Recollections of Robert S. McNamara

By Frank Sutton

I find it improbable that I should outlive a man as dynamic and durable as Bob McNamara, even though he was a year older . But I am grateful to be able to write with memories of him, mostly about his years as a Foundation trustee.

I realized once I started to write this piece that McNamara probably affected my life long before I had even heard of him. In 1945 we were closing a school in Texas where we had trained navigators for B-17s, B-24s and other planes of the US Army Air Corps . We were all to be sent to the Pacific for the final assault on Japan. My buddies were packing to go when I was told I was to stay and run the curriculum department for the B-29 flight engineer school that our old navigation school was to become. I didn't know at the time that the Air Corp's Statistical Control team, with McNamara as a leading figure in it , had convinced General "Hap" Arnold not to keep producing B-17s or to transfer a lot of them from England, but that Japan could be assaulted by B-29s more effectively and with great savings of airmen's lives and everything else. Thus it may have been because of McNamara and "Stat Control" that I stayed in Hondo, Texas, for the brief remainder of the war, training B-29 flight engineers instead of risking my life navigating planes over the Pacific.

It wasn't until McNamara had risen to great fame (and some obloquy) that he came to the Ford Foundation as a trustee in April, 1968 . The real, live man was quickly an easy acquaintance. Dave Bell and Mac Bundy, of course, knew him very well from Washington. Bob McNamara, as they called, him , was newly in the same business as Dave, having taken up running the World Bank on the very month of April 1968 when he came on the Ford board. Dave, after heading USAID in Washington, had been directing Ford's international programs since 1966. There was very high mutual regard to reinforce Washington experience and common interests--I heard McNamara say more than once that Dave should someday succeed him at the World Bank.

It was not remarkable in the late 1960s that Bob McNamara, Dave Bell, and Mac Bundy and the Ford Foundation's trustees were all deeply concerned about the gap between the rich and poor countries, and all strongly devoted to aid programs for the developing countries. Nowadays when we hear about global imbalances it is more likely to be about American debt and Chinese surpluses. But then, in the days before the fall of the liberal American establishment, the need to address the gap of rich and poor nations was canonical doctrine in the New York foundation world. This was not the common faith elsewhere. Foreign aid programs were then losing favor in America and in much of world. McNamara's predecessor at the World Bank, George Woods, had declared the aid business in "crisis", and called a "Grand Assize" over it, that resulted in the Pearson Commission that McNamara appointed in his first year at the Bank. This commission's report declared that there was flagging support for aid, but staunchly reaffirmed the necessity of assaulting world poverty and inequality; it proposed a mission that led to what's been called "the messianic bank of Robert McNamara". Similarly, the Ford Foundation had its "Janus" review on its experience in overseas development coming to completion just as Dave Bell came into the Foundation in 1966. Dave used it to recommend to the Trustees a ten year commitment to development assistance--a commitment that was reviewed in 1972 and extended for another ten years.

Both McNamara's bank and Ford's International Division were thus going firmly against tides of skepticism and indifference in those years. Troubling developments in what we then called the Third World, and doubts about the distribution and effectiveness of aid did not fail to come , but the Foundation's commitment to the developing countries did not waver. There were occasional laments from American universities that we were neglecting them in favor of a task out there that was too big for us, but little dissent within the Foundation. When Henry Ford gave his sour reflections on the Foundation's history in his valedictory in the late Seventies, he explicitly exempted Overseas Development, of which he had " no criticism at all". And this commitment continued to take the lion's share of the Foundation's international budget all through the Bundy-Bell years.

It was inevitable as McNamara kept expanding and diversifying the Bank's efforts, trying to put an end to what he labelled "absolute poverty " in the world, that he should have been a great supporter of the Foundation's development programs during his years on the board. The Foundation did not go as far as he was pushing the Bank to shift the focus of effort from poor nations to poor people themselves. But the Foundation then had underway programs that were moving it in that direction. A major one was the Ford-Rockefeller support of international agricultural research that had a major role in starting the Green Revolution and warding off the starvation of burgeoning populations so much feared in the 1960s. The exciting promise of this revolution called for much greater resources than private foundations could muster and, in a famous meeting in 1969 at Rockefeller's Bellagio center, after listening to our "Frosty" Hill tell what needed to happen, McNamara proposed that his Bank coordinate a public international effort which soon multiplied the foundations' few millions with public money to the $ 100 million annual level that was needed. Of course, we didn't just pass the care and development of these international institutes to the McNamara's Bank and others; for several years, Dave Bell and Lowell Hardin were so busy with the Bank's Consultative Group that I sometimes wasn't sure who they were working for.

