Robert McNamara Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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At Ford, you went into which division?
Ten of us, imagine this, went there as personal assistants to young Henry Ford [II], who had been released from the navy upon the death of his father shortly before. I think Ford was released from the navy in the end of 1943, or something like that. We were hired by him in November, 1945, and went to work in January of '46. And he wanted some individuals who he could feel were his men, if you will, because the company was staffed with old-line executives who had been associated with his father and grandfather. And this may be a slight exaggeration but not much: at that time, out of the top 1,000 executives at Ford Motor Company, there were very, very few college graduates -- let's say on the order of, literally, a handful. Literally a handful. And Henry Ford II wanted some individuals, the ten of us, who were young, presumably well educated, and whom he could depend upon to take a fresh look at the company and advise him accordingly. That's what we were hired for. All ten of us reported directly to him.
And were you all from Harvard?
No, no. We were all from a particular part of the U.S. Army Air Corps - Statistical Control. The group was headed by Tex Thornton, who, by the way, was fired from Ford Motor Company a year or so later, but he subsequently went on to a remarkable career, starting Litton Industries and building it up. He became one of the leading industrialists in the country. And I was the assistant director. The others were all well educated, Princeton, Harvard, University of California. We had a very, very distinguished University of California, UCLA undergraduate and Berkeley graduate student named R.J. Miller, who also, subsequently, was fired after he had succeeded me as president. He earned his tenure and was fired very precipitously by Henry Ford II. He later went on to become the famous dean at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford. But it was truly a remarkable group of young men.
And was Henry Ford II really a visionary?
I think he was visionary in this sense: he realized that he was going into an old line company that was in the deepest of trouble. It's hard for you to believe this, but this company, which had been the premier auto company in the world for decades, in the previous 20 years to the time we went there (say from 1926 to 1946), they barely broke even. When we were there, in the first eight months at the time I was there, it lost $85 million, which was a tremendous sum at the time. It never had a certified public statement. They tried to audit the company for the first time in 1945. They hired Lybrand, Ross Brothers, and Montgomery to prepare certified statements as of December 31, 1945. Lybrand worked for a year and gave up. It was impossible. Things were in such a confused state, I'm speaking now financially and accounting-wise, but the same think could be said of their product line. Henry Ford had a rather instinctive understanding of this, that they were in the deepest of trouble. He thought that he needed outsiders to help him turn the company around. He brought in this group of ten young men; obviously, at the ages of 26 and 27, we were not qualified to do that. I think we, perhaps, performed ably, contributed importantly to some of his ideas. But he needed more experienced people. He realized that a few months later and he hired Ernest Breach, the executive vice president of General Motors, to come in and bring in several senior associates with him.
When one looks at your career, one finds many Robert McNamaras at any one time: a visionary on the one hand and on the other hand an organization man, a manager of large organizations. When I say a visionary, I'm thinking here of the speeches that you gave at Ford before you left, calling for small cars, safe cars and...
I did push for small cars, I did push for safety, and I did push for environmentalism and functionalism. By the way, while I was at Ford, my wife Margaret and I didn't live in the suburbs that were popular.
You lived in Ann Arbor.
We lived in Ann Arbor, a university community. We didn't live in Grossepoint or Bloomfield Hills, where the majority of executives lived; sort of the Greenwich of Detroit, or maybe you'd call it the Piedmont of Detroit. We didn't live there because we wanted our children to be brought up in an academic atmosphere. People have often said to me, "Well, you sound like a wild hare. How is it that you were able to survive?"
Did you say it was because you went to Berkeley?
Well, I was about to give another illustration of this lack of adherence
to normal standards. An executive in the company solicited all the other
executives for contributions to the Republican Party, with the basic argument
that one's bonus is dependent on a Republican administration. The economy
is good and the company makes money and you get a bonus because of a Republican
president, and therefore you should contribute to the Republican Party.
Now without arguing the merits of the Republicans and Democrats, I will
simply say that that I didn't contribute. 
People
have said to me,
"My God, how is it that you were able to stay there? You lived in Ann
Arbor, a university community; you pushed safety; and you didn't contribute
to the Republicans; how did you handle it?"
Well in a sense, Henry Ford II (who was the Chief Executive Officer and one of the major owners), the Board, the owners, and I had a deal. I could make profits for them, and as long as I could benefit the company, they would allow me to pursue some of these idiosyncrasies.
Educated at Berkeley, a visionary at Ford, and some would even say later, because after all, it was you who commissioned the Pentagon Papers...
And who initiated the poverty focus program in the World Bank, to eliminate absolute poverty in the world.
So may I ask why you didn't become an academic?
I guess I never really felt qualified. Certainly I wasn't qualified educationally. I had intended to become an academic, as a matter of fact. At one time, I think I was the youngest assistant professor at Harvard; I was an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Business. There are those in the college who would not consider that an academic. But, in any event, I was in the Graduate School of Business Administration, and at the beginning of the war I was on that faculty. I began as a young instructor in August of 1940, was there when the war started, and I was working on a Ph.D. at the time. Although I was an assistant professor, I was working on a Ph.D. and I had every intention of pursuing that. I left the faculty to enter the army and had every intention of coming back. But because my wife and I both had infantile paralysis at the time of VJ Day -- her case was very serious -- I couldn't pursue that.
You actually needed the money.
I needed the money, that's right. I finally concluded, much to my regret, that I couldn't go back. Had it not been for that I would have been at least formally an academic. I say formally because certainly later in life my intellectual interests have ranged far beyond business administration. I'm not sure I would have been qualified to have been a scholar in a discipline other than business administration, although I think looking back on my life I would have liked to have been.
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