LBJ and McNamara
The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
"In this book, I have sought to blend personal experience, journalism, and scholarship. It is history written by a journalist who was there."-Peter L. W. Osnos
ONE OF KIRKUS REVIEW'S 100 BEST INDIE BOOKS OF 2025
LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail details how President Lyndon B. Johnson and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, made choices central to U.S. strategy in Vietnam, ending in defeat. The portrait emerges of men who knew that conventional victory was impossible but who could not or would not reverse the policies that they and the military pursued.
In their own words, especially McNamara's, how and why this happened is a story never before told with such immediacy and insight. The lessons for today's policymakers are clear-and could have avoided the outcomes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Discover untold insights of the critical Vietnam War decisions made by President Johnson and Robert McNamara, their struggles with policy reversals, and the lessons relevant to today's conflicts. Also featuring a unique audio bonus with exclusive, candid audio from McNamara's memoir creation.
"A slim volume with a knife's edge, even a half century later. . . . [I]n LBJ and McNamara, Osnos nails it."-Washington Monthly
"Utilizing his unprecedented access to the record, Peter Osnos has excavated the complex relationship between Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert S. McNamara. Osnos expertly pulls back the curtain, revealing the central role that the character and personalities of these two complicated men played in the decision to escalate the war. We learn something new on almost every page."-Robert K. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations, Vassar College, and author of Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam
"LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail brings to one of history's most-well covered topics new insights and a deeper understanding of Johnson and McNamara than we have ever had. . . . The approaching fifty-year anniversary of the end of the Vietnam debacle offers the right moment to learn anew."-Daniel Weiss, Homewood Professor of the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University; president emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and author of In That Time: Michael O'Donnell and the Tragic Era of Vietnam
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
PublicAffairs founder and former Washington Post correspondent Osnos (editor of George Soros: A Life in Full) takes on the much-written-about relationship between President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and their prosecution of the Vietnam War in a lightweight book he categorizes as "history written by a journalist who was there." In reality, this book, in which Osnos refers to his main subject as "my friend Bob," is a weak attempt to whitewash McNamara's reputation as the man most responsible for the debacle of the Vietnam War. Osnos points out many of McNamara's failings as the war's manager, then counters with unconvincing excuses. By not telling Johnson, for example, that he believed the war was a mistake and unwinnable in 1965, and by continually obfuscating and dissembling about it in public, McNamara, Osnos says, was simply "doing his duty to the presidency as he saw it." Elsewhere, he writes that the perception of McNamara's "intensity and his publicly bumptious certainty," rather than his outright lying, "defined his lasting reputation." Padded out with several pages of excerpts from McNamara's self-serving apologia In Retrospect, this fails to persuade. This review has been updated.