This promotion of agricultural institutes was one of many examples of support for research on development needs in those years. McNamara brought an acute awareness of the need for the Foundation to do things where it had comparative advantage, leaving other needs to the bigger public sources of aid. This strategy encouraged an increasing emphasis on research and the building of research institutions, not just in agriculture but in population, education and other fields as well. In the late 1960s and the 1970s as more public money came into the population field, there was a clear shift of the Foundation's program toward emphasis on research in reproduction and contraception, and as the needs of education over-topped our powers, grants for educational research both at home and overseas grew, often with the same organizations the Bank was using.

Not all of the fields where McNamara weighed heavily on the making our programs were in the domain of aid to developing countries. Two of them came in the Foundation initiatives in the 1970s on international economics and on security and arms control. Some of the most intense and exciting board discussions of those years were stimulated by McNamara's passionate engagement with these matters. The tsunami of change in the international economic system that came from the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the oil shock of 1973 obviously affected McNamara's Bank even more than the rest of us. Understanding better this new economic landscape, and what ought to be done about it, became one of our major research interests after Craufurd Goodwin commissioned Fred Bergsten to lay out an agenda for us in his influential book on the future of the international economic order (1973)

Research on international economics may have been an obvious need in the early 1970s. It was less obvious that more study of security and arms control was then needed. Much was going on, but as McNamara pointed out to our board with typical passion and vigor, it was practically all within the government and largely classified; he thought serious work outside the government was also needed. Edwin Land, the famous developer of Polaroid and the cameras that transformed intelligence on missiles and weaponry was then on our board; he , McNamara and Bundy led as lively and informed a board debate as I have ever heard on the need and feasibility of study in these fields outside government and the restraints of classification. The Foundation made the decision to go ahead with support of a program in the universities and abroad, a decision that put us almost a decade ahead of other foundations as this later became a popular field. When Enid Schoettle had the International Affairs program critically assessed by outsiders in 1987, they declared that the Foundation's program in the 1970s was "possibly the most important factor contributing to the survival and relative health of the field today".

There were many discussions of what we should do about Vietnam in the years when McNamara was on our board but I hardly remember an occasion when he was engaged in them. Certainly there was nothing as dramatic as his talk to the Council on Foreign Relations on April 20, 1995 about his book, In Retrospect, telling the world how wrong he'd been about the Vietnam war. It was a meeting with wives invited; Mac Bundy and Mary were in the front row with Ted Sorenson. Les Gelb, who had led the Pentagon Papers at McNamara's request made the introduction, with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. chairing the meeting. McNamara became so heated that he took his jacket off, imploring us to go out and buy the book and send him the bill. Schlesinger declared that he could not recall a major American leader admitting error as McNamara had done in his book, and people around us called it an "historic evening". We know something of the influence of McNamara's example on Mac Bundy's effort--too late--to understand where he, too, went wrong. And nearly all of us have seen and heard Bob McNamara in the very moving film, "Fog of War", remembering his fateful engagement with World War II bombing and the Cuban missile crisis as well as Vietnam.

After watching and hearing "Fog of War" with a couple of my sons, I sat down and wrote that this was the Bob McNamara I had known at the Foundation, a man still tirelessly searching for rational solutions to problems, with no simple resignation when rationality was not enough, and no cynicism. He had been a wonderfully industrious, informed and effective trustee who made us feel he knew very well when were doing merely routine work or something better. He will not have an easy time with history but he should rest more comfortably with the respect and affection he earned with those of us who knew him at the Foundation.

By Rocky Staples

McNamara was the last, and best-known, of the trio of high-level cold warriors who left Washington in the years after the Kennedy assassination to join the Foundation as board or executive staff members in the post-Henry Heald period. He was to bear a lifelong burden of hatred and vilification over his role in the Vietnam War as Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Johnson either fired McNamara or accepted his resignation in 1967. He then appointed McNamara as President of the World Bank, where he served until 1981. McNamara was elected to the FF board in 1968.

At the Bank, McNamara threw his great skills and energy into trying to understand what poverty and economic and social development overseas were really about. He was determined to change the policy focus and enlarge the operations of the Bank, which for much of its existence had acted as a relatively compliant and uncritical partner to overseas governments in industrial and infrastructure projects. He made improving the lives of poor people its top priority, greatly expanding its fundraising and loan and grant programs in health, education, and rural development.

As a Trustee of the Foundation, McNamara became a strong voice on the board, not only as concerned the international division and its agenda but across a wide range of domestic topics as well. The Foundation was a veritable mine of ideas and experience in the field of overseas development, and McNamara was an exceptionally quick and bright listener. I knew him in assignments as Head of the Asia program, which held particular interest for McNamara, and subsequently from 1976 to 1981 as Representative in Delhi. I have some great photographs of McNamara and his first wife, Margaret, at an evening performance by a troupe of Rajasthani acrobats, dancers and singers that we staged on the FF lawn in New Delhi for the first ever overseas Trustee meeting.

