It might just be that McNamara knew numbers, but definitely not cars, either, for that matter. Let's consider the better know cars that came out during his tenure at Ford: the Ford Falcon and the Lincoln Continental.
thr
Building the Falcon was a no-brainer, with the increasing sales of cars like the Volkswagen. They also tried to build a smaller car for sale in America, named Cardinal, that ended up as the German Ford Taunus 12-M. This car would have pinched pennies until Lincoln screamed, or there was enough wire to build the car's wiring harness. Two-ply tires? Please.
The iconic Lincoln Continental of 1961 was basically the result of McNamara's threat to shutter Lincoln (lawsuits, here we come!) over the 1958 models. As well as it did, it could have done better had it not been pared to two models, if it hadn't taken 5 years for a two door to appear as well.
I'm sure that there are more examples of why they were happy to see him go, but let's run with these.
Now, back to the affairs at hand. At the end of Phase I of the American SST program, the report indicated that with the information at hand, Delta and Eastern could not make a decision on which aircraft they preferred, and would like to see prototypes of all three. If we were to have spent the money on this, perhaps we would not have had to wait for Boeing (and the powers at the committee) to get over swing wings. I think the NAC-60 might have worked, and well, and the L-2000 was also simpler than what Boeing had in mind. To maintain an advantage that was making money for American industry, by reducing the number of airframe builders and engine builders, we left avenues unexplored that we shouldn't have.
