Robert McNamara (9 June 1916 – 6 July 2009) was the US Secretary of Defense from 21 January 1961 to 29 February 1968, succeeding Thomas Gates and preceding Clark Clifford. He played a major role in US foreign policy during the Cold War, supporting the blockade of Cuba during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam War.
Biography[]
McNamara in 1962
Robert Strange McNamara was born in San Francisco, California in 1916, and he graduated from the University of California in 1937 before teaching at the Harvard Business School during World War II. He joined the Ford Motor Company and rose rapidly to become its president. He resigned soon afterwards to join the administration of John F. Kennedy, despite his Republican Party sympathies. Repudiating John Foster Dulles' concept of brinkmanship, he advocated pragmatism and flexibility as a means to combat world communism. He successfully gained control over Pentagon spending, axing obsolete weapons and applying strict cost-accounting methods. He visited Vietnam in 1962, 1964, and 1966, when he sought to boost the US-backed Saigon government against the Viet Cong. While supporting the early bombing offensive against North Vietnam in 1965, he came to repudiate full-scale military involvement and resigned from Lyndon B. Johnson's administration in February 1968. He was appointed president of the World Bank, where his main concern was to ease the burden of debt repayment incurred by developing countries, many of whose economies were devastated by high oil prices in the 1970s. In 1995, he expressed deep regret at his complicity in the conduct of the Vietnam War. He died in 2009 at the age of 96; from 1978, he had been a member of the Democratic Party.