Institute of Development Studies

Robert McNamara and IDS

Richard Jolly - 8 July 2009 

When Robert McNamara was appointed as Head of the World Bank in 1968, those of us in IDS were both appalled and suspicious. How could the former US Secretary of Defence, the intellectual whiz-kid who brought body-count planning into the Vietnam War be a serious leader for development?

How wrong we were. Within a year or two, McNamara had established himself as a visionary World Bank President, the best the World Bank has ever had. He stayed 14 years, appointed brilliant professionals like Mahbub ul Haq and Hollis Chenery, gave a clear focus to poverty reduction and greatly expanded the Bank’s resources and reputation.

McNamara never visited Sussex but had many links with IDS and our work: Dudley Seers, Michael Lipton, Hans Singer, Clive Bell and others all had links. Barbara Ward, one of IDS’s governors, was a close friend and adviser, one of the only three persons, all women, from whom McNamara took phone calls before ten in the morning (the other two were Katherine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post and his wife, Margaret). When IDS was playing a leading role in the International Labour Organisation’s World Employment Programme, I remember being in the Bank to give a seminar to senior staff on the employment strategy proposed in the Kenya Mission. McNamara attended and afterwards asked me to his office for further discussion. I was given 27 minutes - 9 intervals on his three minute calendar! A year later, McNamara made his historic speech on reducing poverty and pro-poor rural development in Nairobi. The World Bank-IDS work and book on Redistribution with Growth was undertaken at the behest of McNamara.

McNamara dominated all Bank meetings, intellectually as well as by personality and position. The World Bank history brings out his strong leadership for making poverty reduction a major priority and his rejection not only of trickle-down but of the idea that there had to be a trade-off between growth and distribution. However, there was a backlash. When McNamara left the Bank in early 1981, many of his policies were reversed. It is arguable that the negative consequences of structural adjustment on Sub-Sahara Africa and Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s would not have been so severe and humanly destructive, if McNamara had still been at the helm.

McNamara’s later years were notable for his participation in many development meetings and for his frank, insightful and sometimes personally apologetic reflections on key events in which he had played a part. In the documentary film, The Fog of War, he warned against the cataclysmic dangers of nuclear weapons, memorably gesturing with a finger held close to his thumb how close the world had come to nuclear conflagration at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He also organised seminars with the Vietnamese and with Russians and Cubans (including with Fidel) jointly to discuss the lessons of these two conflicts and how in future such risks could be avoided.

McNamara was a giant of international leadership in the era of US hegemony, bringing technical management first to the horrors of the Vietnam war, then to international development and finally, in his later life, to probing deeply the lessons for conflict resolution. One can only hope that present leaders, including Obama and Brown, will ponder this great man and the lessons of his life.

Robert McNamara died on 6 July 2009

Sir Richard Jolly is an Honorary Professor and Research Associate of the Institute of Development Studies.

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