Robert McNamara
Robert McNamara
Robert Strange McNamarawas an American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, during which time he played a major role in escalating the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Following that, he served as President of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth9 June 1916
CitySan Francisco, CA
CountryUnited States of America
Action should be founded on contemplation, and those of us who act don't put enough time, don't give enough emphasis, to contemplation.
The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.
All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly. . . . He draws blueprints for Utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand--his own part comic, part tragic, part cussed, but part glorious nature.
It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.
...but highly placed sources within the Kennedy Administration disagreed: "[T]he assumption that the strategic nuclear balance mattered in any way was wrong... As far as I am concerned, it made no difference... If my memory serves me correctly, we had some five thousand strategic nuclear warheads as against t heir three hundred. Can anyone seriously tell me that their having three hundred and forty would have made any difference? The military balance wasn't changed. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now..."
There is no more important task in a democracy than resolving the differences among people and finding a course of action that will be supported by a sufficient number to permit the nation to achieve a better life for all.
Rationality will not save us.
General, you don't have a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm!
They'll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you're going to destroy nations.
Let's go in, let's totally destroy Cuba.
Belief and seeing are both often wrong,
That's one of the major lessons: no president should ever take this nation to war without full public debate in the Congress and/or in the public.
Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not.
Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused though society.