National Security 2.1

Op-Ed Columnist – Can I Clean Your Clock? – NYTimes.com.

Over the past decade, whenever I went to China and engaged Chinese on their pollution and energy problems, inevitably some young Chinese would say: “Hey, you Americans got to grow dirty for 150 years, using cheap coal and oil. Now it is our turn.”

It’s a hard argument to refute. Eventually, I decided that the only way to respond was with some variation of the following: “You’re right. It’s your turn. Grow as dirty as you want. Take your time. Because I think America just needs five years to invent all the clean-power technologies you Chinese are going to need as you choke to death on pollution. Then we’re going to come over here and sell them all to you, and we are going to clean your clock — how do you say ‘clean your clock’ in Chinese? — in the next great global industry: clean power technologies. So if you all want to give us a five-year lead, that would be great. I’d prefer 10. So take your time. Grow as dirty as you want.”

Whenever you frame it that way, Chinese are quizzical at first, and then they totally get it: Wow, this energy thing isn’t just about global warming! In a world that is adding one billion people every 15 years or so — more and more of whom will be able to live high-energy-consuming lifestyles — the demands for energy and natural resources are going to go through the roof. Therefore, E.T. — energy technologies that produce clean power and energy efficiency — is going to be the next great global industry, and China needs to be on board.

Well, China has gotten on board — big-time. Now I am worried that China will, dare I say, “clean our clock” in E.T.

Yes, you might think that China is only interested in polluting its way to prosperity. That was once true, but it isn’t anymore. China is increasingly finding that it has to go green out of necessity because in too many places, its people can’t breathe, fish, swim, drive or even see because of pollution and climate change. Well, there is one thing we know about necessity: it is the mother of invention.

And that is what China is doing, innovating more and more energy efficiency and clean power systems. And when China starts to do that in a big way — when it starts to develop solar, wind, batteries, nuclear and energy efficiency technologies on its low-cost platform — watch out. You won’t just be buying your toys from China. You’ll be buying your energy future from China.

“China is moving,” says Hal Harvey, the chief executive of ClimateWorks, which shares clean energy ideas around the world. “They want to be leaders in green technology. China has already adopted the most aggressive energy efficiency program in the world. It is committed to reducing the energy intensity of its economy — energy used per dollar of goods produced — by 20 percent in five years. They are doing this by implementing fuel efficiency standards for cars that far exceed our own and by going after their top thousand industries with very aggressive efficiency targets. And they have the most aggressive renewable energy deployment in the world, for wind, solar and nuclear, and are already beating their targets.”

Here’s the key point on energy from the draft report of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board: “If the U.S. fails to adopt an economywide carbon abatement program, we will continue to cede leadership in new energy technology. The U.S. is now home to only two of the ten largest solar photovoltaic producers in the world, two of the top ten wind turbine producers and one of the top ten advanced battery manufacturers. That is, only one-sixth of the world’s top renewable energy manufacturers are based in the United States. … Sustainable technologies in solar, wind, electric vehicles, nuclear and other innovations will drive the future global economy. We can either invest in policies to build U.S. leadership in these new industries and jobs today, or we can continue with business as usual and buy windmills from Europe, batteries from Japan and solar panels from Asia.”

Indeed, if you look at those top 10 lists, compiled by Lazard, the investment bank, Japanese companies have the most, then Europe, then China — then us.

This is a major reason I favor the climate/energy bill passed by the House. If we do not impose on ourselves the necessity to drive innovation in clean-technology — by imposing the right prices on carbon emissions and the right regulations to promote energy efficiency — we will be laggards in the next great global industry.

And this is why I disagree with President Obama when he signals that he has to focus on extending health care and put the energy/climate bill — now in the Senate — on the backburner.

Health care and the energy/climate bill go together. We need both now. Imagine how poor we would be today if U.S. firms did not dominate the top 10 Internet companies. Well, if we don’t dominate the top 10 E.T. rankings, there is no way we are going to be able to afford decent health care for every American. No way.

Op-Ed Columnist – Chinese Fireworks Display – NYTimes.com.

July 3, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Chinese Fireworks Display

By DAVID BROOKS
On July Fourth, we think about our country and its future. But these days it’s impossible to think about America and its future role in the world without also thinking about China. This was the subject of a combative discussion this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

The agent provocateur was Niall Ferguson of Harvard. China and the U.S., he argued, used to have a symbiotic relationship and formed a tightly integrated unit that he calls Chimerica.

