Archive: McNamara: The leper without a bell

January 26, 2004

A friend wrote to ask if I'd read the advance press on "The Fog of War," the forthcoming biography/documentary about Robert McNamara.

McNamara is an interesting character--sad, in a way, although not sad enough that it makes me really want to feel too sorry for him. When I think of him, I sometimes remember a line from Graham Greene's "The Quiet American," about the young CIA operative who believes the theories he read in college will help him successfully, benignly manipulate the French Indochina war (a war he clearly doesn't 'get')--someone calls him "a leper without a bell," wandering from village to village, with no understanding of the harm he's doing.

I always thought the fact about McNamara that nicely symbolized the whole problem was that, during his time as head of Ford, his signature creation was, in fact, the Falcon. The original rationalist nerd-mobile: A mechanic's dream, because there was lots of room under the hood, with all the engine components where you could get at them, so you didn't have to pull the engine every time you had to replace a 50-cent freeze plug, etc. And, of course, it got great gas mileage: I remember a TV ad from the early 1960s featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy--Charlie Brown! Now there's the ego-ideal of every American car buyer!--singing a calypso jingle about the Falcon's fuel economy. This, in a time when gasoline was $.27/gal and no one had even heard of the word "ecology." Logically, in theory, on paper, it was a good car, but it was an ugly, boxy, unsexy little piece of inconspicuous consumption--no fins, no Marilyn Monroe tail lights, no chrome, no muscle. People didn't-buy it in droves. (Compare its fate with the signature model of McNamara's successor Lee Iacocca: the Mustang.) Yet McNamara's spreadsheets told him that the Falcon should have been a great product.

It's much the same with the Vietnam war: McNamara will go to his grave genuinely not understanding why the war didn't conform to his spreadsheets and min/max solution curves. And, except that he did it with dollars instead of guns, he accomplished much the same thing as head of the International Monetary Fund: He perfected their general policy of loaning third world countries more money than they could possibly repay for Western-style projects they didn't need, then forcing draconian austerity measures on them to keep their economy crippled when they can't repay--perhaps the fiscal equivalent of 'bombing the village to save it." But, once again, it looks damned good on paper.

All of which is a long, pedantic way of saying yeah, I've seen trailers for the McNamara film and I definitely want to go see it.