We were trying hard in the Asia program to identify and plan our grant programs, whether these dealt with water management, technical education, or village level development, with greater cultural sensitivity and much more local participation. One example was a series of grants throughout India to NGOs organizing poor urban and rural women for economic and social benefits. McNamara applauded this shift towards NGOs and grass roots organization in the India program and thought them directions the Bank should also pursue. The sheer size of the Bank's annual lending and grant targets and its on-the-ground staff limitations were paradoxically a hindrance. But over the years the Bank moved far in these directions.

I occasionally had lunch with McNamara in Washington after our mutual retirements. We talked about a lot but not Vietnam.

By Peter Bell

The death of Robert S. McNamara in July brought back to mind five points at which my life and career were directly touched by this extraordinarily smart, systematic, hard-driving, forceful and ultimately anguished man.

First, right out of college in 1962, I worked for the summer in the office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. As chance would have it, I was assigned to the International Security Affairs section, headed by Bill Bundy, Mac's older brother, and worked on the Indo-China desk when the engagement of U.S. “advisors” in South Vietnam was still largely covert. I only got occasional glimpses of the Secretary. But even from my junior perch, I was struck by the energy, self-confidence and can-do optimism with which Bob McNamara and his “whiz kids” had taken command of the Pentagon. There was not much room for doubters.

Second, my longest and most intensive meeting with Bob occurred in 1972 when I was the Ford Foundation's representative in Chile and he was coming to Santiago as president of the World Bank to address the UN Conference on Trade and Development. More important, however, was a meeting that he would have with Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Socialist president of Chile. The question on the table would be whether Chile should be blacklisted from obtaining World Bank loans. Since Bob was also then a Foundation trustee, he had asked to have dinner with my wife Karen and me upon his arrival in Santiago.

From the moment of his arrival at our home, Bob launched a nonstop barrage of questions about the politics and economics of Chile. At the end of a long evening, I drove Bob to his hotel, and pulled up near the front entrance. More than an hour later, after many more probing questions and thoughtful exchanges, he seemed content to end the briefing. Throughout the evening, Bob made no mention of his son who had come to Chile to contribute to its “democratic transition to socialism”. Nor would time or circumstances permit their getting together. But after that evening, I wondered how much of Bob's questioning was for advancing his Bank mission and how much was for better understanding the motivations of his estranged son.

Third, several months later, when I was visiting the Foundation's headquarters in New York, I ran into Bob at the entrance to the building. He pulled me aside, and told me that he thought that our approach in Chile of taking seriously President Allende's commitment to a peaceful, legal transition toward socialism was exactly right. He added, however, that the approach could eventually have repercussions for me personally, and wanted me to know that I could continue to count on his personal support.

Fourth, in January 1977, I was asked by Joe Califano to help him and a team of advisors in recruiting appointees for the senior positions at the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare of the Carter Administration. Califano had served with Cyrus Vance in the Office of General Counsel at the Pentagon under Bob McNamara. Joe recalled that after Bob had been asked to serve as Secretary of Defense, he had dropped everything else, moved into a hotel, and gone to work day and night in putting together his senior team. His example was our inspiration. I wish that someone might have shared the example with the Obama administration.

Finally, in 1982, in the midst of the Falklands/Malvinas war in the South Atlantic, the civil wars in Central America and the outset of the debt crisis in Latin America, Sol Linowitz, Abe Lowenthal (also a Foundation alumnus) and I launched the Inter-American Dialogue to bring together democratically oriented Latin Americans and North Americans to engage in candid exchange from their diverse perspectives and to seek cooperative approaches to shared problems. On the U.S. side, Bob McNamara'alongside Mac Bundy, Elliot Richardson, and Cy Vance'was one of our early recruits.

Our Latin American counterparts appreciated the opportunity to engage with people of their standing, and the Latin Americans were impressed in particular when Bob signed on to their support for a regional approach to settling the civil wars in Central America and for an end to U.S. covert aid to the Nicaraguan contras.

Bob was an extraordinary person'filled with energy and certainty in his early years and racked with doubt and contrition in his later years. I would be surprised if there were any trustee whom Mac Bundy valued more. But I am not sure that Bob himself ever fully understood how forcefully and convinced he came across in meetings. That quality was both an asset and liability.

By Will Hertz

At the New Delhi trustees meeting mentioned by Rocky, I saw another side of McNamara. As assistant secretary, I was assigned to the hotel lobby to greet the Trustees and their wives on their arrival. In Bob's case, my job also involved introducing him to the non-uniformed but armed police guard assigned to him because of his position as World Bank president.

About 4 a.m., the last Trustee had arrived, and I went upstairs to my bedroom. By coincidence I had the room next to the McNamaras, and the police guard was seated on the corridor floor between the two doors. I slipped my key in the door and found myself in McNamara's room – facing the startled Bob and his wife in bed! Red-faced I retreated, with the police guard, still seated on the corridor floor, grinning at my blunder.

I apologized to the McNamaras the next morning, wondering aloud who else could get into their room and what other rooms I could enter. Bob laughed and said: “I have a third question. Why aren't you in the morgue?”