Kennedy School Colleagues Reflect on McNamara's Career

For many of his critics and contemporaries, Robert S. McNamara will forever and singularly be known as the supremely rational and self-confident defense secretary who irreparably plunged the United States into the Vietnam War, even while believing that the conflict was not winnable.

But at Harvard, where McNamara enjoyed a brief stint as a Business School professor and later often returned to expound on the lessons learned from his own failures, colleagues reflecting on his death earlier this week pointed to a more nuanced legacy—that of a tragic, repentant, and even admirable man.

"I think one of the most interesting things about Robert McNamara was that he was someone who was a larger-than-life figure in the early '60s, who then continued to learn and grow and change in all kinds of ways," said David T. Ellwood '75, dean of the Kennedy School, where McNamara frequently visited and spoke after he left the Pentagon and the World Bank. "[He was] someone whose ideas were always well-considered...and who ultimately had been through a great deal, but I think in the end came to great wisdom and insight from his many experiences."

McNamara, who endowed a Kennedy School lecture series entitled The Robert McNamara Lecture on War and Peace, died on Monday at age 93 at his home in Washington. He served as defense secretary for Presidents John F. Kennedy '40 and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, during which half a million American soldiers were sent to war in the jungles of Vietnam and hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs were dropped. While McNamara had said early on that he was "pleased to be identified" with the war, his confidence in the military effort steadily deteriorated, albeit not publicly until near the end of his tenure.

By 1966, he was privately urging Johnson to establish troop level ceilings and to halt the bombings, which McNamara had come to believe were futile. In 1967, he pressed Johnson more firmly to consider a peace settlement. Johnson, believing that McNamara was aiding a presidential bid by Robert F. Kennedy '48, announced in Nov. 1967 that McNamara would be stepping down as defense secretary to head the World Bank.

"When [McNamara] left, he was already a very sick, disheartened, and dispirited person, so much so that at his last news conference...he broke down in tears, in front of the President and the cameras," said Marvin L. Kalb, a Kennedy School professor who, as a former journalist, knew McNamara personally. "It was a sad thing to observe, for somebody who was so confident that he knew how to run the war, to leave in tears and in full awareness that he had failed."

For much of his early life, McNamara was defined by his striking intellectualism, his tireless focus and drive, and his seeming lack of personal warmth and humanity.

"In the Kennedy years, he was almost perfect in his hard work and insightfulness. He was very, very sharp...but he lacked that human touch, he didn't acknowledge things that didn't come out of numerical displays," said Paul M. Doty, a member of President Kennedy's Science Advisory Committee and the founder of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, with which McNamara had been closely affiliated for several years. "Later on, when he got into his repentance period, he became a softer and more gentle person. But he was very interesting to talk to all the way along."

After leaving the Pentagon, McNamara spent 13 years tackling global poverty as the World Bank's president, exhibiting his characteristic devotion and confidence but delivering mixed results. He became heavily involved with efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation, and he spoke and traveled widely in his later life denouncing America's role and his own role in Vietnam. He even wrote a memoir indicting American policy in Vietnam and was featured in the acclaimed documentary, "The Fog of War."

But despite these efforts and his attempts to share the lessons that he had learned in office, some continue to feel that McNamara ought to have denounced more forcefully and publicly the war while he was in power. His failure to do so and his failure to save thousands of American lives, critics argue, can never be compensated for.

"To me, the tragic flaw was that Robert McNamara was someone who was incapable of imagining that he could be wrong. The mistakes in Vietnam were mistakes of arrogance and addiction to power," said Stephen M. Walt, a Kennedy School professor who added that he was "certainly no admirer of [McNamara's]."

"Despite his many failures, he always appeared to be 100 percent certain that his own ideas were always right," Walt said. "One would have thought that experience would have taught him a bit of humility, but if it ever came to him, it came very late. There was a tendency to constantly be prescribing advice, and it would have been easier to take if the track record had been more successful."

