1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Robert S. McNamara

Robert S. McNamara Quotes

Robert Strange McNamara was an American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He played a major role in escalating the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy analysis.

He was born in San Francisco, California, graduated from Harvard Business School and served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. After the war, Henry Ford II hired McNamara and a group of other Army Air Force veterans to work for Ford Motor Company. These "Whiz Kids" helped reform Ford with modern planning, organization, and management control systems. After briefly serving as Ford's president, McNamara accepted appointment as Secretary of Defense.

McNamara became a close adviser to Kennedy and advocated the use of a blockade during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy and McNamara instituted a Cold War defense strategy of flexible response, which anticipated the need for military responses short of massive retaliation. McNamara consolidated intelligence and logistics functions of the Pentagon into two centralized agencies: the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Defense Supply Agency. During the Kennedy administration, McNamara presided over a build-up in U.S. soldiers in South Vietnam. After the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, the number of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam escalated dramatically. McNamara and other U.S. policymakers feared that the fall of South Vietnam to a Communist regime would lead to the fall of other governments in the region.

McNamara grew increasingly skeptical of the efficacy of committing U.S. soldiers to Vietnam. In 1968, McNamara resigned as Secretary of Defense to become President of the World Bank. He remains the longest serving Secretary of Defense, having remained in office over seven years. He served as President of the World Bank until 1981, shifting the focus of the World Bank towards poverty reduction. After retiring, he served as a trustee of several organizations, including the California Institute of Technology and the Brookings Institution.

✵ 9. June 1916 – 6. July 2009
Robert S. McNamara photo
Robert S. McNamara: 7 quotes2 likes

Famous Robert S. McNamara Quotes

“It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it, necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.”

Robert S. McNamara

Source: Herbert Y. Schandler (1975), US Policy on the Use of Nuclear Weapons, 1945-1975. p. 55

“You can never substitute emotion for reason.”

Robert S. McNamara

Source: Henry L. Trewhitt (1971) McNamara, p. 119
Context: You can never substitute emotion for reason. I still would allow a place for intuition in this process, but not emotion. They say I am a power gabber. But knowledge is power, and I am giving them knowledge, so they will have more power. Can't they see that?

“Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused through society.”

Robert S. McNamara

Robert McNamara (1967); quoted in: Bruce Rich (1994) Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment and the Crisis of Development, p. 83

“I would rather have a wrong decision made than no decision at all.”

Robert S. McNamara

Quoted in: Charles A. Stevenson (2006), SECDEF: The Nearly Impossible Job of Secretary of Defense http://books.google.com/books?id=2NXbS5AG_8QC&pg=PA28, p. 28

“I must say I don't object to its being called McNamara's War. I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.”

Robert S. McNamara

Source: United States. Congress. Senate (1964) Hearings, Vol. 4, p. 177: Of the Vietnam War

“Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
Lesson #10: Never say never.
Lesson #11: You can't change human nature…”

Robert S. McNamara

Robert S. McNamara (2004), Official Teacher's Guide for The Fog of War, p. 5

“Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests, that the United States is, or should or could be the global gendarme.”

Robert S. McNamara

Source: Charles E. Miller (2010) Conscience, Denied, p. 21

Similar authors

Stephen R. Covey photo
Stephen R. Covey125
American educator, author, businessman and motivational spe… None
Mikhail Gorbachev photo
Mikhail Gorbachev65
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union None
Arnold Schwarzenegger photo
Arnold Schwarzenegger52
actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heri… None
Lee Iacocca photo
Lee Iacocca10
American businessman None
Ben Carson photo
Ben Carson191
17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urb… None
Joseph Stalin photo
Joseph Stalin95
General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union None
Robert T. Kiyosaki photo
Robert T. Kiyosaki151
American finance author , investor None
Al Capone photo
Al Capone44
American gangster None
Steven Weinberg photo
Steven Weinberg46
American theoretical physicist None
Walt Disney photo
Walt Disney102
American film producer and businessman None