Robert S. McNamara

I knew from Monday's news that I'd be reading Robert S. McNamara's obituary the next day. I thought about it on Tuesday morning as I was getting dressed. Robert S. Some names just always come to you with their middle initial. I told myself that I'd finally find out what the S stood for. Certainly I could have found out sooner. I just never did, but not because I didn't give the man any thought. I thought about him enough, just not enough to start to find out what the S stood for.

And of course, there it was, eventually in the obit piece. As somewhat typical, it's not another first name, but a mother's maiden name: Strange. Robert McNamara's middle name was Strange. Not Dr. Strangelove, but I'm sure that had been already suggested by others.

I often thought about McNamara when I thought about my father, and the job he had at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an engineer in the Design division. The year was 1964, and the Yard was closed as part of McNamara's wave of cost control. I read in the obituary that the military closings came about hastily because McNamara had to get under a budget amount set by President Johnson.

My father, and many others wanted to keep their government jobs, Most of them had already been working for Uncle Sam during World War II, and then thereafter. A Federal pension was nothing to sneeze at. My father and several of his co-workers found jobs in Washington, D.C., for the Department of Navy, rather than the Department of Defense. But, they were of course still Federal jobs. And the work was almost the same.

People were uprooted. My father became basically a commuter between New York and Washington, coming back to us in New York on weekends. Life was never the same. The Yard closing was a seminal event in my life, and I always associate the upheaval it caused as being caused by one man--McNamara--fairly or not.

Vietnam of course was the other--what's the best way to say this?--era that I lay at his feet. Hardly alone there. The obituary softened some of the enmity, but very little. A low-key military presence had become escalated to a long-running catastrophe on his watch.

I don't remember how long it was after the 1964 election, but Barry Goldwater appeared on the Carson show, and in what I will always remember as the ultimate in self-effacing humor, told Carson, with a good trace of chuckle, that he never realized how unpopular a president he would have been until President Johnson adopted his policies. Goldwater laughed at himself, and Carson laughed with him, but with a look of acknowledgment.

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