The Hawk Who Couldn’t Fly : PROMISE AND POWER: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara, By Deborah Shapley (Little, Brown and Co.: $29.95; 615 pp.)

Robert Strange McNamara lived at the center of power in exciting and perilous times. He dragged the Ford Motor Company--and the U.S. automobile industry--into the modern world; he presided over the U.S. Department of Defense during the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis and the war in Vietnam; as one of the longest-serving presidents of the World Bank, he led the global effort to do away with poverty; he was so close to the glittering Kennedys that Bobby said he and Jack wanted the presidency to go to McNamara, not L.B.J., in 1968.

And yet, his life story is strangely flat. This is not entirely the fault of his biographer, Deborah Shapley, whose diligent effort to uncover the real McNamara produces the revelation that he is one of the least alive, least passionate individuals ever to stalk the stage of history. McNamara has feelings, of course; indeed he describes himself as a man of strong emotions. But they are buried so deep inside that they can emerge only in strangulated form: as embarrassing episodes of public teariness, as a refusal to be contradicted, and as a fatal rigidity, a tendency to choose a line and hew to it, whatever the consequences, whatever the evidence that he is wrong.

The vehemence of his refusal to know himself or to allow others to know him is almost refreshing in this tell-all era. One of the most striking passages in this book comes from an interview that McNamara gave another journalist:

“Who knows you? Carl Bernstein asked him in 1991. ‘No one. My wife Margy did.’ Do your kids know you? Bernstein asked. ‘No,’ McNamara said, adding: ‘I realize that if people don’t know you it means you haven’t fully communicated.’ Then he yanked the blind down. ‘I’m not about to start now.’ ”

So much was hoped for from McNamara, not least by the man himself, who lacked neither ambition nor self-confidence. His brilliance, his determination, was recognized early by a series of mentors. He pulled himself up, not from poverty, exactly, but from straitened circumstances to become the manager’s manager in a managerial age. In 1961, when he came to the Pentagon, Barry Goldwater praised him as “an IBM machine with legs,” an apt description, the negative side of which was not much considered at the time. McNamara swept into the Defense Department determined to modernize, rationalize and systematize the armed services as he had the Ford Motor Company and in the same way, using the new management techniques he had learned at the Harvard Business School.

There is no doubt that the Pentagon needed to be brought under control, nor that McNamara did succeed in introducing a measure of much-needed central oversight to the military. But his management brilliance was undercut by his blindness about people and institutions. He believed, as he told an interviewer, that “running any large organization is the same, whether it is the Ford Motor Company, the Catholic Church or the Department of Defense.” He was the essential corporate man--”I believe that there needs to be no conflict between the goals of a large institution and those of society,” he told the author. He wanted, through modern, scientific management techniques, to help “the largest number of people,” as he told a boyhood friend, but it was numbers, not people that he trusted. McNamara was a manager, all right, a manager of numbers, not of people.

But the numbers kept letting him down. The body count in Vietnam, by which he set so much store, justified for him the massive escalation in bombing and combat troops. In March, 1965, the first American ground troops, 3,500 Marines, entered Vietnam. Overriding the advice of the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, then ambassador to South Vietnam, and Gen. H.K. Johnson, the Army chief of staff, McNamara in June advocated the sending in of another 200,000 troops. By November he was foreseeing the need for another 200,000 in 1966 and yet another 200,000 in 1967.

Already in late 1965, McNamara had begun to suspect that he had chosen the wrong path, that the United States could never win this war, but another 19 months would pass before he would waver from his hawkish position. It was easier for him to agonize internally than to admit he was wrong, though the lives of tens of thousands of American troops and millions of Vietnamese citizens were in the balance.

Part of McNamara’s--and the nation’s--tragedy was his mistrustful nature. He was arrogant and aloof and he inspired fear in his subordinates. No one wanted to be the bearer of bad tidings to McNamara. At Ford, at Defense, and at the World Bank, McNamara seldom was presented with information that challenged the world as he wished to see it. Over and over in this book, his former colleagues express the same thought. “He ruled the place through fear.” For all his dedication to the facts, he was willing to massage them to make a point. McNamara, says one ex-World Banker, “was very good at manipulating statistics,” which he did “not with ill intent, but in an excess of advocacy” to strengthen his case when, as usual, he was sure he was right.

Despite the hubris that led him to bring misery to this country and to Vietnam, McNamara is often seen as the victim, rather than the perpetrator, of tragedy. Partly, this is due to the waste of his great gifts and his own evident distress at having been so wrong, at such a cost in lives and national unity. Partly, it is a recognition of the fact that he was never purely a power- monger: he was and is a missionary, a man who desperately wants to make the world a better place.

McNamara was seen by many as redeeming himself through his dedication to eradicating poverty during his 13 years at the World Bank. And yet, here too, he held himself aloof from others, from his co-workers and from the “common man” he wanted to help, and in doing so, he guaranteed the failure of many of his efforts. He had grandiose designs, escalating lending to Third World countries as dramatically as he had escalated the war in Vietnam. But the pressure to lend meant that many projects were poorly planned, that benefits flowed to those least in need, and that poverty in the Third World grew almost as fast as did the Bank’s bureaucracy in those years. McNamara was cheerleader for the orgy of lending that ended in the international debt crisis of the early 1980s, a crisis that hurt the poorest of the poor most of all.

In 1982, McNamara was awarded the Einstein Peace Prize, along with McGeorge Bundy and Gerard Smith, a former arms-control negotiator, in recognition of an article the three had written proposing that the United States adopt a no-first-use policy for nuclear weapons. Thus, in one of those hypocrisies of scale by which banks lend money to large, badly run corporations instead of to small, solvent businesses, the peace prize goes to the war maker who recants, not the lifelong activist for peace.

When McNamara left the Pentagon under a cloud in early 1968, columnist Joseph Kraft noted that his leaving, his failure, “casts a dark shadow across the qualities and values of the best men” in the country. The postwar generation had put its faith in managers, in IBM machines on legs, and it had found that management is not enough, that without a moral conscience, a political outlook, it can be a danger.

McNamara cannot have been an easy man to write about. Even now, he wraps himself in numbers, reveals himself to no one. Shapley has been thorough in recounting the many episodes that make up his life, and has tried to illuminate the inner man, the part he would like to keep hidden.

The book is not a great read. It is repetitious. Seventeen of its 25 chapters focus on McNamara’s time at the Pentagon, and much space is spent rehashing the Vietnam story with the help of writers of earlier books. And it suffers from the weight of the numbers he loves so much. But it is, for now and possibly forever, as close as we will get to this strange, sad man who didn’t like people but who wanted to help “the largest number,” and who brought so much suffering to our country and so many others.