Word: mcnamara
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...McNamara persuaded former Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson to head an independent panel of "wise men" who will consider bank activities for the next 30 years. McNamara hopes the Pearson group will be as ambitious for the World Bank as he himself is. "All power is given us to be used," he told his governors this week, "not to be wrapped in a napkin against risk...
...ESSENCE OF SECURITY by Robert S. McNamara. 176 pages. Harper...
Everyone admires efficiency, but no one can readily tolerate an efficient man. He is, after all, a rebuke to others. As a result, most efficient men diplomatically try to appear less efficient than they are. Not Robert McNamara. The ablest of the nation's Secretaries of Defense refused to play "Lovable Bob" for Congressmen, some of whom did not forgive him. Now he is running something of the same risk with his reading public. The Essence of Security is not the gossipy memoir or the in-fighter's recollection that many readers might prefer. Rather...
...Still, McNamara cannot suppress the virtue or vice of his efficiency altogether. He is too coldly crisp when he ticks off his punch-card proofs-one, two, three-that the U.S. possesses "assured-destruction forces." He seems most himself when speaking of the Department of Defense as the "greatest single management complex in history." Nothing gives him more evident satisfaction than having pruned logistics expenses by $14 billion in five years through his "planning-programming-budgeting system." In the end, his standard is efficiency, and his integrity lies in remaining loyal...
...were to respond to the Soviet anti-ballistic-missile system with a massive ABM system of its own, it would fall again into the "action-reaction phenomenon," he contends. The Johnson Administration obviously agrees; the Pentagon now plans to build only the "thin" anti-Chinese defense ABM screen that McNamara proposed (TIME, July 5). He adds: "The blunt fact remains that if we had had more accurate in formation [in 1961] about planned Soviet strategic forces, we simply would not have needed to build as large a nuclear arsenal as we have today...