BARBER CONABLE b. November 2, 1922

BARBER BENJAMIN CONABLE, JR.

November 2, 1922-November 30, 2003

BARBER CONABLE

Notably

Member, U.S. House of Representatives (R-NY), 1965-1985

7th President of the World Bank, 1986-1991

The World Bank has a lengthy and informative retrospective of Barber Conable's time as its president here. It points out that the twenty-year Republican Representative from New York "was the first career politician to be appointed president of the Bank, and the only one without substantial Wall Street experience." The New York Times (here) and the Los Angeles Times (here) ran substantive obituaries, but two of the most interesting came from this American politician came from the U.K.

Conable, the Guardian wrote (here), "is best remembered as the man who took the World Bank by the scruff of the neck, totally reorganised its often sclerotic bureaucracy and persuaded the US Congress to double the amounts the bank could disburse to developing nations." He "also engineered a significant shift in the disbursement of this additional cash. He diverted the bank from its previous fascination with glitzy prestige projects towards schemes more clearly designed to relieve poverty. He encouraged far wider education in birth control, without which few Third World women could ever hope to improve their lot. He also insisted that the bank pay greater attention to the environmental impact of the large engineering schemes it decided to support."

The Telegraph noted (here) that Conable also paid attention to "to Eastern Europe as it emerged from Communism and attempted to establish free market economies. 'I pledge to you,' he told the Eastern Europeans, 'you can count on the World Bank in the tough times ahead, not just in the first euphoric moments of change.'"

But he left the World Bank presidency after the end of his single five-year term, not long into the changes in Eastern Europe, when his long friendship with George Bush "turned sour after Bush ascended to the presidency in 1989." (Conable had been appointed by Ronald Reagan.) Bush "'thought I should be supporting an American agenda,' Conable said in 1998. 'I thought I was there to help the poor people. So I got the reputation of not being a team player, and that was the one thing George wouldn't stand for.'"

Finally, more than one of the obituaries noted that during his Congressional career, Conable refused to accept more than fifty dollars from any campaign contributor, "for fear of compromising his integrity."

"THE BEST & THE BRIGHTEST": ROBERT McNAMARA

ROBERT S. McNAMARA

TURNS NINETY-THREE TODAY

Former Secretary of Defense & President of the World Bank 

At a Forum on "13 Days" 

- Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis - 

At the John F. Kennedy Library 

Boston, Massachusetts, October 1, 2002 

Robert McNamara came out of the Harvard Business School and World War II a Whiz Kid, and whizzed his way up to the presidency of the Ford Motor Co., just in time to be plucked to become Secretary of Defense for President John F. Kennedy. 

Apparently, and not just by his own account, he played a cautionary role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those who have not lived through the crisis may not appreciate how close we seemed to come to nuclear war then. 

But he was anathematized for Vietnam; he remained Secretary of State when Lyndon Johnson became president and escalated the war. 

In early 1968, McNamara decamped for the presidency of the World Bank. There he remained until he retired in 1981 at sixty-five. The World Bank is certainly not without its critics, but his colleagues credit him with transforming "the institution from being a 'bank' into being the world's premier development agency," in order to concentrate on fighting poverty. 

In 1995 he published (with Brian Vandemark) In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, uncorking a new round of controversy: He admitted mistakes; was he sorry enough? 

Then in 2003, Errol Morris released The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. He found McNamara surprisingly approachable, and willing to talk.  And talk. 

But we are once again at war, again fighting enemies who favor "asymmetrical" warfare, and an old "metric" from the McNamara/Vietnam era has come back, and gained currency: The Body Count. The military, and Donald Rumsfeld, had turned against it in Iraq. But now we are being told -- seriously -- that it is good to use in Afghanistan. 

David Halberstam named his Vietnam book The Best and the Brightest, and bridled afterwards when some did not realize he meant the term ironically. Are we in danger of another Best and Brightest moment?