McNamara's brand - former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara - Column

National Review, July 10, 1995 by Andrew Ferguson

I'M a little bit worried. As I write this, in early June, it's been a full month since I've read a nationally published article trashing Robert McNamara. All spring, immediately preceding the publication of McNamara's memoirs and then for a luscious period thereafter, you couldn't pick up a magazine or a reputable newspaper without exposing yourself to a shower of bile, all of it directed at our diminutive and bespectacled former secretary of defense.

NR and The American Spectator pitched in, of course, but so did the New York Times and the Boston Globe, and Time and Newsweek, and The New Yorker and The New Republic -- even The Nation! For a while there, many of us McNamara-despisers thought we'd died and gone to heaven (a fate, incidentally, that McNamara himself is unlikely to enjoy). And then -- silence. What gives? Apparently the scribes have moved on; never has the press's short attention span been so criminally obvious. I feel like a guy at a college beer bust who senses the buzz just starting to kick in and wants to part-ay down, only to discover that everybody has gone off to the library to cram for a chem final. But for all that, I am an optimist; I am one of those who believe the keg is half full rather than half empty. And speaking only for myself, I'm ready for another draft. My interest in McNamara is intensified because he exemplifies a peculiar Washington phenomenon. In Washington people fail up. The city is exempt from the laws of professional gravity. No other city is so accommodating of failure, so friendly to the people who fail. Large awards await the bunglers and bobblers, the has-beens and wannabees-who-never-could. Our present mayor, to cite an obvious example, destroyed the city's finances, smoked crack on TV, went to prison -- and then got re-elected. Other failures have shown greater artfulness. You can see them cruising K Street in chauffeured Town Cars, cashing large checks for their ``consulting'' businesses, digging into filets at the Palm. Here's the Iran - Contra bungler, awarded a popular radio show for his work destroying the Reagan Administration. Over there is the manager of the 1992 Bush campaign, mulling offers from candidates to work his magic again in 1996. And over here is the chief strategist for Jimmy Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis -- why, he's the secretary of state! McNamara is spiritual father to them all. He is the architect of a career breathtaking in the scope of its screw-ups, a clockwork progression of failure and reward, error and advancement. Imagine a friend who comes to visit. The first night he cooks you dinner and sets fire to the kitchen. The next morning he accidentally electrocutes the cat. He blows his nose in the curtains and never flushes the toilet. He borrows your car and drives through the garage door, then spreads a rare contagion to your kids. By the third day you make the decision: You ask him to move in with you. This is the pattern of McNamara's career. At Ford Motors, in the late 1950s, he designed the sclerotic top-down management system that almost sank the American automobile industry; for good measure, he oversaw the production of the Edsel. Accordingly, JFK handed him the Pentagon. There McNamara got the idea for the Vietnam War -- the Edsel of American foreign policy. So awed was the Washington establishment that it placed him at the head of the World Bank, in hopes that he might do for the international economy what he had done for the American military. And he did! Within ten years he had doubled the amount of money loaned, and lost, to Third World kleptocracies like Brazil and the Central African Empire. He was Midas in reverse. Wherever he draped his hand, industries wilted, economies collapsed, corpses piled up. NO one should have been surprised, then, that when McNamara chose to write the story of his life, it should have turned out to be a disaster by every literary measure: mendacious, sentimental, shameless in its exculpation, oily in its tone, a book so badly written that no one would ever really want to buy it. And of course it has been a rousing bestseller. How does one explain a life thus charmed? His good looks? They may indeed have dazzled back in the days when no one minded goofy wire rims and the stink of Brylcreem. His sensitivity? It's true he cried often, and still does -- the one time I met him, at a think-tank luncheon, he teared up over the Cuban Missile Crisis -- and in the pre - Alan Alda Sixties a man's capacity to cry could still disarm unwary companions. But none of this is sufficient. Washington's inverted culture, where failure propels a man ever upward, bespeaks a kind of masochism. Of course, the actual pain is dispersed to the country at large. But for the professional failure Washington remains safe harbor. Within weeks of the publication of the book, McNamara had been called ``evil,'' a ``liar,'' and a ``hypocrite.'' Out in the heartland, a few Vietnam vets even sued him. Here in Washington Katharine Graham threw him a book party. Everybody who's anybody was there.