The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Having accepted the job, McNamara went back to Detroit to get clearance from his boss, Henry Ford II, who, less than enthusiastic, let him go, for in giving the presidency to McNamara, a system and accounting man rather than a traditional auto man, he had based an entire production system around one highly specialized individual, and the functioning of that system was very much dependent on that one person. Now he was losing the man and keeping the system. In the meantime McNamara talked with past Defense Secretaries and other experts, and showed up a week later in Washington thoroughly prepared; in that short time he had mastered what the main issues before him were and singled out the major areas of work. He already seemed unique in his grasp of the situation, his control, discipline and energy. The Kennedy people, who were having the normal trouble trying to change from seeking office to assuming office, were impressed by the new Secretary, who seemed to be out and running while they were still in the standing start. He had developed that capacity at Ford, to prepare himself so thoroughly in the more intricate areas (his control of the most abstract figures was formidable) that other men, mere mortals, came away quickly impressed.

  He managed to pick an uncommon group of bright, fast, analytical, self-assured men who in part helped lead us into the war in Vietnam, but who, unlike other layers of the Washington bureaucracy, would turn and help lead the fight to extricate the country from the war. It was said that in the Kennedy-Johnson years, the three places with the most talented people were the White House under Bundy, the Justice Department under Robert Kennedy, and the Defense Department under McNamara.

  Even in the beginning he was completely sure of what he wanted to do, sure of the kind of people he wanted. While the talent scouts under Yarmolinsky were putting up different men, one of them had called Cyrus Vance at his New York law firm, because Vance was the kind of good, sound lawyer you put in a new Administration, and asked if he would like to be in the Defense Department. Vance said yes, as a matter of fact, he would. What kind of job, Cy? A service secretary job, I guess. What service? asked the talent scout. The Navy, I suppose. I was on a destroyer during the war—and so it was decided that Vance would be Secretary of the Navy. McNamara flipped through his dossier and said yes, this man has impressive credentials, but all my service secretaries have to have administrative ability of some kind, and this man doesn’t. So Vance was given the job of general counsel to the Defense Department. Everyone else in the Administration was still learning, but McNamara already seemed to know, already the confidence was there. From the very start, he was an active, decisive Secretary of Defense, and this was not lost on John Kennedy.

  Theirs was a relationship which was to continue with mutual admiration and ease, and McNamara was one of the few people working for Kennedy who crossed the great divide and became a part of his social world. Midway through the Kennedy Administration, in fact, a reporter working on a magazine article would ask McNamara who his friends were, and McNamara would answer, well, he had lots of friends. “But whom do you call when you want to relax and chew the fat or have a beer?” And McNamara answered, “The Kennedys—I like the Kennedys.” He had left Detroit, though, at an enormous financial sacrifice, perhaps a loss of as much as $3 million (he had somewhat less than $1 million to his name when he went to Washington). At the time, one block of stock options was about to mature in just a few weeks and Henry Ford graciously suggested he delay two weeks in selling, but that would have interfered with his swearing-in ceremony and McNamara played by the rules. Besides, he was always far more interested in power than money. Power to do good, of course, not power for power’s sake.

  His growing up had been simple—and enviable. Good parents. Good values. Good education. Good marks. He was born in San Francisco in 1916, the son of Robert J. McNamara and Claranell Strange (thus the middle name, Robert Strange McNamara, upon which his critics would so joyously seize in later years). His father, who married late, was fifty when Bob was born; he was a sales manager for a San Francisco wholesale shoe firm. Father Catholic, mother Protestant, McNamara a Protestant. (Later, during the height of Lyndon Johnson’s love affair with McNamara, the President thought of the Secretary of Defense as a vice-presidential possibility and called around to Democratic pols with the idea. “You could even see Lyndon thinking it out—the Protestants will assume he’s a Protestant, and the Catholics will think he’s a Catholic,” one White House aide said.)