Kalb, the former reporter, said that even McNamara himself likely did not believe that his post-war actions could serve sufficient penitence for his mistakes.

"I think he realized deep down that he is going to be remembered in history for his unfortunate contributions to the American role in Vietnam," Kalb said. "[McNamara] could have worked 50 years at the World Bank, and when he died, the lede would still say he was the man who failed in Vietnam."

Nevertheless, others regard McNamara's legacy more favorably. Jack P. Ruina, an MIT professor who worked under McNamara as Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, said he was a "great admirer of [McNamara's]" even though he was "a little bit like a machine." And Graham T. Allison, a former dean of the Kennedy School and now director of the Belfer Center, noted in an e-mailed statement that President Kennedy regarded McNamara as his "most valued counselor" during the potentially disastrous Cuban Missile Crisis.

Joseph S. Nye, another illustrious former Kennedy School dean who met McNamara in 1987 while working on an oral history project about the Cuban Missile Crisis, said that he had once thought of McNamara as "one-dimensional" and not to be admired. But later, through personal interactions, Nye said he found McNamara to be a man very interested in "moral questions" who genuinely cared about reducing poverty and nuclear risk.

"He didn't apologize [for his Vietnam mistakes], but he did certainly say a number of times in personal conversations and in public that he made mistakes, and he wanted others to avoid those mistakes," Nye said. On a post to his blog on the Huffington Post, Nye wrote that "the lives of leaders are more complicated than I thought when I was an assistant professor," and that while part of him will never forgive McNamara for the consequences of his mistakes in Vietnam, McNamara has also earned his respect by trying "to come to terms with his actions and to help a younger generation to learn."

McNamara's legendary quantitative approach to problem-solving was established long before he became the secretary of defense. After studying economics, mathematics, and philosophy at Berkeley, he earned his MBA at Harvard, where he explored systems analysis and the statistical techniques that he would later rely on in restructuring the Pentagon and managing the Vietnam War effort.

After finishing his education, he briefly worked in accounting before returning to HBS as an assistant professor. But he took leave to help direct the Allied air war in WWII, and then left academia afterwards to work at Ford Motor Company—where he later became President—because his Harvard salary was not enough to pay the medical bills when both he and his wife came down with cases of polio.

In an 1996 interview at Berkeley, McNamara said that he "wanted nothing more in the world than to go back to Harvard at the end of the war." But in 1966, McNamara was greeted at Harvard by hundreds of virulent anti-war student protesters when he came to deliver the first speech at the newly created Kennedy School Institute of Politics. When he refused to debate an anti-war spokesman brought on campus by Students for a Democratic Society, McNamara was blockaded in Quincy House and was forced to sneak out using decoys and underground steam tunnels.

Daniel Ellsberg '52, the government insider who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971 and exposed the knowledge that top officials had believed early on that the Vietnam War could not be won, had mixed feelings about McNamara's career.

"I think his overall role is considerably misunderstood," Ellsberg said. "Certainly he did have great influence on the bombing of North Vietnam, which was tragic and criminal...it's fair to say we were all participants in war crimes. I was a minor one, McNamara was a major one, as well as Johnson."

But he also said that he believed McNamara knew the war was futile early in his Pentagon career, and that McNamara worked diligently inside the government to limit bombings and prevent the conflict from escalating into nuclear war with China.

"Nobody was more important than McNamara, other than [President] Johnson, in getting us into Vietnam. But no official worked more effectively inside to limit and eventually try to end the war than McNamara," Ellsberg said. But McNamara could have even been more effective if his concerns were aired publicly, Ellsberg added, comparing McNamara's role in Vietnam to that of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in the recent Iraq War.

"We could have avoided that war if [Powell] had spoken frankly about his own doubts," Ellsberg said. "But McNamara took 30 years, so maybe in 30 years we'll hear Powell."

—Staff writer Peter F. Zhu can be reached at pzhu@fas.harvard.edu