Who was the American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, who surrounded himself with the group of experts called Whiz Kids?
Whiz Kids (Department of Defense) Whiz Kids was a name given to a group of experts from RAND Corporation with which Robert McNamara surrounded himself in order to turn around the management of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) in the 1960s. The purpose was to shape a modern defense strategy in the Nuclear Age by bringing in economic analysis, operations research, game theory, computing, as well as implementing modern management systems to coordinate the huge dimension of operations of the DoD with methods such as the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). They were called the Whiz Kids recalling the group at Ford Motor Company that McNamara was part of a decade earlier. The group included (among others):
McGeorge Bundy McGeorge "Mac" Bundy (March 30, 1919 – September 16, 1996) was an American expert in foreign and defense policy, serving as United States National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 through 1966. He was president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 through 1979. Despite his distinguished career as a foreign-policy intellectual, educator, and philanthropist, he is best remembered as one of the chief architects of the United States' escalation of the Vietnam War during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.