The Death of the Manager: Robert McNamara

Click to enlarge
President John F. Kennedy meets with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the Cabinet Room, 1962

Robert McNamara, the managerial Übermensch of the American establishment, the ‘best and brightest’ of the brightest in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, is no longer with us. But his death on July 6 at the age of ninety-three leaves a complicated legacy, one that has earned a fair share of uncharitable responses. Veteran journalist Alexander Cockburn suggested in a piece for his magazine Counterpunch that the former US Defense Secretary ‘rest in darkness.’

McNamara’s own justification for his record as US Defense Secretary through the 1960s came in his In Retrospect, a work that features much ritual hand washing. The work, if nothing else, provided a sense of the torment that comes with power. ‘We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values.’ The Errol Morris documentary, The Fog of War, gave McNamara a chance to expound on those lessons.

Power might corrupt in the way Lord Acton meant it, but it also distorts its possessor. The failure of the US effort in Vietnam was not one of weakness but one of strength. Colossi gifted with immeasurable strength lose sight of basic questions: the ‘why’ of intervention, the reason for exercising power. But even worse are colossi burdened with a system that excuses the excesses of unbridled power.

In a sense, the McNamara problem has been snap shot of the triumph, and the tragedy of American power. His fetishism for targets, numbers and goals did have their ghastly purpose, and may well have revolutionised such hulks as Ford Motors in such things as car safety. (This triumph was a short lived one, as the safety campaign was seen as too costly.) He cut his teeth during World War II under the guidance of the sanguinary, mentally unbalanced General Curtis LeMay, whose obsessions with efficiency in the bombing strategy of the US Air Force blooded McNamara to the possibilities of management in war.

The reductive approach to human problems, a managerial approach to the dilemma of war and its winning, proved disastrous in such conflicts as Vietnam, or the poverty-alleviation projects of the World Bank, which he presided over for thirteen years. Technocrats mired in the darkness of book keeping often miss human realities. Ideology is treated as guff. Language is employed to obfuscate realities and limitations. Euphemisms (‘mutually assured destruction’) are adopted as terms of reference to legitimise blundering, and sometimes murderous acts of state. Such individuals are Kafka’s bureaucrats, obsessed with polluting the human experience with measurements of performance.

McNamara’s sense of guilt has been palpable, but contrition does not erase a remarkable record of belligerence and complicity. He was not averse to frightening the American public with notions of a ‘missile gap’ with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, a policy that made the Kremlin jittery and keen to acquire its own massive stockpile of weapons. His credentials as a Cold War hawk were unquestionable.

He did have his moments of restraint. He uttered the odd warning behind closed doors that the Vietnam War was not going to plan. He subsequently condemned the very nuclear policies he had endorsed. But these were the warnings of a manager who had lost control of his accounts, the banker who had speculated with the assets of his clients. Rather than seeing the problems of war and peace as human ones, McNamara’s flaw was to see them as mechanical and instrumental ones. Till the day he died, the world was less one of philosophical dilemmas than a system of analysis, excused subsequently as the mistakes made in the ‘fog of war’, the mist that complicates the task of a decision maker. It is that system, one which he also profited from, that was never condemned.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

© Scoop Media