Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara ran Ford Motor Company before becoming Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, where he became a central architect of the American escalation in Vietnam, a role he later publicly called a mistake. From 1968 to 1981 he served as president of the World Bank, where he sharply increased the volume of lending and shifted its stated mission toward reducing poverty in the developing world. Critics argue that the rapid growth of loans under his leadership helped build the debt burdens that strained many poor countries in the 1980s, and that large projects sometimes did more harm than good. His career left him a deeply contested figure in both war and development.