  When he and his sister were small, the family moved across the Bay to an area of Oakland which featured a particularly good school system. They lived in Annerly, a nice middle-class section. More than forty years later his teachers would remember him with pleasure. Bob was always well behaved, never pushy, his work always ready in case you called on him; he prepared beautiful books on foreign countries—if only there had been more like him. On to Piedmont High, a school of high standing, where he received excellent marks. He was a doer, no jarred nerves, joining all the right clubs, honor societies, the yearbook, the glee club, president of a secret fraternity pledged to service. He was a very good student but not yet exceptional; an early IQ test put him above the norm, very bright but not exceptional.

  From Piedmont he went to Berkeley at a time when Robert Gordon Sproul was turning it into a great university (McNamara greatly admired Sproul, and some friends felt that one of his secret ambitions was to leave Ford, if not for government service, then to head Berkeley). At Berkeley he was remembered as a student with a broadly based education and interests. His proficiency in math was beginning to show through, and his own grades came so easily that he had time to read and work in other courses. His professors assumed that he would become a teacher; he did not seem to have the kind of drive, the hustle, which one felt went with a business career; he seemed a little more scholarly. Those were good years, summers spent gold mining (unsuccessfully), climbing mountains, a sport which he quickly came to love, learning to ski, which he went at in typical McNamara style: find out your weaknesses and work on them, and then keep working on them. Man could conquer all by discipline, and will, and rationality.

  From Berkeley he went to Harvard Business School, where he was an immediate standout. His unique ability in accounting control became evident, and he began to work at applying that talent to management techniques. He graduated, moved back to the Bay area to work for Price Waterhouse, and in 1939 started seeing an old friend named Margaret Craig. When he was asked back to Harvard Business to teach accounting, he married Marg (whom everyone would consider a good and humanizing influence on McNamara; much of what was good in Bob, friends thought, came from Marg’s generous instincts). At Harvard he was a particularly good teacher, well organized, with good control of his subject and enthusiasm for his work, but he was restless. World War II was approaching and he wanted to play his part; the Navy had turned him down because of weak eyes. He was trying to join the Army when Harvard Business School went to war.

  Robert Lovett, the World War I aviator, had stayed in Europe after the Armistice. He had been plagued with a bad stomach, had lived far too much on baby foods, and thus had forsworn most of the social life that a well-connected young banker might be expected to enjoy. Instead he devoted himself to the political study of a decaying Europe and a military study of what the Hitler build-up would mean, particularly in the way of air power. He predicted accurately the fall of France, saw the rot in the fiber there, and sensed that it would be a war that no one could contain, in which air power, an embryonic factor in the first war, would become the decisive factor. He returned to America in 1940, and as a private citizen, while the rest of the country slept, he made his own private tour of all U.S. airplane factories and airfields to find out what America’s air needs and resources were, and he was shocked by the inadequacy of what he saw. He foresaw vast possibilities for American air power, given our industrial base; American industry could flex its muscle and build the greatest air force in the world, which would wreak massive saturation bombing against the enemy’s industrial might. He had met Jam
es Forrestal through banking connections, and Forrestal, then Undersecretary of the Navy, sent him to see Robert Patterson, Assistant Secretary of War, where Lovett quickly became a special assistant, then Assistant Secretary for Air, and where his own private planning saved the United States vital time. When this country finally entered the war, some progress had been made in spite of ourselves. But it had not been easy; Lovett could not even find out how many airplanes there were in the country. Charles (Tex) Thornton, one of Lovett’s aides, would remember that when they started in 1940, Lovett asked to see the Air Corps plan. There was much stalling, but Thornton insisted, the Air Corps plan, the overall plan for the defense of this country, and for its offense as well. The military kept delaying and delaying, and finally they brought down a plan for the aerial defense of New York City, with the dust still on it, apparently designed more to fight off the Red Baron than the new massive waves of air power being fielded in modern warfare.