In this unit, China did the making, and the United States did the buying. China did the saving, while the U.S. did the spending. Between 1995 and 2005, the U.S. savings rate declined from about 5 percent to zero, while the Chinese savings rate rose from 30 percent to nearly 45 percent.

This savings diversion allowed the Chinese to plow huge amounts of capital into the U.S. and dollar-denominated assets. Cheap Chinese labor kept American inflation low. Chinese efforts to keep the renminbi from appreciating against the dollar kept our currency strong and allowed us to borrow at low interest rates.

During the first few years of the 21st century, Chimerica worked great. This unit accounted for about a quarter of the world’s G.D.P. and for about half of global growth. But a marriage in which one partner does all the saving and the other partner does all the spending is not going to last.

The frictions are building and will lead to divorce, conflict and potential catastrophe. China, Ferguson argued, is now decoupling from the United States. Chinese business leaders assume that American consumers will never again go on a spending binge. The Chinese are developing an economy that relies more on internal consumption.

Chinese officials are also aware that the U.S. will never get its fiscal house in order. There may be theoretical plans to reduce the federal deficit and the national debt, but there is no politically practical way to get there. Depreciation is inevitable and the Chinese are working to end the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.

Chinese nationalism is also on the rise. The Internet has made young Chinese more nationalistic. The Chinese are acquiring resources all around the world and with them, willy-nilly, an overseas empire that threatens U.S. interests. The Chinese are building their Navy, a historic precursor to expanded ambitions and global conflict.

Think of China, Ferguson concluded, as Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the years before World War I: a growing, aggressive, nationalistic power whose ambitions will tear through pre-existing commercial ties and historic friendships.

James Fallows of The Atlantic has lived in China for the past three years. He agreed with parts of Ferguson’s take on the economic fundamentals, but seemed to regard Ferguson’s analysis of the Chinese psychology as airy-fairy academic theorizing. At one point, while Fallows was defending Chinese intentions, Ferguson shot back: “You’ve been in China too long.” Fallows responded that there must be a happy medium between being in China too long and being in China too little.

Fallows pointed out that there is no one thing called “China” or “the Chinese,” and that many of the most anti-American statements from Chinese officials are made to blunt domestic anxiety and make further integration possible. That integration, Fallows continued, is deep and will get deeper. Many, many Chinese leaders were educated in the U.S. and admire or at least respect it. If you go to cities like Xian, you find American and European aviation firms fully integrated into the commercial fabric there.

Fallows’s main argument, though, was psychological. When he lived in Japan in the 1980s, he said, he sometimes felt that the Japanese had a chip-on-their-shoulder attitude in which their success was bound to U.S. decline. He says he rarely got that feeling in China. Instead, he has described officials who are thrilled to be integrated in the world. Their mothers had bound feet. They themselves plowed the fields in the Cultural Revolution. Now they get to join the world.

Some of the officials interviewed by Fallows believe the U.S. is following unsustainable fiscal policies that will lead to decline, but they view this with frustration, not joy. Fallows doesn’t know what the future will hold, but he believes that Chinese officials still see the dollar as their least risky investment. Domestically, China will not turn democratic, but individual liberties will expand. He agreed that China and the U.S. will dominate the 21st century, but he painted the picture of a more benign cooperation.

I came to the debate agreeing more with Fallows and left the same way, but I was impressed by how powerfully Ferguson made his case. And I was struck by their agreement about what to do. This conversation, like many conversations these days, gets back to America’s debt. Until the U.S. gets its fiscal house in order, relations with countries like China will be fundamentally insecure.

‘Obama Is Like a Chess Player’

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 86, discusses the painful lessons of the Treaty of Versailles, idealism in politics and Obama’s opportunity to forge a peaceful American foreign policy.

SPIEGEL: Dr. Kissinger, 90 years ago, at the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Is that an event of the past only of interest to historians or does it still shape contemporary politics?

Henry Kissinger: The treaty has a special meaning for today’s generation of politicians, because the map of Europe which emerged from the Treaty of Versailles is, more or less, the map of Europe that exists today. None of the drafters understood the implications of their actions, and that the world that emerged out of the Treaty of Versailles was substantially contrary to the intentions that produced it. Whoever wants to learn from past mistakes, needs to understand what happened in Versailles.

SPIEGEL: The Treaty of Versailles was meant to end all wars. That was the goal of President Woodrow Wilson when he came to Paris. As it turned out, only 20 years later Europe was plunged into an even more devastating world war. Why?

