Robert McNamara did have military experience, and it was the kind that JFK would want in a Secretary of Defense: statistical and logistical analysis in World War II. McNamrara was, as Kennedy put it, the "smartest man" that he had ever met, and "smart" men were exactly the kind that Kennedy wanted in his administration. Indeed, the highly intelligent and educated advisers that Kennedy surrounded himself with became known as the "Wise Men." McNamara fit in well.

Prior to the Second World War, it looked as though McNamara's career might remain centered in academia. Having earned an MBA from Harvard, he taught at the prestigious university beginning in 1940 and until 1943, when he joined the army as a logistics officer for the Army Air Forces (the predecessor to the Air Force, which Congress did not establish until after the war). After the war, McNamara worked with a group of ex-logistics officers, known as the "Whiz Kids," to improve operations at Ford. Thus when he became president of Ford, it was seen as an extension of the statistics work he had done for the army--making the jump from president of Ford to Secretary of State not as strange as it sounds in isolation. And as the "smartest" of the so-called Whiz Kids, which many people perceived him to be, McNamara was a natural choice for Kennedy (though Robert Lovett, Truman's Secretary of Defense, had been Kennedy's first choice).