“Quantification was a word Robert McNamara loved,” or so you open his obituary (July 11, 2009). Teaching at Harvard Business School from the Forties onward, until his fatal entanglement with John F. Kennedy, he could not but be a numbers guy, it goes without saying. I remember loathing him passionately in the Sixties and Seventies, when his name became nearly synonymous with the Vietnam War. But your insistence on his passionate reliance on metrics, mathematical models, and statistics makes me wonder a bit about my innermost feelings. I, too, was very much a numbers guy back in my student days. And so were the best and the brightest everywhere around me. Yuckety yuck.