New at Reason: Jesse Walker on the Death of Robert McNamara

July 9, 2009

Robert Strange McNamara—secretary of defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, president of the Ford Motor Company and the World Bank, co-architect of the Vietnam War—died Monday at age 93. Two days later, The New York Times published a column by the filmmaker Errol Morris, who once directed a documentary about McNamara. Morris noted that McNamara did take some blame for the disaster that the Vietnam War turned out to be. "He said, 'We were wrong,'" wrote Morris. "He was reluctant to use the first person. It was always 'we,' not 'I.'"

By losing himself in the plural form, writes Managing Editor Jesse Walker, McNamara may have been evading responsibility for his personal role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. But he was imparting an important truth as well. Vietnam was collective endeavor, and one way men like McNamara made it happen was by refusing to rock the boat even after they started to have their doubts about the project. McNamara, Walker writes, was an Organization Man.

Read all about it here.