Remembering Robert McNamara

Last week’s news that former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara had died in his sleep stirred special memories for me.

McNamara was nationally important and very controversial. He was the chief architect of the war in Vietnam, and to a large extent he was the focus of the ferocious debate that accompanied the war.

Yet he was also important to Michigan, too, in ways now largely forgotten. And he also touched my life in a positive way.

McNamara was briefly President of the Ford Motor Company. He was the most successful of the team of “Whiz Kids,” the management team of young Army Air Corps experts who arrived in Dearborn in 1946, when there was real risk Ford would go belly up.

All the while he worked at Ford, the scholarly and low-key McNamara lived in Ann Arbor, where he and his wife, Margy, felt at home. He formed many life-long friendships during that period, including my parents. My father liked very much his matter-of-fact ways, comparing him to a “comfortable pair of old shoes.”

I remember quite clearly a dinner party at my parents’ house in 1960, just after John F. Kennedy was elected President. The McNamaras were present, together with several other couples.

The phone rang in the middle of dinner. The call was for Mr. McNamara. He was away from the table for some time. When he came back, he had a slightly rueful smile. “That was Jack Kennedy,” he explained. “He wants me to be his Secretary of Defense!”

In the excited babble of talk afterward, I don’t recall any discussions about Vietnam, which had bubbling at a low level ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower had been asked by the French to pull their chestnuts out of the fire following their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Back then, we had only a few hundred “advisors” there.  Bob McNamara would end up sending half a million more.

McNamara went off to Washington, where he played a crucial role in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, helping defuse the instincts of the military to strike first, and perhaps saving us from  nuclear war. But he would be remembered for Vietnam.

Then, in 1965 when I was in Washington running the congressional office of the late U.S. Rep. Paul Todd (D-Kalamazoo,)  my parents came to visit. The idea was for all of us to have dinner with the McNamaras the next evening. But Bob called, explaining that President Lyndon B. Johnson had called him up to Camp David and wondering if we would like to come along.

You bet! We flew up on the Air Force One helicopter, taking off from the White House lawn and settling down at the air strip at the presidential retreat in the mountains of Virginia.
LBJ greeted us. We all walked to the main residence, which featured a large flag stone patio overlooking President Eisenhower’s favorite putting green. President Johnson flopped down in a chaise lounge, reaching back with his arm. Imagine my surprise when it came forward with a drink in his hand! A white-coated waiter had been standing behind the President’s chair, just waiting to hand him his drink when he sat down.

I’m not sure how it happened, but I wound up sitting next to the President, with Secretary McNamara on the other side. And we quite quickly got into a discussion – “argument” is too extreme – about Viet Nam. President Johnson sat silently between us, wearing enormous dark purple sunglasses, his big head rotating from one to the other of us as we made our points.

I seem to remember I argued that we were misconstruing the nature of the war. Instead of drawing the line against the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, we had got ourselves tragically involved in what was at heart a civil war amongst the Vietnamese themselves. Secretary McNamara, of course, disagreed. And we ended the discussion as the President and his Secretary of Defense walked off to have their own separate conversation.

My respect for McNamara – for his dignity, his patriotism, his blazing intellect and his devotion to his old friends – was always great, even though we differed over Vietnam. I was delighted to discover, upon reading the obituaries after his death, that privately he had come to the conclusion that the war was a mistake and had developed the way it did because we misunderstood the nature of the conflict in that sad country.

We left Camp David on the helicopter, and I never will forget landing at night with the White House lawn gleaming green in the spotlights and the very bright White House nearby.

A few weeks later, President Johnson offered me a job, one that appeared to involve reaching out to young people to explain the Administration’s position in the war. I turned it aside, probably wisely, because I certainly would have been in way over my head.

But I remain indebted to Bob McNamara for the opportunity to go to Camp David, for his tolerance for listening to a 27-year-old criticizing his conduct of the war in the presence of the his Commander-in-Chief, and for the rich store of memories.

As I get older, increasingly I feel whether or not you happen to disagree with somebody is less important than the way you go about it. Bob McNamara’s civility, thoughtfulness and willingness to listen to the other point of view will always remain in my mind as a touchstone of adult, civilized behavior.  We could use more of it today.

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Editor’s Note: Former newspaper publisher and University of Michigan Regent Phil Power is a longtime observer of Michigan politics and economics, and a former chairman of the Michigan chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He is also the founder and president of The Center for Michigan, a centrist think-and-do tank which publishes the Michigan Scorecard. The opinions expressed here are Power’s own and do not represent the official views of The Center. He welcomes your comments at ppower@thecenterformichigan.net.