In 1977 Robert McNamara, as head of the World Bank, saw in population growth the "gravest issue" short of nuclear war and in a particularly prophetic statement lamented that the decisions that had led to this growth were "not in the exclusive control of a few governments but rather in the literally hundreds of millions of individual parents who will determine the outcome."Of course, the World Bank is not technically a US government office. But before joining the World Bank, this fellow was none other than Robert S. MacNamara, US Secretary of Defense.Evaluations of McNamara's long career as secretary of defense vary from glowing to negative and sometimes scathing. One journalist reported criticism of McNamara as a "'human IBM machine' who cares more for computerized statistical logic than for human judgments."