Kissinger: Any international system must have two key elements for it to work. One, it has to have a certain equilibrium of power that makes overthrowing the system difficult and costly. Secondly, it has to have a sense of legitimacy. That means that the majority of the states must believe that the settlement is essentially just. Versailles failed on both grounds. The Versailles meetings excluded the two largest continental powers: Germany and Russia. If one imagines that an international system had to be preserved against a disaffected defector, the possibility of achieving a balance of power within it was inherently weak. Therefore, it lacked both equilibrium and a sense of legitimacy.

SPIEGEL: In Paris we saw the clash of two foreign policy principles: the idealism embodied by Wilson who encountered a kind of realpolitik embodied by the Europeans which was above all based on the law of the strongest. Can you explain the failure of the American approach?

Kissinger: The American view was that peace is the normal condition among states. To ensure lasting peace, an international system must be organized on the basis of domestic institutions everywhere, which reflect the will of the people, and that will of the people is considered always to be against war. Unfortunately, there is no historic evidence that this is true.

SPIEGEL: So in your view, peace is not the normal condition among states?

Kissinger: The preconditions for a lasting peace are much more complex than most people are aware of. It was not an historic truth but an assertion of the view of a country composed of immigrants that had turned their backs on a continent and had absorbed itself for 200 years in its domestic politics.

SPIEGEL: Would you say that America inadvertently caused a war while trying to create peace?

Kissinger: The basic cause of the war was Hitler. But insofar as the Versailles system played a role, it is undeniable that American idealism at the Versailles negotiations contributed to World War II. Wilson’s call for the self-determination of states had the practical effect of breaking up some of the larger states of Europe, and that produced a dual difficulty. One, it turned out to be technically difficult to separate these nationalities that had been mixed together for centuries into national entities by the Wilsonian definition, and secondly, it had the practical consequence of leaving Germany strategically stronger than it was before the war.

SPIEGEL: Why? Germany was militarily disarmed and geographically decimated.

Kissinger: Territorial expansion and power are relative. Germany was smaller, but more powerful. Before World War I, Germany faced three major countries on its borders: Russia, France, and Britain. After Versailles, Germany faced a collection of smaller states on its eastern borders, against each of which it had a huge grievance but none of which was capable of resisting Germany alone, and none of it probably was capable of resisting Germany even if assisted by France.

So that from a geostrategic point of view, the Treaty of Versailles met neither the aspirations of the major players nor the strategic possibility of defending what had been created, unless Germany was kept permanently disarmed. It would have been correct to include Germany in the international system but that precisely what the victorious powers omitted to do by demilitarizing and humiliating the country.

SPIEGEL: Despite the failure of Versailles, this Wilsonian idea is remarkably prevalent. Is our affinity to the ideals of democracy perhaps naïve?

Kissinger: The belief in democracy as a universal remedy regularly reappears in American foreign policy. Its most recent appearance came with the so-called neocons in the Bush administration. Actually, Obama is much closer to a realistic policy on this issue than Bush was.

SPIEGEL: You see Obama as realpolitician?

Kissinger: Let me say a word about realpolitik, just for clarification. I regularly get accused of conducting realpolitik. I don’t think I have ever used that term. It is a way by which critics want to label me and say, “Watch him. He’s a German really. He doesn’t have the American view of things.”

SPIEGEL: Then it’s a way to cast you as a cynic, isn’t it?

Kissinger: Cynics treat values as equivalent and instrumental. Statesmen base practical decisions on moral convictions. It is always easy to divide the world into idealists and power-oriented people. The idealists are presumed to be the noble people, and the power-oriented people are the ones that cause all the world’s trouble. But I believe more suffering has been caused by prophets than by statesmen. For me, a sensible definition of realpolitik is to say there are objective circumstances without which foreign policy cannot be conducted. To try to deal with the fate of nations without looking at the circumstances with which they have to deal is escapism. The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.

SPIEGEL: What if values cannot be taken into consideration because they are inhuman or too expansive?

Kissinger: In that case, resistance is needed. In Iran, for example, you need to ask the question of whether you have to have a regime change before you can conceive a set of circumstances where each side maintaining its values comes to some understanding.

SPIEGEL: And your answer?

Kissinger: It is too early to say. Right now I have more questions than answers. Will the Iranian people accept the verdict of the religious leaders? Will the religious leaders be united? I don’t know the answers, nor does anyone else.

SPIEGEL: You sound very skeptical.

Kissinger: I see two possibilities. We will either come to an understanding with Iran, or we will clash. As a democratic society we cannot justify the clash to our own people unless we can show that we have made a serious effort to avoid it. By that, I don’t mean that we have to make every concession they demand, but we are obligated to put forward ideas the American people can support.The upheaval in Teheran must run its course before these possibilities can be explored.