  Thornton was someone that Lovett immediately liked. He came from a small Texas town, was ambitious, bright and pleasantly extroverted; he quickly became one of Lovett’s top deputies. Together they decided that in order to harness American industry for the great war effort, they needed first and foremost a giant statistical brain to tell them who they were, what was needed, and where. They asked Harvard Business School, the most logical place, to train the officers they needed for statistical control. This brain trust would send the right men and the right supplies to the right places, and would make sure that when crews arrived at a base there were enough instructors. It was a symbolic step in America’s going from a relatively sleepy country toward becoming a superpower (a step which the acceleration in air power and air industry would finalize). We were already so big that our problem primarily concerned control as well as careful and accurate projection of just how powerful we were. (It was significant that twenty years later, when we were an acknowledged superpower, when Kennedy looked for a Secretary of Defense he turned to someone who was not really a production man, but the supreme accountant, determination of what we needed being more essential than the qualities of the old-style professional production man who ramrodded manufacturing schedules through, who went by instinct, and who knew nothing about systems control.)

  The Business School accepted the proposition, and a group of the best young teachers was sought out. McNamara, who was already anxious to go into the service, agreed to become a teacher in the program. He was so effective, such an immediate standout, that Thornton soon pulled him from Harvard and attached him to the Army Air Forces. Finally, for the first time, McNamara had something upon which to fasten that energy, that drive, that curious cold passion. Those traits which would eventually be part of the legend began to emerge; until then he had been just another bright young man, intelligent and hard-working. Now he had a cause and a field to operate in. Thornton would recall that the young McNamara of those early days was strikingly similar to the mature McNamara: the same discipline, the concentration, the relentless work all day and night (“I’m sure that now that he’s at the World Bank, only the Bank exists, and Defense is behind him, just as when he was at Defense, Ford was behind him, and when he was at Ford, there was really nothing else but his work,” he would say).

  Thornton sent him first to England to work out problems on the B-17 bomber program, finally got him a commission as a temporary captain in the Army Air Forces. But when the B-29 was being developed, he was pulled from other programs. This was to become the major project for the Air Force, the long-range bomber which was to prove so vital during the last year of the war, but first it needed to be organized and systematized. Other men would make their reputations on the development of the B-29, but Thornton later claimed that the genius of the operation was the young McNamara, putting all the infinitely complicated pieces together, doing program analysis, operation analysis, digesting the mass of facts which would have intimidated less disciplined minds, less committed minds, making sure that the planes and the crews were readied at roughly the same time. Since all this took place before the real age of computers, he had to work it out himself. He was the intelligence bank of the project, and he held the operation together, kept its timing right, kept it all on schedule. It was an awesome performance for a man not yet thirty.

  McNamara had planned to go back to Harvard after the war. Challenges fascinated him, but not worldly goods or profit as ends in themselves. So why not return to Harvard, the teaching of those beloved statistics, it was amazing what statistics had done, it was awesome to imagine what they might do in the future. The life style of Cambridge appealed to him; he could enjoy the university atmosphere, he could talk with men who were in other fields and still involve himself in statistics. But Thornton, more outgoing, more entrepreneurial, a man with more imagination than the somewhat reserved McNamara, had other ideas. To Thornton the Air Force had not just been a part of a vast and impressive wartime enterprise but something more, a case study in instant corporate success. From a standing start, the Air Force quickly became cranked up into a supercompany, the most powerful and the most complicated industrial force in the world. It had gone from 295 pilots trained in the year before Pearl Harbor to 96,000 the year after, planes built, flight crews trained, all dovetailed. It had been a staggering task and an enormous success. And they had done it, not by the tired old men who had headed prewar companies, but by this group of talented young people that Thornton and Lovett had created, fresh young minds with modern skills, not tied to the myths, the superstitions and the business prejudices of the past.

  Now, Thornton knew, there would be a reconversion from military to civilian production, and the business world would be filled with new opportunities. He took stock of his team: they were without doubt the most talented managerial team of the century, young men who had gained twenty-five years of experience in four years. Under normal business conditions they might not have attained comparable positions of power and influence until they were nearly fifty, by then having picked up all the old prejudices and undesirable traits of their predecessors. Thornton, the oldest and the most senior, was thirty at the time. None of the young men had any real ties to previous jobs; to go back to what they had been was like a general becoming a corporal.

