Miscellaneous Polling Data about Robert McNamara
From a Gallup poll conducted Dec. 31, 1965 - January 5, 1966 (N=1,545):
What kind of rating would you give him (Robert McNamara) for the job he had done in running the Defense Department - A, B, C, D, or flunk?
18% A
14 B
11 C
3 D
6 Flunk
6 Don’t know
42 Don’t know who McNamara is
From a Harris Survey conducted Nov. 20-27, 1967 (N=1,600):
How would you rate the job Secretary of Defense (Robert) McNamara has done on the Vietnam War — excellent, pretty good, only fair or poor?
42% Excellent/Pretty good
45 Only fair/Poor
13 Don’t know
There’s not much else in the Roper Center’s iPoll database, and nothing that allows one to track opinion over time.
UPDATE: Here’s Harris poll from Sept. 8-11, 20082006, that asked a similar question about Rumsfeld, albeit without a prompt about the Iraq War:
How would you rate the job…Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is doing—excellent, pretty good, only fair, or poor?
10% Excellent
28 Pretty good
25 Only fair
32 Poor
4 No sure
Comments
That should be 2006. For what it’s worth, Rummy does no worse than Gates in approval polls.
Posted by: j | July 6, 2009 04:06 PM
Here’s the best effort at a time series using only the Harris wording. It looks fairly predictable.
http://i28.tinypic.com/2csih6t.jpg
Posted by: j | July 6, 2009 04:40 PM
Here's the time series on the Harris question wording - pretty much in line with what I would expect.
http://i28.tinypic.com/2csih6t.jpg
Posted by: j | July 7, 2009 04:07 PM
Rummy does no worse than Gates in approval polls? Can you link to some data on that?
Posted by: Kevin | July 7, 2009 09:36 PM
Kevin: That’s the first I’ve heard of this claim. A quick Google search turns up this Harris poll from late March:
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/pubs/Harris_Poll_2009_03_25.pdf
There, the majority of respondents (60%) didn’t know enough about Gates to have an opinion. Of the 40% who did, most (67%) had a positive impression. That made him one of the more popular Obama officials, although, again, not many people had an opinion to begin with.
So, on the basis of those two polls, I would say Rumsfeld did worse than Gates, although the comparison is quite complicated by differences in circumstance (tenure in office, etc.), in familiarity with each of them, etc.
Posted by: John Sides | July 7, 2009 09:58 PM
Rumsfeld enjoys a post 9-11 popularity with a slow decay.
Plot of the Harris question wording
Posted by: j | July 8, 2009 04:40 PM