A map of Laos and Vietnam prompts Robert McNamara's pointing

Date

1965

Description

Creator of the image: Marion Trikosko
Date of the image creation: 1965
Medium: Photograph
Person depicted: Robert McNamara

This photograph depicts Robert McNamara standing before an audience, under stage lights with his hair slicked back. While casually leaning on a lectern, the Secretary of Defence wields a long, black-tipped pointing wand, using it to gesture towards a large map representing the ‘theatre of war’.

Robert McNamara (1916–2009) was taught accounting at Harvard before joining the World War II effort, where he served in the Air Force as part of its Office of Statistical Control. He was tasked with making bombing raids more efficiently organized. Afterwards, he was employed by Henry Ford II who was worried that his inherited company was in need of reform. McNamara was one of ten ‘Whiz Kids’ employed by Ford II, and he was to implement more efficient management controls and financial reforms. Moving rapidly up the management hierarchy, in 1960 McNamara became the president of Ford Motor Company, the first to occupy that position from outside the Ford family.

Shortly after, the newly elected John Kennedy appointed McNamara to serve as the Secretary of Defence. He focused on improving the US ability to counter ‘wars of national liberation’, by using political subversion and guerrilla tactic, stating in 1962 annual report: ‘The military tactics are those of the sniper, the ambush, and the raid. The political tactics are terror, extortion, and assassination’. McNamara went on to be one of the major architects of the Vietnam War, specializing in using statistical analysis to maximize the efficiency of bullets, bombs and chemical weapons. After leaving office in 1968, McNamara went directly to serve as the head of the World Bank, a position he would occupy for thirteen years.

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