  Thornton began to think of the possibility of selling them as a group, all that expertise and managerial talent bound together. It was not just that they could bring a better price as a group, but more important to Thornton, if they were to accomplish something, really create something new and bold in the business world, then their chances were far greater as a group (“If you went in with one or two people you could get lost or chewed up; if you were going to convert a relatively large company quickly you needed a group,” he would recall). When he talked it over with his team, they were enthusiastic. Only McNamara had serious objections, he wanted to return to Harvard. The idea of business did not excite him. But there were financial problems: he had come down with a mild case of polio, and Marg with a more serious case, necessitating considerable doctor bills. (“I said, 'Bob, you’ve got those doctor bills and you can’t go back there to Harvard on twenty-six hundred dollars a year,’ and he thought and said, 'I guess you’re right,’ and he was on board,” Thornton said.)

  There were two immediate possibilities; one was Robert Young, the railroad man, and the other was the Ford Motor Company. Thornton went by to see Young, who offered him a job and said he could bring two or three men with him. And then there was the Ford Company, which seemed to offer the most challenge. It would have to be retooled and reconverted; they knew that financially it had not done well, though they did not know how badly it had done during the last twenty years, showing a profit only once since 1927, in the year 1932. The old man’s long-time associate, Harry Bennett, had just been ousted and the reins taken over by Henry Ford II, their own age—he was twenty-eight—who now desperately needed to modernize the company that his grandfather had founded and then let slip. They sent Ford a cable which said in effect: Bri
ght young management team, ran Air Force, ready to work. Thornton made an early contact; eight of them went out there and impressed Henry Ford and the deal was set. Ford told Thornton to set the salaries; they ranged from $10,000 to $16,000. Thornton gave McNamara the second highest salary. The group became the famous Whiz Kids: Thornton, McNamara, Arjay Miller, J. E. Lundy, Charles Bosworth, Jack Reith, Jim Wright, Ben Davis Mills, Wilbur Andreson and George Moore. It was an extraordinary decision for young Ford to make; however, at that bleak moment in his company’s history he had nowhere to go but up. He was reaching beyond the normally closed auto business for a group of non-auto men, whose experience was not in the failure and stupidity of war, but rather in the technology of it, and indeed the technological success of war. Their chief lesson had been that you could control an organization by converting an abundance of facts and figures into meaningful data and then apply them to industrial production; these men were purveyors of what would be a new managerial art in American industry.

  The Ford Company practices, both in production and in personnel, had an almost medieval quality to them. Under Henry senior and Harry Bennett the policies of the company were singularly primitive. The public was a problem, the unions were a problem, the bankers were a problem. If Ford built a car, it was the public’s responsibility to like it. No modern managerial group was being trained. The company had no credit. Henry Ford’s only son, Edsel, had tried to fight the policies, but Bennett destroyed him. After the family revolt which resulted in Bennett’s expulsion, young Henry had inherited the shell of a company, the name and perhaps not that much more, at a time when General Motors seemed to employ the most up-to-date production and managerial techniques. Young Henry needed, above all else, instant executives; the company was losing $9 million a month. But he needed, as one friend would admit, two levels of management. One now, instantly, and one to come along. In hiring the Whiz Kids, he was taking care of the future, the near future, but the future nonetheless, so he shrewdly covered all bets and hired a senior level of management from General Motors, men in their late forties and early fifties who could go to work that day and help train his new intellectuals in the auto business. This was to be known in automotive circles as the Breech-Crusoe-Harder group, headed by Ernie Breech, then forty-nine, who had been at General Motors for most of his adult life, and was at the time president of GM’s subsidiary, Bendix. He brought with him Lewis Crusoe, another high General Motors executive, now retired, and Delmar Harder, former chief of production of GM.