Numbers Man – In Development

History remembers two Robert McNamaras. Lingering in public memory is McNamara as US secretary of defense—the architect of America’s escalation in Vietnam and, for a time, one of the most vilified figures in the country. Then, for a thin slice of development specialists, Robert McNamara is remembered as president of the World Bank. From 1968 to 1981, he led a second war, the war against global poverty, a struggle to which he dedicated extraordinary personal effort—but a war which, for him, ended also in disillusionment. It is tempting to try and separate the two McNamaras. His tenures at the Pentagon and the World Bank each deserve, and have received, the space of a full-length biography. The two chapters of his life—as head of the “greatest war machine in the history of the world,” then antipoverty crusader—clash like thesis and antithesis.1 But, when considered together, the two wars of Robert McNamara’s life reveal a common approach, one that defined the postwar era of global development. Nicknamed “an IBM machine with legs,” McNamara was the living embodiment of midcentury American technocracy—a man who brought an ambitious drive to scale, a rationalizing impulse, and (most of all) a faith in the power of quantification to solve our most pressing social problems. “To this day,” he wrote near the end of his life,2 “I see quantification as a language to add precision to reasoning about the world. Of course, it cannot deal with issues of morality, beauty, and love, but it is a powerful tool too often neglected when we seek to overcome poverty, fiscal deficits, or the failure of our national health programs.” This approach made McNamara’s early career a glittering success. During World War II, he brought statistical control to the US Air Force’s bombing of Japan. At 24, he was made the youngest assistant professor at Harvard Business School. At 44, he became the first person outside the Ford family to preside over the Ford Motor Company—a job he left after just five weeks, to join President John F. Kennedy’s cabinet. At the Pentagon, and then the Bank, he presided over massive increases in spending, bending these huge bureaucracies to his will and reassembling them into their modern forms. And yet, when the sum total of his career is considered, the overwhelming sense is one of failure. The final years of McNamara’s life were spent reckoning with the wreckage of his legacy. Where did things go so wrong? Something Rotten in South Vietnam In 1960, the newly elected John F. Kennedy offered McNamara the choice of secretary of the treasury or secretary of defense. McNamara, who claimed to know little about finance, chose defense. Amid the arms race with the Soviet Union, he was now in charge of 9% of all spending in the US economy, and more than half of every federal tax dollar. His first task was bringing this spending to heel. He introduced the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS), which helped coordinate spending across the army, navy, and air force, and remains the main way the Pentagon allocates funds. With advice from the RAND Corporation, he created a new Office of Systems Analysis, which centered cost-effectiveness as a criterion for spending. It was perhaps the first serious attempt by a civilian to exert control over the Department of Defense—and remains the foundation of defense procurement to this day. McNamara later said that, had Kennedy not been assassinated, the United States would not have become entangled in Vietnam. Perhaps, then, McNamara might have been remembered by history as a technocratic reformer. But under President Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara instead became known as one of the fiercest advocates of escalation. Robert McNamara pointing at a map of Vietnam during a press conference. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko; reproduced from the Library of Congress. As head of the Pentagon, McNamara presided over a massive scale-up in South Vietnam. In 1961, there were still just 3,200 American troops in-country. By 1968, there were over half a million. From 1965 to 1970, they were fed and supplied by 3 million tons of dry goods shipped by sea. (This transpacific traffic would later set off the containerization revolution in global trade.) Overhead, American planes would eventually drop 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, more than double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during World War II. But the Vietnam War was more than just a military conflict. The need to “win hearts and minds” put questions of development at the center of the war—and although South Vietnam ceased to be a country over 50 years ago, it remains the fourth-largest recipient of US foreign aid in history. Perhaps without fully realizing it, McNamara was presiding over a massive, quixotic effort to develop a country that had not asked for it. The Pentagon’s strategy was informed by a vast new statistical apparatus, the Hamlet Evaluation System. Starting in 1967, every month, an army of surveyors canvassed 12,000 hamlets (subunits of villages) in an active warzone. Hamlets were graded on a scale from “A” for friendly to “E” for contested, based on recorded attacks by Viet Cong or North Vietnamese forces. Alongside the wartime metrics were a host of other variables: questions about levels of education, the state of public works, conditions in agriculture. Each month, the data from the Hamlet Evaluation System would be fed into an IBM 1410, which would spit out time-series plots that invariably showed that the US was winning the war. Another grisly statistic, the crossover point, measured the juncture at which more North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were being killed than could be replaced. Yet despite the mounting body counts, the tons of bombs dropped, and the purported success of pacification schemes, the North Vietnamese showed little interest in coming to the bargaining table. The problem, McNamara’s critics stated at the time, was mistaking the war as something that could be understood as a purely quantitative exercise. Counting enemy casualties or pacified villages measured what was legible at the expense of what was strategically important. The North Vietnamese proved willing to absorb losses that American planners did not anticipate. By contrast, fundamental reform to address the root causes of why the Vietnamese were fighting—such as land reform to benefit peasant farmers—was delayed until it was too late. Archival evidence suggests that McNamara had realized as early as November 1965 that the war could not be won—just months after he had pushed for massive escalation. Within the closed doors of the Johnson administration, he began advocating for a negotiated peace. Quietly, he also assembled a team of analysts, including the economist Daniel Ellsberg, to compile a set of secret papers on the errors of judgment that had led to American involvement. Yet, for almost two years, McNamara continued to go out and sell the war to the American people. In November 1966, he told the press that “military victory [for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong] is beyond their grasp.” In 1968, in a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, he claimed the Government of South Vietnam was making “encouraging progress.” The cost of McNamara’s silence was enormous. Although precise estimates are impossible, perhaps 100,000 to 150,000 Vietnamese civilians were being killed each year. From 1965 to 1968, American deaths averaged over 9,100 a year. Decades later, landmines planted during the war were still mutilating children. The carcinogen Agent Orange—sprayed wantonly over fields and villages—is estimated to have caused another 400,000 excess deaths. When pressed years later on why he had remained silent, McNamara responded with the limp excuse that his ultimate loyalty lay with the president. (Notably, Cabinet secretaries swear their oath of office to defend the Constitution, not the president.) Perhaps he also believed that he could still influence the administration’s policy from the inside. For McNamara, the consummate system builder, it was impossible to imagine himself on the outside. Privately, the cost of continuing the lie exerted a psychic toll. At night, McNamara ground his molars down to stumps, forcing a painful dental operation. His college-aged son and daughter turned against him. The tension between the sunny and confident public McNamara, and the haunted and doubt-ridden private one, was unsustainable. President Lyndon B. Johnson and McNamara in the Cabinet Room in 1968. Photo courtesy of the National Archives. At the end of 1967, President Johnson announced that he was nominating McNamara to be president of the World Bank. Johnson had grown tired of McNamara’s doubts; McNamara, having reportedly suffered a mental breakdown, took the offer. Years later, he recalled telling his friend Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, that he didn’t know if he quit or was fired. “You’re out of your mind,” she said. “Of course you were fired.” McNamara’s Bank Bruised and drained by his final years as secretary of defense, McNamara found new vitality in the task of remaking the World Bank.