Patrick Allan Sharma,Robert McNamara’s Other War: The World Bank and International Development

Reviewed by: Leo McCann, University of York, UK

Robert S. McNamara was one of the 20th-century’s most influential corporate managers and public administrators. He was a major figure at Harvard Business School, the Ford Motor Company, the U.S. Department of Defense and the World Bank. His public persona and operating style embodied those of the 1960s ‘Organization Man’ (Whyte, 1956), with his penchant for ‘systems analysis’ or quantitate measurement. Much has been written about McNamara in the fields of politics, history, security studies and current affairs. But his career, policies and impact have received fairly limited coverage by academics in business and management, public administration and even development economics, partly because of the huge shadow cast over his legacy by his prominent role in American’s disastrous war in Vietnam (McCann, 2015).

This book is an important discussion of a neglected part of his career, his 13 years as the President of the World Bank (1968–1981). Through detailed discussion of a wide range of archival sources, Patrick Sharma describes and evaluates McNamara’s Presidency and critically explores McNamara’s transformation of the Bank’s structure, behaviour and mission. Sharma insightfully demonstrates how this period of time was a difficult one for the World Bank, in which its policy measures started to shift away from their technocratic, activist traditions and towards neoliberal forms of governance. As such, McNamara and the Bank increasingly emerge as conduits for the Washington Consensus, ‘structural adjustment’ and loan conditionality.

Chapter one provides an overview of McNamara’s career before his appointment to the World Bank Presidency. McNamara was a prominent member of the group of so-called ‘Whiz Kids’ – highly cerebral advisors and analysts who installed new management concepts such as systems analysis and operations research in the U.S. Army Air Forces during the Second World War. Quantitative data analysis was central to every target they set, every decision they made, and every outcome they evaluated. These approaches were used with some success by McNamara in the post-war corporate world as he climbed the ranks of the Ford Motor Company. At one point, he was arguably the most well-known and in-demand executive in the United States, culminating in John F. Kennedy appointing him as Defense Secretary in 1960 aged just 44. It was at the Pentagon where the limitations of his data-driven managerialism were most powerfully exposed. ‘Systems’ designed for a ‘total war’ in which Japanese cities would be annihilated from the air were counter-productive in a ‘limited war’ of searching out and destroying North Vietnamese regulars or Viet Cong insurgents.

Lyndon Johnson removed McNamara from the government in 1968 amid the ruins of the Tet Offensive and rebellion in the universities. The World Bank Presidency was a suitably grand project for McNamara to try to resurrect his career. Sharma describes in chapter two the surprise and concern among many World Bank insiders upon hearing the news of the appointment of such a divisive figure to the top job. Systems analysis, target-setting and policy evaluation were forcibly introduced by McNamara onto a reluctant, resistant organization. McNamara drove to expand the Bank’s range and depth of activity and make organizational changes to boost ‘efficiency’. Workloads went up. Morale went down. Debates broke out around the extent to which senior management really understood the nature of front-line work, or whether management’s precious metrics were more important. Sharma suggests there is no evidence that McNamara learnt a great deal from his Pentagon nightmare. He continued to press ahead with his generalist, management-by-objectives, professional MBA style approach to governing the Bank, as if it were the same as any other large organization.

Chapter three explores some of the policy changes under McNamara, especially the rhetorical and practical switch from promoting economic growth to ‘poverty reduction’. To some extent, he was a pioneer in this regard, broadening the Bank’s focus into a range of policy areas that were traditionally beyond its remit, such as education, health and population control. But Sharma demonstrates that ‘poverty reduction’ largely failed. With the management emphasis placed so strongly on measuring management processes – such as setting and hitting targets for volume of activity – the issue of whether or not ‘poverty reduction’ policies actually helped citizens of low-income countries become strangely irrelevant. It seemed more important (and considerably easier) for McNamara’s restructured Bank to be showing to the world how active it is through its target-setting and target-hitting, rather than for it to demonstrate genuine progress in reducing poverty. The ghosts of the Vietnam War linger ominously.

Senses of confusion and decline really set in during the events described in chapters four and five. Here Sharma documents the severe economic and political shocks of the 1970s; the OPEC oil price spikes, the rise of authoritarian regimes, and the early stages of what later came to be called ‘globalization’. Of particular interest were the growing threats from certain parts of the U.S. to cut off financial and political support for the IBRD. While much of the world sees the World Bank as essentially an offshoot of U.S. power, Sharma describes conservative and neoliberal Congressmen attacking the World Bank as a waste of American money. Read today, this looks highly pertinent. Bretton Woods attacked as broken and irrelevant. Critiques of ‘globalism’. ‘America First’.

Some of the criticism was not without foundation. Sharma argues in chapter six that McNamara’s restless expansionism meant that the Bank increasingly approved poor-quality loans. Low-income nations became embroiled in chronic indebtedness. Familiar weaknesses of ‘global civil society’ institutions become all too apparent. Corruption was a growing problem, as was the collusion with authoritarian regimes. The ‘voices’ of end users of loans and aid were ignored or silenced. With the World Bank struggling to remain credible, chapter seven argues that the Bank and McNamara increasingly abandoned their state-led, interventionist, technocratic approach, turning instead to ‘structural adjustment’. As we reach the conclusion in chapter eight, McNamara and the Bank have basically become agents of neoliberal governance.

Overall, Sharma is critical of McNamara’s Presidency and his expansionist, numbers-driven modus operandi. But it is important to note that he is even more critical of his long list of mostly short-lived successors, such as Barber Conable or Paul Wolfowitz, who had no vision for the Bank and acted with hostility towards it staff. The only recent President to emerge with any credit at all is James Wolfensohn who, like McNamara, at least had ambitions for the institution.

This is a highly readable and extensively documented account of McNamara’s Presidency of the World Bank Group. It is an important book in at least two senses. Firstly, it provides a very detailed account of McNamara’s time at the Bank, which is extremely helpful given the way most accounts of McNamara’s career focus on the more dramatic and more obviously controversial Vietnam era. Secondly, it paints a detailed picture of the World Bank’s troubled recent history, its general ineffectiveness, and its steady policy shift towards neoliberalism. In important ways, therefore, the book hints that McNamara’s managerialism could be potentially more disturbing than the obvious outrage and conflict generated by his time as Defense Secretary. Structural adjustment, policy evaluation and lending targets won’t ever be as eye-catching as napalm, Agent Orange and B-52s. But they might be all the more sinister for that. McNamara’s Other War doesn’t explicitly argue this, but such is the depth of failure of the development industry portrayed in it, one could surmise that the World Bank’s daily operations amount to a form of ‘structural’ or ‘slow’ violence (Farmer, 2004; Nixon, 2013).

Sharma focuses most of his attention on the big-picture policy realm. He gives a more partial reading of McNamara’s management style and techniques. McNamara’s evaluation departments, systems analysis, and Country Program Papers were forerunners of today’s ‘big data analytics’ that have come to dominate public and private organizations. These systems are just as vulnerable today to wishful thinking, goal-displacement, and manipulation as they were throughout McNamara’s long career. Metrics, targets and ‘management information systems’ have now spread well outside of public bureaucracies or corporate businesses and into the realms of everyday life (Beer, 2016). Some further reflection on the surviving legacies of McNamara-style management would have been welcome in Sharma’s book. But overall, this is a fine piece of work that has done much to bridge a large gap in the scholarly writings on this flawed, controversial, but deeply fascinating figure, whose restrictive, reductionist approach to management still resonates strongly today.