Robert McNamara

Biography

Robert McNamara was born in San Francisco in 1916. He graduated in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1937 and took an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1939. After a year at the accounting firm Price Waterhouse he returned to Harvard in 1940 to teach accounting. In 1943 he joined the Army Air Forces, where in its Office of Statistical Control he analysed bomber operations for Curtis LeMay, leaving in 1946 as a lieutenant colonel.

With other former statistical officers, the 'Whiz Kids', he was hired by the Ford Motor Company in 1946. He brought modern planning and financial controls to the company, championed the compact Ford Falcon and safety features such as seat belts, and on 9 November 1960 became Ford's first president from outside the family.

Weeks later John F. Kennedy made him secretary of defense, a post he held under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson until February 1968, the longest tenure in the office. He introduced systems analysis into defence planning, sat on the ExComm during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and was a principal architect of the escalation in Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, though he grew sceptical and commissioned the study later known as the Pentagon Papers. From 1968 to 1981 he was president of the World Bank, turning its focus towards poverty reduction. In his 1995 memoir In Retrospect he expressed regret for decisions on Vietnam. He died in 2009.