SPIEGEL: So you are calling for a kind of realistic idealism?

Kissinger: Exactly. There is no realism without an element of idealism. The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.

SPIEGEL: Do you think it was helpful for Obama to deliver a speech to the Islamic world in Cairo? Or has he created a lot of illusions about what politics can deliver?

Kissinger: Obama is like a chess player who is playing simultaneous chess and has opened his game with an unusual opening. Now he’s got to play his hand as he plays his various counterparts. We haven’t gotten beyond the opening game move yet. I have no quarrel with the opening move.

SPIEGEL: But is what we have seen so far from him truly realpolitik?

Kissinger: It is also too early to say that. If what he wants to do is convey to the Islamic world that America has an open attitude to dialogue and is not determined on physical confrontation as its only strategy, then it can play a very useful role. If it were to be continued on the belief that every crisis can be managed by a philosophical speech, then he will run into Wilsonian problems.

SPIEGEL: Obama did not only hold a speech. At the same time, he placed pressure on Israel to stop building settlements in the West Bank and to recognize an independent Palestinian state.

Kissinger: The outcome can only be a two-state solution, and there seems to be substantial agreement on the borders of such a state. Now, how you bring that about and what phases of negotiation, what issue you start with, that you cannot deduce from one speech.

SPIEGEL: Do concepts like “good” and “evil” make sense in the context of foreign policy?

Kissinger: Yes, but generally in gradations. Rarely in absolutes. I think there are kinds of evil that need to be condemned and destroyed, and one should not apologize for that. But one should not use the existence of evil as an excuse for those who think that they represent good to insist on an unlimited right to impose their definition of their values.

SPIEGEL: What does the word “victory” mean to you? After World War I, there was a victor and a victim, the Germans; and the Versailles Treaty was an effort to contain the power that had lost. Do you think it’s a smart idea to claim victory over another country?

Kissinger: The important thing after military victory is to deal with the defeated nation in a generous way.

SPIEGEL: And with this you mean not to subdue the defeated nation?

Kissinger: You can either weaken a defeated nation to a point where its convictions no longer matter and you can impose anything you wish on it, or you have to bring it back into the international system. From the point of view from Versailles, the treaty was too lenient with respect to holding Germany down, and it was too tough to bring Germany into the new system. So it failed on both grounds.

SPIEGEL: What would a wise winner do?

Kissinger: A wise victor will attempt to bring the defeated nation into the international system. A wise negotiator will try to find a basis on which the agreement will want to be maintained. When one reaches a point where neither of these possibilities exist, then one has to go either to increase pressure or to isolation of the adversary or maybe do both.

SPIEGEL: Were the Western countries wise in respect to their dealings with the former Soviet Union after their implosion?

Kissinger: There was too much triumphalism on the western side. There was too much description of the Soviets as defeated in a Cold War and maybe a certain amount of arrogance.

SPIEGEL: Not only towards Russia?

Kissinger: In other situations as well.

SPIEGEL: What’s the difference between the conflicts in Europe in the early 20th century and the conflicts we are facing in today’s world?

Kissinger: In previous periods, the victor could promise itself some benefit. Under the current circumstances,that no longer applies. A clash between China and the United States,for example, would undermine both countries.

SPIEGEL: Would you go so far as to say what we are seeing is end of major wars?

Kissinger: I believe that Obama has a unique chance to conduct a peaceful American foreign policy. I do not see any conflicts between suchmajor countries, China, Russia, India, and the U.S., which will justify a military solution. Therefore, there is an opportunity for a diplomatic effort. Moreover, the economic crisis does not permit countries to devote a historic percentage of their resources to military conflict. I am structurally more optimistic than a couple of years ago.

SPIEGEL: The situation in Iran doesn’t make you fearful?

Kissinger: Fear is not a good motivation for statesmanship. It could be that some kind of at least local conflict will happen, but it does not have to happen. Iran is a relatively weak and small country that has inherent limits to its capabilities. The relationship of China with the rest of the world is a lot more important in historic terms than the Iranian issues by themselves.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Kissinger, we thank you for this interview.

Interview conducted by Jan Fleischhauer and Gabor Steingart.

Carré-d’Etoiles Mini-Prefabs For Green Vacations : TreeHugger.

They call it “a new idea in “get away from it all” tourism. Carré d’Etoiles is a tiny vacation prefab that can be dropped anywhere, is designed to “protect the environment” with “designer bio-ethanol heating, recyclable wood, etc.”

