Promise and Power
Shapley, Deborah
In the days of Camelot the name Robert McNamara was a synonym for administrative genius. Now Deborah Shapley has written a magnificent book about him. With the readability of a Raymond Chandler...
...But in the end he always settled on being his master's voice in insisting that victory was in sight...
...Or a latter-day Mrs...
...In 1967, LBJ allowed McNamara, then apparently near a nervous breakdown, to escape from the war to the presidency of the World Bank...
...Shapley' s research is meticulous, but after 700 pages we are still left wondering about her subject: Is he a latter-day Don Quixote, shaped not by knightly romance but by case studies of the Harvard Business School, tilting against demons to redress the ills of the world...
...No matter that the secretaries of the Navy and the Air Force reported that a plane meeting the requirements of both services "is not now technically feasible and would place severe operational penalties upon the Air Force and Navy," and that the Navy's assistant secretary for research and development thought that the "risks of attempting a common Navy–Air Force fighter were not consistent with national defense interests...
...She is unsparing in her vituperation of McNamara for one of his great achievements: establishing in record time a crushing superiority over the Soviet Union in nuclear intercontinental missiles...
...t is in the cover-up of cost overruns and the deficiencies of the TFX that McNamara's resort to lies becomes most apparent...
...With the readability of a Raymond Chandler mystery, it brings alive not only Robert Strange McNamara but also twenty traumatic years of American history...
...Throughout his watch in the Pentagon McNamara kept on lying—about the plans for escalation, about the rising estimates of the costs of escalation, about the military realities in Vietnam, and, worst of all, about his policy of seeking a negotiated solution...
...McNamara emerges as a most complex man, uncomfortable except among the few—like the Kennedys, Tom and Joan Braden, and Katharine Graham—in whose prominence he can reflect his own...
...But these opinions are unintrusive and do not make Promise and Power any less an achievement...
...McNamara's defense before the Senate Government Operations Committee of his decision to award the TFX contract to General Dynamics rather than Boeing was riddled with inaccuracies and manipulated data...
...This arrogance seems to have been the principal cause of the havoc he wrought with every one of those institutions...
...For instance, he became convinced early on that the war could not be won without calling up reserves and increasing taxes...
...Commonality was the key to efficiency and profits in manufacturing automobiles at Ford," and so it had to be the same in the Catholic Church and the Department of Defense...
...Already during the Cuban missile crisis, senior commanders in the Navy had concluded that "McNamara was a 'liar' in his dealings with them...
...The really big lies came with the Vietnam war...
...Or is there, as David Halberstam put it, "no gentler word" for him than that he is "a fool...
...In 1965, when the decision to send another 100,000 men had already been made, McNamara told Congress, "We have no desire to.widen the war...
...For someone with that conviction, listening to individual or institutional experience is superfluous...
...Or none of these, but just an ambitious careerist, devious and mendacious in climbing to titles, awards, and publicity, groveling before his masters while bullying his subordinates...
...As had been the case at Ford, McNamara's judgment was often better than that of his bosses, Kennedy and Johnson...
...But she gives him too much credit for such achievements as seeing that "smallholder agriculture could multiply the Green Revolution and raise incomes of the poor...
...Another constant is blind faith in the capacity of an elite of top managers to achieve results in large organizations, which, he thought, were "all the same, whether . . . the Ford Motor Company, the Catholic Church or the Department of Defense...
...When he left the bank in 1981, he had succeeded in the former...
...Jellyby, feeding her ego with missionary zeal for African heathens while neglecting to feed her children...
...McNamara even fostered lying by his subordinates, intimidating them to the extent that they preferred giving him cooked-up reports that pleased rather than true ones that displeased him...
...Messengers bearing bad news had short lives under McNamara...
...She describes how, at Ford, McNamara thought the plan to produce the Edsel "absurdly risky" and "a bad idea...
...Justas the collapse of the Evil Empire and the unmasking of the realities within it have not dampened collectivist enthusiasms in our universities, the failures of McNamara did not prevent him from being the darling of corporate Ametica, of whose bad judgment he was such an exemplar...
...McNamara, "with no feel for the physical problems of advanced engineering," rammed his project down the experts'—and ultimately Congress's—throats...
...The misguidedness of such methods should be measured not only by the miserable rates of return they produced but also by the damage they inflicted on their supposed beneficiaries: destruction of thousands of square miles of rain forest in Brazil and Indonesia, and the brutal displacement of native tribes...
...as secretary of defense he ignored the views of soldiers, sailors, and airmen...
...Once you get to a certain scale, they're all the same...
...No matter how his conduct looks to himself, when it is seen from the outside, lying, lust for power, servility, and bullying are constants in his life...
...That project was his baby, and his alone...
...McNamara's only real innovation was to turn the bank's sound policies into gigantic, megalomaniacal schemes with which to rush ahead without leaving time for analysis or listening to the staff or to local authorities...
...She endorses Shawcross's blaming Nixon and Kissinger for the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, and with Paul Kennedy she seems certain that "the sun [is] lowering on American world hegemony...
...S hapley's judgments are liberal, and occasionally naïve...
...Shapley tries to exculpate McNamara when possible...
...In February 1968, McNamara untruthfully told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations under oath that there had been "no plan for the bombing of [North Vietnam]" in 1964...
...and as president of the World Bank he held the "old hands" of Eugene Black's Bank in scorn...
...He could brook no opposition to the logic that to build one type of plane meeting the requirements of both the Navy and the Air Force was more efficient than building two...
...But McNamara's sound judgment was never translated into timely dissent...
...McNamara's failures are not just individual ones but failures of our corporate and governmental culture—impersonal and obsessed with efficiency and quantifiable objectives...
...The Edsel was Henry Ford II's baby, and McNamara, on becoming group vice president in 1957, with direct authority over all Ford cars including the Edsel, had to give the appearance of nurturing it for a while...
...He arrived not chastened by failure but bent on remaking the bank and the world in hisown image...
...Shapley gives McNamara credit for going to meet Fidel Castro in Havana in early 1992, even though she criticizes him for having made World Bank loans to wicked regimes...
...Shapley does a superb job in detailing the reign of terror, the explosive bureaucratization, and the bad projects for which the McNamara regime was responsible...
...Upon leaving a demoralized World Bank, McNamara was elected a director of the Washington Post, the Bank of America, Corning Glass, the TransWorld Corporation, and Royal Dutch Petroleum...
...As president of the Ford Motor Company, McNamara gave short shrift to engineers...
...McNamara cannot be similarly exculpated for the TFX, eventually known as the F-111...
...The highlights are widely known: the Edsel at Ford, the TFX and Vietnam at the Department of Defense, and the wages of megalomania at the World Bank...
...She attributes the subsequent Soviet military buildup to the Soviets' fear of a strong United States, oblivious—as McNamara was not—to the fact that the Soviets had embarked on an enormous program of constructing medium-range missiles with which to blackmail Europe...
Vol. 26 • May 1993 • No. 5
