National Affairs: SIX FOR THE KENNEDY CABINET

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SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

Robert Strange McNamara, 44. "In our business," says Automaker Henry Ford II, "we are lucky if we make the right decision 51% of the time. What I have noticed about Bob McNamara is that he makes an awful lot of right decisions."

The first Henry Ford, unlike his grandson, might have thought scholarly Robert McNamara, president of the Ford Motor Co., an odd choice to be top man in either Dearborn or the Pentagon. San Francisco-born, Bob McNamara was a sophomore Phi Beta Kappa at the University of California. He went on to Harvard Business School for a master's degree, taught there for three years after working briefly for the accounting firm of Price, Waterhouse & Co. Although 4-F (eye trouble) during World War II, McNamara wangled a captain's commission in the Army Air Forces, eventually joined a team of ten young officers who were exploring the then new field of statistical control of vast Air Force supply. At war's end the team sold itself as a package to Ford, soon became known in the company as the "Whiz Kids."

None of the Whiz Kids grew into executive manhood faster than McNamara. Starting as a financial analyst, he was named company controller in 1949, group vice president in charge of all car and truck divisions in 1957. Last month, just one day after Kennedy won the election, McNamara was made the first non-Ford ever to serve as president of the nation's second largest auto firm (TIME, Nov. 21).

Even within the Ford hierarchy, businesslike Bob McNamara was to many little more than an awesome name. Up daily at 6, he was at his desk in Dearborn no later than 7:30, seldom left before 6. He rarely attended the hail-fellow parties other automen love, even more rarely invited the brass to his home—a modest, $50,000 English Tudor house near the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor, far from the mansions of most other auto executives in Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe. An ardent mountain climber, McNamara reads widely and well (current choices: The Phenomenon of Man, W. W. Rostow's The Stages of Growth), urges his favorites on often bewildered fellow executives. His mind, says a friend who has seen him in Ann Arbor discussions, "is a beautiful instrument, free from leanings and adhesions, calm and analytical." He and his wife Margaret (they have two daughters and a son) are active in Ann Arbor civic work. McNamara is an elder in the Presbyterian Church, practices such stern business ethics that he refuses all Christmas gifts from business contacts, rents a car on vacation rather than borrow one from the company pool. In politics, McNamara is a lukewarm, liberal Republican who often contributes to Democratic candidates. This year he voted for Kennedy.