And every unit comes with a telescope and a star chart.

‘Terribly Wrong’ Handling of Vietnam Overshadowed Record of Achievement
By Thomas W. Lippman
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Robert S. McNamara, 93, the former secretary of defense whose record as a leading executive of industry and chieftain of foreign financial aid was all but erased from public memory by his reputation as the primary architect of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, died yesterday at his home in Washington. The family said he suffered a fall three years ago but did not provide a specific cause of death.

McNamara was secretary of defense during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. In that capacity, he directed a U.S. military buildup in Southeast Asia during the critical early years of a Vietnamese conflict that escalated into one of the most divisive and bitter wars in U.S. history. When the war was over, 58,000 Americans were dead and the national social fabric had been torn asunder.

Before taking office as secretary of defense in 1961, McNamara was president of Ford Motor Co. For 13 years after he left the Pentagon in 1968, he was president of the World Bank. He was a brilliant student, a compulsive worker and a skillful planner and organizer whose manifest talents carried him from modest circumstances in California to the highest levels of the Washington power structure. He was said to have built a record of achievement and dedication in business, government and public service that few of his generation could match.

After his retirement from the bank in 1981, he maintained an exhausting schedule as director or consultant to scores of public and private organizations and was a virtual one-man think tank on nuclear arms issues.

More than 40 years after the fact, he was remembered almost exclusively for his orchestration of U.S. prosecution of the war in Vietnam, a failed effort by the world’s greatest superpower to prevent a communist takeover of a weak and corrupt ally. For his role in the war, McNamara was vilified by harsh and unforgiving critics, and his entire record was unalterably clouded.

In his 1995 memoir of the war, “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,” McNamara said he and his senior colleagues were “wrong, terribly wrong” to pursue the war as they did. He acknowledged that he failed to force the military to produce a rigorous justification for its strategy and tactics, misunderstood Asia in general and Vietnam in particular, and kept the war going long after he realized it was futile because he lacked the courage or the ability to turn Johnson around.

He elaborated on Vietnam and the other events that shaped his life in Errol Morris’s Academy Award-winning documentary “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara” (2003). He described how as a young man he had analyzed bombing operations under the command of Gen. Curtis LeMay during World War II and in that job played a role in making the firebombing of dozens of Japanese cities “more efficient.”

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” he told Morris. “LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost,” he added. “But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

* * *

From the day in 1961 when he burst upon the Washington scene as a political unknown selected by Kennedy to be secretary of defense, McNamara’s trim figure, slicked-back hair and rimless glasses made him instantly recognizable, a Washington monument whose interests covered everything from nuclear war to the fiscal health of local governments.

At the Pentagon, he reorganized the military bureaucracy, built up the country’s nuclear arsenal and instigated a massive campaign to end racial discrimination in off-base housing.

At the World Bank, he was often described as “the conscience of the West” for his relentless efforts to persuade the industrialized world to commit more capital to improving life in have-not nations. In retirement, he avoided celebrity-for-hire appearances on the lecture circuit and TV talk shows, devoting his time to improvement of education, government and health in the United States and abroad.

As secretary of defense, he was a key figure in such major crises as the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile confrontation with the Soviet Union. He changed the balance of nuclear forces in the world with the development of the multiple-warhead missile.

His reputation foundered in Vietnam. Many Americans held him largely responsible for the futile and humiliating military adventure there, a responsibility he accepted in a 1995 memoir of the war.

It was “McNamara’s war,” matching his technology, statistics, weaponry and organization charts against a peasant army from a small, impoverished country. The peasants won. In retrospect, it could be seen that McNamara’s can-do, technological approach to military issues might have been perfectly suited to a conflict against the Soviet Union in Europe, but it led him into disastrous miscalculations in the jungles and paddies of Vietnam.

On his first visit to South Vietnam in 1962, before most Americans had heard of the place and before the involvement of American combat forces, McNamara said that “every quantitative measurement we have shows we’re winning this war.”

It was a statement often quoted by his critics in later years, because it seemed to encapsulate the fallacy of his approach. American troops did prevail in many of the big battles, and the United States did win the war by every statistical measurement on the Pentagon charts that McNamara so admired. But the numbers — even the few that were accurate — had little to do with the political reality on the ground.

