Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara.

• Author: Lagon, Mark

SINCE LEAVING THE presidency of the World Bank in 1981, Robert McNamara has pursued a frenetically active "retirement" worthy of an elder statesman. With his reputation scarcely tarnished by his consistent failures in private industry, in the cabinet, and in leading a major international organization, McNamara has consciously taken on the persona of eminence grise. By advocating aid for the Third World, limits on American use of force, and nuclear disarmament, McNamara has sought to fabricate the image of a man committed to peace and justice throughout his public life. An exemplary pronouncement in recent years was his recommendation that the United States and the world rely on economic sanctions as a response to Iraq's occupation of Kuwait.

Much of his retirement has been devoted to a revision of his own history, despite his unwillingness to publish memoirs. It is hardly surprising that McNamara has tried to control his image in history, since Deborah Shapley, in her breezy new biography, presents plentiful evidence that the quest for control and management has been the central motif of McNamara's career.

McNamara's management mentality is evident in each of the successive phases of his life. The future emblem of the American establishment rose from modest roots in northern California. The first in his family to attend college, he excelled at Berkeley and at the Harvard Business School in the 1930s. After a brief stint at an accounting firm back in his native state, McNamara was invited to join the faculty of the Harvard Business School. Upon receiving this invitation he proposed to his sweetheart, Margy Craig, before moving to the East Coast. Shapley recounts an act which illustrates McNamara's quest for efficiency nicely. He arranged a cruise from the West Coast through the Panama Canal to Boston in August 1940 with a dual purpose: both to move his belongings to his new home and as a honeymoon.

McNamara was not a faculty member for long at the Harvard Business School. He and a number of other practitioners of a systems approach to management worked for the Air Force in World War II. This group was dubbed the "whiz kids," after a contemporary television game show. After contributing to the systematic pursuit of the war effort, this cell of managers hired itself out to private industry. The "whiz kids" went to work for the Ford Motor Company. Applying his technique of statistical control to auto making rather than in the classroom or in building FDR's "arsenal of democracy," McNamara steadily moved up the executive ranks at Ford.

As an executive and (as of 1960) president of Ford, McNamara relentlessly expanded the application of systems analysis to the production of cars. He cared more about efficiency and cost, as measured by statistics and dollar amounts, than engineering considerations. McNamara's managerial ethic led him to distance himself from technical experts with substantive knowledge of auto design--as it would later lead him to be remote from career military men at the Pentagon.

An often-mentioned episode in his tenure with Ford was the Edsel project. In discussions at Ford, McNamara initially opposed development of the Edsel, and later he was at pains to take credit for this. Yet when the project fell into his portfolio as general manager of the car division...