Robert McNamara's Other War

When Robert McNamara took the helm of the World Bank in 1968 the institution had no mission. Created at Bretton Woods in 1944 to stimulate postwar recovery, the bank was eclipsed first by the Marshall Plan (1948) and later by the development initiatives of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson eras. Development itself was in crisis, its theories and constituencies exhausted by a decade of failure and conflict. The World Bank was a discredited institution under attack by Congress, the political Left, and leaders across what was then called the Third World. The same was true for McNamara. According to Patrick Allan Sharma, the qualities that crippled McNamara as manager of the Vietnam War—his mania for quantification, lofty self-assurance, and skill at bureaucratic empire building—enabled him to remold the bank and establish “intellectual leadership” over a rejuvenated movement for global development (p. 97). The first step was to reupholster the bank's finances, which relied on the threadbare generosity of the U.S. House of Representatives. Japan and Germany became full partners with seats on the board, but McNamara's real coup was recognizing that the oil crisis would generate a bolus of Persian Gulf cash that would have to pass through U.S. private banks on its way toward “emerging markets” in Asia, Latin America, and Africa (p. 32). The World Bank would quicken and guide that cascade

Bureaucracy · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Generosity · Institution · Political science · Politics · World War II · Global Financial Crisis and Policies · International Development and Aid · Law

• El apoyo internacional a la reforma educativa en España

  Open Access•Lorenzo Delgado Gomez-Escalonilla, Óscar Jesús Rubio Martín•Historia y Memoria de la Educación•2021

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