Interview: Robert S. McNamara with Philip Geyelin

INTERVIEW: ROBERT S. MCNAMARA WITH PHILIP GEYELIN In his modest new office, Robert S. McNamara, private citizen for the first time in twenty years, is only a few blocksfrom the White House. In his grasp of the great underlying social, economic, and security problems of the world, he is leagues away. While the Reagan administration talks and often acts in the ways of the 1960s, Mr. McNamara speaks urgently of the year 2,000—of how many people will then inhabit this planet, how many in absolute poverty, how many without food or water or affordable energy resources, and, as a consequence, how manyfacing political disorder? A presidentfor thirteen years ofan international lending institution with one hundred andforty members—ranging in their various stages of economic developmentfromJapan to Bangladesh—could be expected toform a unique view of the world: compassionate, pragmatic, supranational, geopolitical. What is worth remembering about Mr. McNamara is that his particular concept of the interrelationship between international security and international economic and social welfare was not acquired on the job at the Bank. Two years before he became its president in 1968, he addressed the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Montreal, as Lyndon Johnson's secretary of defense. In that speech, Mr. McNamara revealed an intense preoccupation with the problems of the less-developed nations—a philosophy, really, for world stability. It was not the philosophy one would have expected of a man almost wholly identified at the time with the development of weapons systems and—above all—with the expansion ofthe American involvement in the Vietnam war. "The United States has no mandate, " McNamara said in Montreal, "to police the world, and no intention of doing so. Clearly we have no charter to rescue floundering regimes that have brought violence on themselves by deliberately refusing to meet the legitimate expectations of their citizenry. " But he went on to argue: 119 120 SAIS REVIEW Our security is related directly to the security of the newly developed world, and our role must be precisely this: to help provide security to those developing nations that genuinely need and request our help and that demonstrably are willing and able to help themselves. The rub is that we do not always grasp the meaning of security in this context. In a modernizing society security means development. Security is not military hardware , though it may include it; security is not military force, though it may involve it. . . . Security is development, and without development there can be no security. A developing nation that does not, in fact, develop simply cannot remain secure for the intractable reason that its own citizenry cannot shed its human nature. If security implies anything, it implies a minimum measure of order and stability. Without internal development of at least a minimal degree, order and stability are impossible . As development progresses, security progresses, and when people of a nation have organized their own human and natural resources to provide themselves with what they need and expect out of life and have learned to compromise peacefully among competing demands in the larger national interest, then their resistance to disorder and violence will enormously increase. Conversely, the tragic need of desperate men to resort to force to achieve the inner imperatives of human decency will diminish. In thefollowing interview with Philip Geyelin, syndicated columnist and editor-in-residence at TheJohns Hopkins University School ofAdvanced International Studies, Mr. McNamara was asked to revise and expand upon his fifteen-year-old views on problems of the less-developed southern half of the world. GEYELIN: How would you apply your Montreal message to the situation today? MCNAMARA: I would make the same point now that I made then — that security is a much broader concept than military hardware and manpower, and that a lot of people don't seem to realize that today any more than they did fifteen years ago. A 20 percent increase in real terms in the Carter administration 's defense budget over the next five years is supposed to buy security. But it won't buy security unless it is at least complemented with the other efforts I spoke of in Montreal. A broader concept of security than weapons...