America 250: 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?
