McNamara at War
A New History
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A revelatory portrait of Robert S. McNamara, informed by newly discovered diaries, letters, and interviews with those closest to him.
Robert S. McNamara was widely considered to be one of the most brilliant men of his generation. He was an invaluable ally of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson as U.S. secretary of defense, and he had a deeply moving relationship with Jackie Kennedy. But to the country, McNamara was the leading advocate for American escalation in Vietnam. He strongly advised Johnson to deploy hundreds of thousands of American ground troops, just weeks before concluding that the war was unwinnable, and for the next two and a half years, McNamara failed to urge Johnson to cut his losses and withdraw.
McNamara at War examines McNamara’s life of intense personal contradictions, following his childhood, his career as a young faculty member at Harvard Business School, and his World War II service, to his leadership of the Ford Motor Company and the World Bank. Philip and William Taubman had access to materials previously unavailable to McNamara biographers, including Jacqueline Kennedy’s warm letters to McNamara during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and beyond; family correspondence dating back to McNamara’s service in World War II; and a secret diary maintained by McNamara’s top Vietnam policy aide. What emerges is the comprehensive story of the infamous former leader of the Pentagon: riven by melancholy, guilt, zealous loyalty, and a profound inability to admit his flawed thinking about Vietnam before it was too late. McNamara at War is a portrait of a man at war with himself—with a grave influence on the history of the United States and the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, embodies the tortured soul of technocratic liberalism in this melodramatic biography. Journalist Philip Taubman (Secret Empire) and his political scientist brother William (Gorbachev) trace McNamara's rise through the military-industrial complex, first as a colonel helping make the Air Force more efficient during WWII and then as an executive at Ford. The book centers on McNamara's management, as defense secretary, of the Vietnam War, which he initially supported but concluded was unwinnable in late 1965. He nevertheless continued to publicly maintain, citing misleading statistics, that it was going well, while privately urging Johnson to seek peace. The strain led to psychological turmoil, including incidents of public weeping. Subsequent chapters cover McNamara's later acknowledgments that the war was wrong. The Taubmans' psychologizing of McNamara is heavy-handed: they say his mother "infantilized" him merely because she told him to eat well and stay warm at Harvard, and make much of McNamara's apparent platonic affair with Jacqueline Kennedy. (Jackie danced with him, shared poems, and beat on his chest while yelling at him to "stop the slaughter.") The narrative is more revealing when focusing on prosaic factors—like that arguing more forcefully against the war would probably have gotten McNamara fired. McNamara's spiritual ordeal, despite the authors' efforts, never comes off as more than a sideshow to the Vietnam tragedy.
