ABSTRACT
Few Americans have been liked or loathed as much as Robert Strange McNamara. He was a brilliant top manager at the Ford Motor Company, transforming Ford’s prospects. Shaar Murray argues that the performance is the most powerful work of post-war American art dealing with the corrupting effect of Vietnam. The management control revolution had arrived; and with it the quantitative revolution and the rule of experts. The rule of experts did not last. Several causes have been suggested for the collapse of support for the technicians and their plans. The Vietnam War tested the qualities to destruction. Revisionist historians like Michael Lind have argued that the war was inevitable and a necessary element in America’s fight to contain communism in South East Asia. A rising generation, born after the war, began to question the methods and the values which underlay the boom, inspired and influenced by the rise of a critical ‘counterculture’, and a profound cultural revolution.
