ANN ARBOR -- There are still a few old-timers who remember him strolling across the University of Michigan campus on weekends with his wife; going to Drake's Sandwich Shop for a Big M Burger, getting misty-eyed over Yeats' poetry at higher-level faculty parties.
Most people long ago forgot that side of him, if they ever knew it. Nor, when he died on Monday, did the front-page obituaries everywhere devote much space to his meteoric career as head of Ford Motor Co., give him the credit he deserved for the success of the Falcon, or even blame him for the Edsel.
No. In the history books, he will always be Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War. Architect of one of America's greatest military and foreign policy failures, the brilliant fool with the computer-like brain who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
He knew it, too. Long before he died in his sleep at age 93, Robert Strange McNamara knew that whatever else he did, he would be linked forever with Vietnam. But there was another McNamara, the one who came of age in Michigan, the one who was one of the most influential people in automotive history -- even though he was by no means a "car guy" and got into the business only by accident.
Years later, in fact, Henry Ford II was once trying to find something nice to say about Lee Iacocca, McNamara's successor, who Hank the Deuce never really liked and eventually fired.
Well, he said, at least Iacocca, unlike McNamara, liked cars.
Robert McNamara was, in a sense, a most improbable auto executive. Zoom back to the end of World War II, when Charles "Tex" Thornton, head of a statistical unit in the U.S. Army Air Force, and nine of his associates decided to market themselves as a management team to a corporation in need of help.
Nobody needed help then more than Ford, which was trying to right itself after decades of decline. They were all invited out to Dearborn. But one member decided not to go. According to Robert Lacey's classic history, "Ford: The Men and the Machine," he said cars weren't for him. He was going back to teach at Harvard.
"You'd better get interested," Tex snapped at Bob McNamara. He pointed out that the young professor's wife had polio.
The bills were enormous, far beyond a professor's salary. Robert McNamara, always a numbers man, reluctantly concluded he was right. So the "Whiz Kids" descended on Ford.
They did very well, and made the company, which had been in danger of failing, competitive again. Through his sheer brilliance and drive, Robert McNamara would eventually rise to be the highest non-family official at Ford. But while the rest of them found homes in Dearborn and later, the Grosse Pointes, he wouldn't think of it.
He moved instead to Ann Arbor, for the university atmosphere, and commuted to Dearborn every day.
Henry Ford II announced he was making Bob McNamara, then just 45 years old, his president at a press conference on Nov. 9, 1960, the morning Americans got up and discovered that John F. Kennedy had been elected president. Within days, there was a call from Washington. Kennedy wanted Bob McNamara as secretary of the Treasury. He wasn't interested. But he was interested in defense.
What happened next is well-known. The quantitative methods that worked so well for selling cars didn't work so well for estimating the human costs of war. Later, when things went sour, Lyndon Johnson used to say he never would have kept McNamara on if he had known he had only been president of Ford for a month.
Seven years after he left his beloved Ann Arbor, Robert McNamara couldn't have set foot on campus without risking angry anti-war riots. He never lived in Michigan again.
However, one has to wonder if he -- and the nation -- might have been better off had he stayed at Ford. He was a rigorous bean-counter whose signature car -- the Falcon -- had few frills.
The "car guys" scoffed. He was a guy with granny glasses and a granny car, they said. But the Falcon made money -- and Ford overtook Chevy in sales.
Might Ford have been better positioned to meet the oil shocks of the 1970s with Bob McNamara at its helm?
Had he stayed on in Dearborn -- or even gone on to run the Treasury -- we might be mourning Robert McNamara as a paragon of enlightened efficiency, a shining member of the greatest generation.
But that's not how things turned out.
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