* * *

Despite his addiction to charts, statistics and briefings in which the United States and its ally in Saigon were always winning, McNamara privately had a broader appreciation of what was happening in Vietnam. As early as 1964, after Buddhist uprisings that shook Saigon’s political structure, he observed that the Viet Cong had “large indigenous support” and were held together by “bonds of loyalty.” In 1966, even as the buildup of U.S. forces continued and Cold War tensions gripped Europe, he said it was “a gross oversimplification to regard Communism as the central factor in every conflict throughout the underdeveloped word. . . . The United States has no mandate from on high to police the world and no inclination to do so.”

McNamara acknowledged late in his Pentagon tenure that the bombing of North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh trail supply line could not cripple the Viet Cong because the Viet Cong hardly needed any supplies other than ammunition. But as critics pointed out and as he admitted many years later, he was unable or unwilling to translate these assessments into policy reversals that would extricate Johnson’s administration from the Asian morass.

The harshest critic of all, journalist and author David Halberstam, describing McNamara’s trips to Saigon in “The Best and the Brightest,” wrote that McNamara, the ultimate technocrat, was “a prisoner of his own background . . . unable, as indeed was the country which sponsored him, to adapt his values and his terms to Vietnamese realities. Since any real indices and truly factual estimates of the war would immediately have shown its bankruptcy, the McNamara trips became part of a vast unwitting and elaborate charade, the institutionalizing and legitimizing of a hopeless lie.”

In Halberstam’s judgment, McNamara “did not serve himself or his country well. He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool.”

Chester L. Cooper, a senior official at the State Department when McNamara was at Defense, wrote in “The Lost Crusade” that McNamara’s brilliant staff and his “unique ability to grasp and synthesize a vast mass and variety of information made him the best informed official in Washington.” But McNamara’s insistence on dealing with Vietnam in the same way he dealt with other issues led him into miscalculations, Cooper said. Cooper summarized McNamara’s approach in a memorable portrait:

“His typical trip involved leaving Washington in the evening and, after a 24-hour journey and a 13-hour time change, arriving at Saigon at eight in the morning. The Secretary would emerge from the plane and suggest graciously that his fellow-travelers take a half-hour or so to wash up and then join him at a 9 o’clock briefing at MACV [Military Assistance Command Vietnam] headquarters. There, for the next three hours, they were expected not merely to add up figures but to absorb a rapid-fire series of complicated military briefings. . . . . While we less adaptable beings desperately attempted to make sense out of the mass of information, McNamara queried every apparent inconsistency and was usually well ahead of the briefers.”

The problem was that as the war escalated, the briefings grew increasingly irrelevant to what was really happening. McNamara tolerated, even encouraged, a system in which optimistic Washington analysis dictated the content of the briefings, rather than the other way around.

For all his participation in the great events of his time, it was the Vietnam war that shaped the nation’s perception of McNamara and his performance and eventually eroded his credibility. When he said, in 1966, that manpower requirements and draft calls would be reduced the next year, hardly anyone seemed to believe him. When he told Congress that the purpose of bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail was to reduce North Vietnamese troop infiltration into the South, newspaper analysts pointed out that the Pentagon’s own charts showed infiltration was increasing.

An incident that reflected the temper of those tense, bitter years occurred in November 1966, when McNamara traveled to Harvard for an informal discussion with undergraduates. He was mobbed by about 800 jeering students, who blocked his car and cried “Murderer!”

The secretary, never apologetic, climbed atop his car, in shirt sleeves despite the New England chill, and told the crowd: “I spent four of the happiest years of my life on the Berkeley campus, doing some of the things you do today. But I was tougher than you, and I’m tougher than you are now. I was more courteous then, and I hope I’m more courteous today.”

* * *

It is inaccurate to portray McNamara as an unreconstructed hawk to the bitter end; his early doubts became known after the war. But he failed to persuade the president and such hard-line White House insiders as national security specialist Walt W. Rostow to moderate their views. McNamara succeeded only in hastening his own ouster from the Cabinet, and because he waited 20 years after the fall of Saigon in 1975 to go public with his confession of error about the war, he retained his reputation as a technocrat committed to firepower above all else.

McNamara later dismissed as “absurd” and “baloney” suggestions that he devoted himself to helping Third World countries through the World Bank to atone for his record in Vietnam. But he never attempted to defend himself against critics of his role in Vietnam or to justify the escalation there. For more than two decades after leaving the Pentagon, he avoided the topic of Vietnam in his public statements.

Publication of his 1995 memoir opened some kind of intellectual floodgate for McNamara. He developed a virtual fourth career of organizing and participating in seminars about the war — about who did what and why, and about how doing something else might have meant, if not a different outcome, at least less death. In 1999, he published a book about this quest for the truth about the war, with a title signaling that he did not find it: “Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy.”

