In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam

by Robert S. McNamara

Because of our cerebral approach to making decisions and our youth, we became known as the Whiz Kids. We were as much a shock to Ford’s parochial culture as the automotive culture was to us. Most of our group avoided the Detroit social scene. Senior automobile executives always lived in the wealthy suburbs of Grosse Point or Bloomfield Hills, but two of us chose Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, so that we could raise our children in a university environment. Our political views were not typical of motor company executives, either. One of John Bugas’s jobs, I soon discovered, was to go around to top Ford executives and collect money for the Republican Party. I refused to contribute. After I became head of the Ford Division, the company’s biggest unit, in the early 1950s, I also refused when he asked me to solicit contributions for the Republicans from the 1,100 or so highest-paid executives in my division. Instead, I sent each man a letter saying we lived in a democracy, our political system was based on a vigorous two-party system that depended on private financial contributions, and I hoped they—like I—would donate to one or the other party. If they wished to give to the Democrats, the letter went on, they could do so by sending their contribution to Mr. So-and-so; contributions to the Republicans could be sent to Mr. Bugas. No one would know which party they supported, but I hoped they would support one or the other. Things like this did not endear me to ma...

I had no patience with the myth that the Defense Department could not be managed. It was an extraordinarily large organization, but the notion that it was some sort of ungovernable force was absurd. I had spent fifteen years as a manager identifying problems and forcing organizations—often against their will—to think deeply and realistically about alternative courses of action and their consequences. My team and I were determined to guide the department in such a way as to achieve the objective the president had set: security for the nation at the lowest possible cost. As I told a TV interviewer a month after starting the job: “The role of a public manager is very similar to the role of a private manager; in each case he has the option of following one of two major alternative courses of action. He can either act as a judge or a leader….I have always believed in and endeavored to follow the active leadership role as opposed to the passive judicial role.”