ROBERT McNAMARA by Peter F. Drucker

“Let me return to your question about Bob McNamara.

To me, the greatest strengths of McNamara as a person is that he inspired admiration; his greatest weakness is that he did not inspire trust.

The greatest strength of McNamara as an administrator was his ability and willingness to pick the very strongest people as members of his team. It was a truly distinguished group. In DOD the group was outstanding.

McNamara’s greatest weakness as an administrator was that he had not the faintest idea how to make use of the strengths of his team, or even how to make a team out of them.

McNamara’s greatest strength as a manager was his realization of the need for objectives and his willingness to think through objectives and altogether to think through strategy. His greatest weakness was that he always lost the objective over procedures. He always got caught up then in the minor points and the objective became secondary to the way in which this or that specific ‘urgency’ of the moment was being done.

This, let me add, is better than the opposite—the tendency to work on great objectives and then lose them because the execution is totally neglected; a tendency I have seen much too much, and especially in DOD.

But McNamara lost one objective after the other, e.g., standardization of weapons system across services—by dictating how something should be done instead of saying ‘this is what we are going to do, you work out how to get there.’

McNamara’s great strength as a leader was his realization that this was indeed his role, and that the Secretary of Defense is not just a cushion between this military and the President.

His great, and I think ultimately self-destructive, weakness was that he confused leadership with morality. Anyone who did not agree was an ‘enemy,’ and clearly had to be damaged, destroyed, or at least humiliated—and McNamara’s willingness to humiliate people was, and is, I think, his one great character weakness and a very serious one. He never learned to use disagreement as a source of understanding and conflict as a management tool.

Instead, he divided the world into the ‘good’ guys who agreed with him and the ‘bad’ guys who saw different things and came to different conclusions.

And this is the reason why, in the last result, I believe, he was a failure as Secretary of Defense, just as I think he is a failure now as head of the World Bank.”

Letter to Hon. Thomas Morris, Inspector General Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1978