Thus in the final years of his life, the war again took over the reputation of a man whose life in many ways had embodied the American dream.

* * *

Robert Strange McNamara was born June 9, 1916, in San Francisco, where his father was sales manager for a wholesale shoe company. He demonstrated academic brilliance from the time he was in elementary school and achieved straight A’s in high school. At the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied economics and philosophy, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa after his sophomore year.

After graduation in 1937, he went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, where he received his MBA in 1939. He went back to the West Coast for a year to work for the accounting firm of Price, Waterhouse and Co., and during that time he married a former classmate, Margaret Craig. She died in 1981.

In 2004, he married Diana Masieri Byfield, whom he met through mutual friends. Besides his wife, survivors include three children from his first marriage, Craig McNamara of Winters, Calif., and Kathleen McNamara and Margaret Pastor, both of Washington.

In 1940, McNamara returned to Harvard as an assistant professor. When the United States entered World War II, McNamara volunteered for military service but was initially rejected because of weak eyesight. He worked closely with the military, teaching courses for officers and serving as a consultant to the Army Air Forces on the establishment of a statistical system for the control of logistical operations.

He took a leave from Harvard to go to England on a military mission in 1943, and there he was finally granted a commission and accepted into the service as a captain.

In three years of active duty, he traveled in several Asian countries. He later said that it was the experience of visiting Calcutta during a famine, when there were as many dead people in the streets as live ones, that first stirred his interest in trying to improve conditions in the poorest nations.

McNamara left the service in 1946 at the rank of lieutenant colonel. Instead of returning to Harvard, he joined with nine other statistical control experts who offered their services as a group to various corporations. This extraordinary ploy resulted in all 10 being hired as a team by Ford Motor Co.

Ford was plagued by deficient management at the time, and Henry Ford II, chairman of the board, sent the 10 into every department to study operations and make recommendations. Their unending questions at first earned them the snide appellation “Quiz Kids,” after a radio program of the period that featured bright youngsters, but their performance soon changed the title to “Whiz Kids.”

Several of the “whiz kids” made careers at Ford; McNamara rose fastest and highest. Although his specialty was the application of statistics to management, he was also credited with a sense of public taste that led him to bring out new models that scored great success in the market. He started as manager of Ford’s office of planning and financial analysis and by 1957 had become a director of the corporation. In 1960, he succeeded Henry Ford II as president — the first president who was not a member of the Ford family.

He had been president of Ford only a month when Kennedy offered him the Defense post. When he left to join the New Frontier Cabinet, he said he was relinquishing $3 million in personal profits he would have realized from his stock options had he remained with Ford.

While he was at Ford, the McNamaras stayed out of the Grosse Pointe, Mich., social orbit dominated by the auto industry. They lived in Ann Arbor, where they cherished the academic atmosphere around the University of Michigan. Once they got to Washington, it became more difficult for McNamara to insulate his family from the demands of his job, and except for skiing vacations in Colorado it often seemed that he was on duty all the time.

“Bob lives an ‘on-call’ kind of life,” his wife Margaret once said. When he had time to himself, McNamara tended to spend evenings with his wife and a few close friends, not on Washington’s party circuit. The McNamaras kept their three children out of the news.

According to his widow, McNamara left written instructions that no funeral or memorial service be held, not even among his children. She said his decision was not because of his legacy as secretary of defense. “The reality is that he’s been a very private person all his life and tried to avoid limelight and publicity,” she said. “Of course he couldn’t, because of the position he was in. And so he wanted to fade away quietly. His children maybe would have liked to, but he was against it.”

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At the Pentagon, McNamara quickly put his stamp on the sprawling military bureaucracy in what amounted to a management revolution. He centralized control, broke down the traditional fiefdoms of the individual services, and imposed multipurpose, multi-service weapons on the brass.

According to an account published in The Washington Post at the time, “he shook all five floors of the Pentagon in his search for the tools he needed to get a firm grip on the biggest military establishment in the world. . . . McNamara brought in computers to help with the spade work, hired systems analysts to comb through the technical points and then list the pros and cons for the generalists, reassessed the war plans, regrouped weapons into programs.”

The Kennedy administration came into office vowing to close the “missile gap,” the apparent Soviet lead in strategic nuclear weapons. McNamara later acknowledged that there was no “missile gap” — he said it was based on “a total misreading of the information” — but by that time the United States had greatly expanded its nuclear arsenal and the Soviets had responded in kind.

