The Cal 100: No. 88 -- Robert McNamara
We count down the top 100 individuals associated with Cal athletics, based on their impact in sports or in the world at large – a wide-open category. See if you agree.
No. 88: Robert McNamara
Cal Sports Connection: He was a 1937 Cal graduate who was a member of the Bears rowing team for one year and a crew team manager the following year.
Claim to Fame: He was the United State Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1967 whose actions involving the Vietnam War, as exposed by the Pentagon Papers, led to public outrage directed at McNamara
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Robert McNamara’s association with Cal sports is simple: He was a member of the Bears rowing team for one year in the mid-1930s and was a crew team manager for an additional year.
McNamara’s claim to fame (or infamy) is complicated:
He was the president of the Ford Motor Company, earning more than $400,000 a year, when he accepted the job of United State Secretary of Defense under President Kennedy in 1961, earning $25,000 annually. He served in that capacity under Kennedy and President Johnson until 1967, when America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam was escalating, with McNamara being the chief architect of that involvement.
It wasn’t until four years after his departure that he came under intense criticism for those actions. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the so-called Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which concluded that this historical record of the Vietnam War, commissioned by McNamara, indicated that the administration had lied to the public and to Congress about the progress being made in Vietnam. In essence McNamara had known for years the war could not be won, yet he publicly defended the U.S. involvement in Vietnam while continuing to send troops to Southeast Asia.
The revelation resulted in public outrage directed at McNamara. That outcry was driven home again in the 2017 movie “The Post” when Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (played by Meryl Streep) chastised McNamara, a long-time friend, for putting American lives in danger for a lost cause. (Adding to the complexity of McNamara’s legacy is that, 10 years later, he dated Graham briefly after his wife died in 1981.)
McNamara is remembered for his distasteful actions regarding the Vietnam War, even though he spent much of the rest of his life admitting the mistake and trying to atone for it.
In 1995, as shown in the video below, McNamara noted his course of action. “We were wrong. We were terribly wrong,” although that admission did not satisfy many parents of soldiers killed in Vietnam.
Eight years later, he was the focal point of the 2003 documentary film “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,” which won the 2004 Academy Award for best documentary feature.
When McNamara died in 2009, the headline on his New York Times obituary read: “Robert S. McNamara, Architect of a Futile War, Dies at 93.”
The Cal 100: No. 89 -- Andrew Vaughn
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