He at once personified his generation’s promise and failure while achieving enough accomplishments for several lifetimes.  Heralded by his supporters at the beginning of his career as a “whiz kid” and jeered by his critics for embodying his middle name - Strange – in his constantly optimistic stance on Vietnam, McNamara spent most of the last 40 years of his life on the periphery of policy influence before passing away on July 6th at the age of 93.  For despite saving Ford Motor Company and reforming the World Bank, McNamara’s slick-haired, steely-eyed visage will forever be seen exactly as many wire stories defined him – the “architect” of the Vietnam War.

Much like General William Westmoreland, a fellow rising star whose career was launched by success in World War II and destroyed by frustration and failure in Southeast Asia, McNamara did not live to see his image rehabilitated.  Other than what could be described as stating the defense’s case in his faux film trial, the Oscar-winning documentary Fog of War, McNamara was out of the public limelight save the publishing of his memoirs in the 1990s.  And other than a series of quotes from him being used to highlight opposition to the war in Iraq (Fog of War premiered in 2003) and his relevations of moral uncertainty at the very policies he put into place in World War II and Vietnam, McNamara remained unwelcomed and unloved by the liberal intelligensia that had lauded him as the poster child of bureaucratic efficiency in the post-war boom.

Indeed, McNamara was the symbol of both the pinnacle and nadir of the technocratic elite spawned by the “success” of government invention in the 1930s and 40s.  Shaped by the New Deal, the War, and the bureaucracy that ran both of them, men like Robert McNamara found confidence – and likely arrogance – in the reduction of all management, from machines to men to nations, to simple mathematical or behavioral equations.  A bureaucratic Theo Epstein with a poli-sci set of sabermetrics, McNamara’s tenure at the Department of Defense nevertheless proved the inherent flaws in bureaucratic micromanagement – in his case, running a war in Vietnam out of Washington.

As George Will notes, the timing of McNamara’s passing isn’t without irony:

Today, something unsettlingly similar to McNamara’s eerie assuredness pervades the Washington in which he died. The spirit is: Have confidence, everybody, because we have, or soon will have, everything — really everything — under control…

Robert McNamara deserves better from history than what he’ll receive.  The contrast of his salvation of Ford to the task handed to young Brian Deese today is striking.  His attempted efforts to redesign American military strategy to adopt to the smaller “wars of liberation” that the Russians had perfected by the early 1960’s, were well-intended and timely (not unlike Donald Rumsfeld’s similar efforts in this past decade).  But the worldview that shaped his policy ideas was ultimately ill-suited for the realities of a war that refused to be easily calculated.