Robert McNamara: tearful architect of the Vietnam war
It was not meant to have been this way. McNamara became secretary of defence under President Kennedy in 1961, having been a “Whiz Kid” at the Ford Motor Company, where he was remembered as having a “phenomenal IQ and a steel-trap mind”. In the Kennedy administration, McNamara was the quintessential member of “the best and the brightest”, as David Halberstam termed them in his book of the same name. “He was intelligent, forceful, courageous, decent,” describes Halberstam, “everything, in fact, but wise.”
McNamara’s worldview was in accord with those heady years of American power. South Vietnam mattered because its fall, he believed, would send communism cascading across Asia as far as Japan and India, even imperilling American interests in Turkey. As early as November 1961, he urged Kennedy to dispatch 200,000 men to fight the North Vietnamese, adding that even if the Chinese invaded, the US would still be able to defend Berlin from the Soviets
A comment on the article from Proclone.
He reduced the world to Linear Programming; calculating optimal output per inputs.
Paul A Myers, an astute commenter in the FT, wrote, with respect to Proclone’s comment on linear programming
If so, McNamara did not complete the analysis. I studied linear programming in grad school after coming back from Vietnam and noticed that some solutions involve three constraints whose lines never intersect to create a solution space. The answer is a Null set. That was Vietnam. It is also today’s American Middle East policy.
Economists and those fellow travellers who claim that only spreadsheets can lend intellectual rigour to the counting of souls never listen.