- Robert McNamara is remembered both as a vilified US Secretary of Defense who escalated the Vietnam War and as a World Bank president who fought global poverty.
- His approach, rooted in midcentury technocracy, emphasized quantification, scaling, and rationalizing systems, which led to early successes but also to failure in Vietnam and mixed outcomes at the World Bank.
- During Vietnam, McNamara relied on statistical tools like the Hamlet Evaluation System but ignored strategic realities, leading to massive loss of life and his eventual disillusionment.
- At the World Bank, McNamara scaled lending, centralized operations, and shifted focus to absolute poverty, but faced criticism for an 'approval culture' and later structural adjustment programs that harmed poor countries.
- Despite his efforts, McNamara's legacy is overshadowed by his silence on Vietnam's failures and his inability to reconcile rationality with ethical judgment.