That he was. I remember him as an important influence in Johnson’s war on poverty.

It was sometime in the sixties when I was a Commissioner in the Lindsay administration in charge of Youth Employment. I came to the job via Mobilization for Youth, MFY a pioneering effort to find ways to help troubled youth make useful lives for themselves. Early on at MFY I became obsessed with the reading difficulties of the 400-500 kids we would be working with at any one time. A large percentage were functionally illiterate, others read at the 3,4,5, grade levels. It was clear that they simply could not function in the job market unless we could find ways to improve their reading skills. (Even a janitors job required reading the instructions on the soap cans.)

So began a whole series of experiments in reading programs. On numerous occasions I was asked to participate in research projects designed to demonstrate new reading programs. One of those programs involved the military in Project 200,000. The Army would recruit kids rejected because of lack of reading ability and then subject them to intensive reading remedial program. As a member of the research review panel I asked one of our staff members to spend some time at the Lackland Air Force base in Texas where the remedial program was taking place and report on the progress of the program.

After spending a week at the base she returned with a glowing report of success. The first group of about 500 kids had their reading scores raised 2,3 grades in six month period. Keep in mind we had been reviewing remedial reading programs all over the country. The Army record was far in away the most successful. We were delighted and decided to ask for a meeting with the Secretary to persuade him to increase the program for all the armed services. We also understood the circumstances that contributed to the success, The Army has the kids full time. They feed, clothe and regulate their daily lives. That gives real structure to kids who grew up in a Ghetto where life is a series of of, “anything can happen.”

We went to Washington all puffed up with our great success story and laid it out before Robert McNamara and some of his associates. Well, I will tell you I have hoisted any number of lead balloons in my life but this one took the cake. The most disappointed person in the room was the Secretary as he laid out before us all the reasons the program could not be expanded or even continued. The various service commanders accused McNamara of trying to turn the Army, Navy and Air Force into a “moron army.”

We argued and pleaded but it was to no avail. McNamara had made his mind up and nothing we could say or do was going to change it. As we left I began to understand the rigidity of the man we had tried to just look at the data and see if there wasn’t some way we could continue the program. For Robert McNamara there was absolutely no room for ambiguity. No room for even a chance that there might be some other way to continue the program. There wasn’t.

Of all the unlikely places for McNamara influence to show up was in the Anti Poverty Programs of the Johnson years. At the Ford Foundation I had numerous opportunities to deal with anti poverty community organizations. I began to notice an increasing amount of talk about “Zero Based budgeting as well as PPBS “Planning Program Based Budgeting Systems.” Having come out of the corporate world this was lingo I was familiar with and it set me wondering where it came from? Sure enough I was repeatedly told it was the work of Robert McNamara and hastily added “he had been President of the Ford Motor Company.” In the non profit world there was a glorification of how business functioned. It was as, if they could emulate business they would be just as successful. Of course I thought this was just more baloney about how the world of profit making functioned. The problems of the poor and disadvantaged are in no way comparable to a corporation. In fact corporations avoid those problems with their selective hiring of the best and the brightest.

I had one more brush with McNamra when he was on the Board of the Ford Foundation. My boss at the Foundation said that McNamara was uncomfortable with our spending millions helping community organizations like the California based Watts Labor Community Action Committee, WLCAC without knowing exactly what that accomplished? A few of us on staff spent an afternoon trying to figure out how to satisfy McNamara’s concern. By now we understood his obsession with hard data. So, we came up with an algebraic formula called, “the spin off effect of community investment.” Okay, so A equal investment. B equal how it is spent. C equals local business benefits. D equals how that money moves around the neighborhood equals the multiplier effect. Wow, McNamara loved it said, “that’s the kind of thinking we needed.”

In the documentary ”The Fog of War” McNamara certainly does well in explaining the futility of war but he insists that even when he knew that the Veitnam was was lost he could not say so publicly out of loyalty to the President. In many ways his rigidity and need to be absolute in his thinking is reminiscent of all those who have ever been caught in the vise of a moral dilemma. Right and wrong gets lost in the absolute of loyalty to my Commander in Chief. In his interviews with Charlie Rose he kept insisting that Charlie didn’t understand the atmosphere, the conditions under which he made his decisions. Everybody I ever listened to explaining away a moral responsibility calls up the circumstances that made me do it. Then of course there are those who just said “no I cannot in good conscience do that.” They are the Rosa Parks, the back of the bus lady. The Mandellas, Ghandi’s and Martin Luther King’s of our era and the legends of others who just said “No.” Thank God for them.

Thanks Kate N.H.W.Y.