According to critics such as John Edwards, in his 1982 book “Superweapon,” the United States actually had nuclear superiority over the Soviets in 1960, and the U.S. buildup only convinced Moscow that the United States was seeking the ability to attack the Soviet Union with impunity.

The U.S. nuclear buildup, Edwards said, “far exceeded the forces developed by the Soviet Union in the first half of the 1960s. The secretary himself later judged that the American buildup contributed to the dramatic expansion of Soviet forces.”

McNamara sponsored development of missiles that could carry up to 14 nuclear warheads each, giving the United States the ability to strike more Soviet targets without adding missiles and the capability of launching more warheads than the Soviets could fend off. This, McNamara later acknowledged, was substantially responsible for the nuclear arms race.

“I have no question,” he said in a 1982 interview, “but that the Soviets thought we were trying to achieve a first-strike capability. We were not. We did not have it. We could not attain it. We didn’t have any thought of attaining it. But they probably thought we did.” Their response, he said, provoked a counter-response by the United States, and the cycle became self-perpetuating.

He was at the center of Washington decision-making during the 1962 confrontation with Moscow over the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. After a retrospective discussion of those dramatic days with his Soviet counterparts in 1989, McNamara wrote in a Newsweek essay about the crisis that “as I left President Kennedy’s office to return to the Pentagon, I thought I might never live to see another Saturday night” — so great was the threat of nuclear war.

All parties to the confrontation in Cuba, McNamara wrote, were guilty of gross miscalculations and errors that nearly resulted in a catastrophe. A quarter-century later, he wrote, “It is inconceivable to me that we should be content to continue on the present path of East-West confrontation for another 40 years. The risks of disastrous military conflict, so dramatically demonstrated by our re-examination of the Cuban missile crisis, are totally unacceptable.” The hardware-loving strategist of the Cold War had come full circle.

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McNamara never publicly broke with Johnson over the war in Vietnam, but a gradual process of disillusionment seemed to set in as he lost control of tactics to the generals. In one well-publicized incident, he rejected a list of bombing targets that the military officers wanted to hit, including targets near Hanoi and other civilian population centers. The joint chiefs of staff went over his head to Johnson, and the president authorized the strikes.

Even when he resigned to move to the World Bank, McNamara remained publicly loyal, staying on as secretary for a transition period of several months until his successor, Clark Clifford, took over in early 1968. During that interval, the Viet Cong staged the Tet Offensive, the nationwide uprising in South Vietnam’s cities that shocked American public opinion by demonstrating the hollowness of all the Pentagon’s claims of military success.

Unlike other high government officials who seemed to spend their years out of power waiting around Washington for a chance to get back in, once he moved from the Pentagon to the World Bank, McNamara threw himself into his new assignment with zest and concentrated on using the bank’s resources to help alleviate the poverty of the most underdeveloped nations.

The year before he took over the bank, it had a staff of 767 and made 60 loans totaling about $954 million. In the last fiscal year of his tenure, a staff of 2,400 made about 250 loans, totaling $11.7 billion. And yet he wanted more, and he importuned the industrialized nations to expand their commitments.

As president of the bank, he could have given a speech a day if he wanted, but he chose a low profile and private persuasion. “I just don’t give a damn whether I’m on TV or not,” he said. “I just am uninterested in personal publicity. I’ve had all I need. Other people in town have different objectives.”

He limited his public appearances to one or two a year because, he said, he wanted to speak out only when he had “new ideas” to offer, and “I don’t get those ideas so frequently as to require me to speak out on them.” His technique was to choose his spots, decide what message could best advance the objectives he was pursuing at the bank and take his time deciding what to say.

He spent a year, for example, thinking about what to say in a 1982 speech at the University of the Witwatersrand, in apartheid South Africa. Then he told his audience that America’s “century of delay in moving to end our shameful discrimination toward black Americans . . . was without question the most serious mistake in our entire history, and the hard truth is that all Americans will continue to [pay] a heavy price for it for decades to come.” He urged South Africa not to make the same mistake.

In retirement, McNamara maintained an office on K Street and worked, by his own count, with 55 corporations, universities, foundations and other groups in which he was interested. He was a director of The Washington Post Co., Royal Dutch Shell and several other companies, and he chaired the Overseas Development Council, a nonprofit organization that sought increased American understanding of economic and social problems in developing countries.

“I’m not wealthy, but I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do,” he said, “and I decided not to do anything that doesn’t meet two criteria: expand my understanding of the world and allow me to apply whatever understanding I have in some productive way.”