More than 50 years after Robert McNamara left his teaching post at Harvard Business School, he received a letter from a former student stating that “I have told many of my friends that nothing you’ve said or done in your very illustrious career will ever diminish my opinion of you or the regard in which you are held by my family.” This ungainly equivocation might seem unfair or even insulting — wasn’t McNamara the man who saved Ford from bankruptcy, worked tirelessly to lay the foundations for President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” and all but eliminated the horrific African disease onchocerciasis, also known as “river blindness,” during his tenure as president of the World Bank?