Ellis Eugene "Gene" Vance (February 25, 1923 – February 16, 2012) was an American professional basketball player for the NBA's Chicago Stags and a collegiate athlete for the University of Illinois Fighting Illini basketball team.
 He was most famous for leading Illinois as a member of the famed "Whiz Kids" of the 1940s.
 He was drafted into the NBA in 1948, and played for the Chicago Stags, the Tri-Cities Blackhawks and the Milwaukee Hawks.
 He and the other Whiz Kids, Andy Phillip, Art Mathisen, Ken Menke, and Jack Smiley, are regarded as some of Illinois' all-time greats, but only he and Phillip are on the team's all-century team.
 Vance and his Whiz Kids teammates left basketball to serve in World War II in 1943.
 He later served as the university's athletic director, from 1967 to 1972.
 Vance was elected to the "Illini Men's Basketball All-Century Team" in 2004.
He holds a BA ("summa cum laude") and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
 Early in his career, he was one of the "whiz kids" assembled by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara to apply cutting-edge analysis to Cold War military strategy.
Crash Zone is an Australian children's science fiction television series which aired on the Seven Network from 13 February 1999 to 25 August 2001.
 It was produced by Australian Children's Television Foundation, in association with the Disney Channel, and ran for 26 episodes.
 The series starred five high school students, "high-tech whiz kids" of varied backgrounds, who are hired by the president of the "Catalyst" software company to save her failing business.
 The premise of the series was unique in that it was one of the first series to examine the early use of the internet as well as the video game industry and artificial intelligence.
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):
John Hillen (born 3 February 1966) is an American business executive and the former Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, nominated by President George W. Bush, who served from October 11, 2005 until January 11, 2007.
 He served as President & CEO of Sotera Defense Solutions formerly Global Defense Technology & Systems, Inc. (GTEC) from 2008 - June 18, 2013.
 While at Sotera, he took the company public in November 2009.
 John currently serves on a number of corporate boards and is the Executive in Residence and Professor of Practice at George Mason University's School of Business.
 He has been featured on WashingtonExec.com numerous times for his business accomplishments and his talks on Defense policy, particularly as they relate to the private sector.
 John currently writes a column for Washington Technology magazine.
Robert Strange McNamara (June 9, 1916 – July 6, 2009) was an American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
 He played a major role in escalating the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
 McNamara was responsible for the institution of systems analysis in public policy, which developed into the discipline known today as policy analysis.
Wesley Garvin Hamner (March 18, 1924 – December 15, 2003) was an American professional baseball player.
 A second baseman and shortstop, he appeared in one season (1945) for the Philadelphia Phillies of Major League Baseball.
 His younger brother, Granny Hamner, would become the Phillies' star shortstop of the 1950 "Whiz Kids" National League championship team, while Garvin spent all but two months of his 11-year career in minor league baseball.
John H. Rubel (April 27, 1920 – January 13, 2015) was a business executive in the early post-World War II years of the defense electronics industry, later serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy administration.
 He is regarded as one of Robert McNamara's so-called whiz kids and was an early proponent of geosynchronous communications satellites.
The Whiz Kids were a group of ten United States Army Air Forces veterans of World War II who became Ford Motor Company executives in 1946.
Andrea Elson (born March 6, 1969) is an American former actress.
 Beginning her professional career as a child actress and model, Elson is perhaps best known for her television roles; as Alice Tyler on the CBS science-fiction adventure series "Whiz Kids" and as Lynn Tanner on the NBC comedy series "ALF", which garnered the teenage actress two Youth in Film Award nominations in 1986 and 1989.

Question: Who was the American business executive and the eighth Secretary of Defense, who surrounded himself with the group of experts called Whiz Kids?
Answer: Robert McNamara