Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara
Official portrait, 1961
President of the World Bank Group
In office April 1, 1968 – June 30, 1981
Preceded by	George Woods
Succeeded by	Tom Clausen
8th United States Secretary of Defense
In office January 21, 1961 – February 29, 1968[1]
President	John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Johnson
Deputy	Roswell Gilpatric Cyrus Vance Paul Nitze
Preceded by	Thomas Gates
Succeeded by	Clark Clifford
Personal details
Born	Robert Strange McNamara (1916-06-09)June 9, 1916 San Francisco, California, U.S.
Died	July 6, 2009(2009-07-06) (aged 93) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Resting place	Arlington National Cemetery
Political party	Republican (until 1978)[2] Democratic (from 1978)[2]
Spouses	Margaret Craig ​ ​ (m. 1940; died 1981)​ Diana Masieri Byfield ​ ​ (m. 2004)​
Children	3, including Craig
Education	University of California, Berkeley (BA) Harvard University (MBA)
Signature
Military service
Branch/service	United States Army
Years of service	1940–1946
Rank	Lieutenant colonel
Unit	U.S. Army Air Forces Office of Statistical Control

Robert Strange McNamara (/ˈmæknəmærə/; June 9, 1916 – July 6, 2009) was an American businessman and government official who served as the eighth United States secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968 under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson at the height of the Cold War. He remains the longest-serving secretary of defense, having remained in office over seven years. He played a major role in promoting the U.S.'s involvement in the Vietnam War.^[3] McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy analysis.^[4]

McNamara was born in San Francisco, California, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard Business School.^[5] He served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. After World War II, Henry Ford II hired McNamara and a group of other Army Air Force veterans to work for Ford Motor Company. These "Whiz Kids" helped reform Ford with modern planning, organization, and management control systems. After briefly serving as Ford's president, McNamara accepted appointment as secretary of defense.

McNamara became a close adviser to Kennedy and advocated the use of a blockade during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy and McNamara instituted a Cold War defense strategy of flexible response, which anticipated the need for military responses short of massive retaliation. McNamara consolidated intelligence and logistics functions of the Pentagon into two centralized agencies: the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense Supply Agency. During the Kennedy administration, McNamara presided over a build-up of U.S. soldiers in South Vietnam. After the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, the number of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam escalated dramatically. McNamara and other U.S. policymakers feared that the fall of South Vietnam to a Communist regime would lead to the fall of other governments in the region.

McNamara grew increasingly skeptical of the efficacy of committing U.S. troops to South Vietnam. In 1968, he resigned as secretary of defense to become president of the World Bank. He served as president until 1981, shifting the focus of the World Bank from infrastructure and industrialization towards poverty reduction. After retiring, he served as a trustee of several organizations, including the California Institute of Technology and the Brookings Institution. In his later writings and interviews, he expressed regret for the decisions he made during the Vietnam War.