Alfred Eisenstaedt took this picture for LIFE magazine.
Robert McNanamara was an expert on management at the Ford company where he became president.
He helped Ford to stop its losses and administrative chaos by implementing modern planning, organization, and management control systems.
But his management skills made him a tragic Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam years and a mediocre president of the World Bank.
His son Robert Craig McNamara objected to the Vietnam War as a student.
As he said on TV a few years ago:
“We were in the wrong place with the wrong tactics”
McNamara died today in his sleep at his home in Washington early in the morning.
He was 93.
He was too smart, and as the Daily Kos states:
“He was very bright and energetic, but dry and boring, driven by an insane need for success and with no evident ethical standards beyond those associated with the ferociously ambitious.”
As David Ignatius writes today in The Washington Post:
“Perhaps the memory of this brilliant and tragic man will keep us from being too certain of our own judgment — and encourage us to consider, even when we feel most confident, the possibility that we could be wrong.”
