Project Logic Ga

Robert McNamara

While we are spending so much time on Michael Jackson this week, I wonder if the Nam Era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara actually had as big an impact on our world.  McNamara was a whiz kid for real: Eagle Scout, Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard B_School professor, president of Ford Motor Company. 

We are all familiar with his role in the escalation of the Vietnam Conflict but few remember that McNamara was for the father of Zero Based Budgeting.  That tripped me out in grad school; McNamara takes ZBB to the Department of Defense and Jimmy Carter takes notice and implements it in Georgia then later the federal government.

Before ZBB, agency would assume their new fiscal year amount would be a continuation of last year.  With ZBB, the budget process starts with zero.  Later, performance-based budgeting emerged and the rest is history.

Michael Jackson was the King of Pop but Robert McNamara changed the game also.  I am no expert and I might be wrong but I think Halliburton came from Vietnam and if you believe Oliver Stone JFK, RFK and MLK were assassinated by the Defense Industrial Complex because these leaders had doubts about our involvement in southeast Asia.  I don’t know but next time someone crosses us. let’s light that tail up from high in the sky and enough of this nation building, regime change stuff.  It is hard to tell struggling towns and cities they can’t get some stimulus cheese after spending like Iraq was the 51^st state and Afghanistan is being the 52nd. 

I am going to miss Michael but then again I have been missing him for years.  Can we do that; can we stop the clock on someone when we choose.  The music was great and we try not to speak ill of the dead but my Michael Jackson still looks like me, my hair, my nose.  The world can have post Triller MJ. 

McNamara is gone without a elaborate function at Staples Center—maybe, Veterans Memorial Stadium would be more fitting.  Let me get this right: my oldest brother in the military during Nam to free the people in southeast Asia while our mother could not drink out of a water cooler in Georgia..could not swim in a pool and my father could not get a PHD in ag from UGA because he was Black.  Check the stats on the number of Nam combat troops who look like me….without a doubt “this land is your land, this land is my land.”