Millions of Americans too young to remember the Vietnam War first encountered Robert McNamara in spring 1995. The publication of his memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, a characteristically earnest effort to grapple with the mistakes of the war, instead seemed to deepen the wounds left by the conflict. Contrite yet insistent, McNamara appeared unsurprised by the acrimony.
Across his final decades, the former secretary of defense sought to make sense of his choices: to wring some useful lessons from them. His evident regret makes McNamara the most interesting alumnus of Lyndon B. Johnson’s war council. His two principal peers, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, predeceased McNamara by more than 10 years, and neither man felt the same obligation to reenter the spotlight. McNamara is the subject of several biographies, and his garrulous participation in Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary, The Fog of War, lends him a vivid posterity.
Into the crowded field of McNamara studies strides McNamara at War: A New History, a remarkable collaboration between the brothers Philip and William Taubman. The former reported on the final stages of the Cold War for the New York Times and has written, among other titles, a biography of Secretary of State George P. Shultz. The latter, an Amherst political science professor emeritus, wrote exhaustive, prize-winning biographies of both Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev.
The product of this fraternal endeavor is an engaging and deeply insightful biography of the 20th century’s most controversial secretary of defense. One may initially wonder whether an additional biography was needed, but McNamara’s own drive for public understanding and his late-life struggles argue for a new account. The Taubmans, in any case, write authoritatively but not ostentatiously. McNamara at War joins a conversation without the pretense of displacing its predecessors. The two authors benefit from those predecessors’ transcripts, their own ample interview work, the recently discovered diary of a key McNamara subordinate, and the 2022 memoir of McNamara’s son, Craig.
One is tempted to treat McNamara’s life as the American 20th century in microcosm. At two, he witnessed exuberant public celebrations of the armistice ending World War I. His father, a descendant of Irish refugees, was a dedicated salesman, whose strivings later reminded his son of Willy Loman’s. McNamara spent his first seven years in San Francisco, one in San Rafael until the commute defeated his father, and then the rest of his childhood in Piedmont-adjacent Oakland. An Annerley Road address let the gifted McNamara climb the hill to attend affluent Piedmont High. A middle-class upbringing in atypically diverse, Californian surroundings differentiated McNamara from most of his peers in John F. Kennedy’s administration.
McNamara never fully integrated into elite society, but he could thrive in proximity to it while masking his discomfort. Better-heeled contemporaries took note of his abilities. At the start of his career, when he joined the Ford Motor Company, he never bonded well with the other executives. True to form, when nominated to serve as secretary of defense, he insisted on remaining aloof from “that damn Washington social world.”
War, of course, is central to the McNamara story. The Taubmans point out his role in perfecting strategic bombing during World War II. This, in turn, presaged his approach to the spiraling Vietnam conflict. The McNamara in this telling is far from a numb practitioner of industrial warfare. By 1965, he held profound doubts about the wisdom of introducing U.S. ground forces into South Vietnam to rescue a faltering government in Saigon. The Taubmans emphasize psychology and emotion in their analysis: the shock of Kennedy’s assassination and McNamara’s susceptibility to Johnson’s charm and coercion. McNamara, they explain, felt an inexhaustible need to “excel and succeed” and hoped to retain his office. LBJ, meanwhile, emerges as a volatile, even unstable presence. Mistaken Cold War notions play their role—the domino theory and McNamara’s dismissal of North Vietnamese agency among them—but the emphasis is psychological, not doctrinal. The Taubmans note McNamara’s curiously close ties to Jacqueline Kennedy—and the mounting suspicion this elicited from Johnson.
The extent of McNamara’s inner torment has been chronicled previously, yet the public image of him as an “IBM machine with legs”—in Barry Goldwater’s notorious phrasing—remains potent. The alert biographers mention brief, revealing moments of fracture in McNamara’s carefully composed exterior. McNamara believed that his doubts about Americanizing the war had crystallized by the end of 1965, at the very latest. Yet it is hard to detect any real optimism from him before that point.
McNamara played his part, as much as anyone. He and Bundy advanced a fateful memorandum to Johnson in January 1965, advising the president that the middle-of-the-road course he had inherited from Kennedy was no longer tenable. Far from representing a calculated choice, the Taubmans suggest, escalation in Vietnam was born from desperation. McNamara later lamented, “There weren’t any answers. That was the terrible thing.”
Henceforth, McNamara loyally served Johnson while his doubts intensified through 1966 and 1967 and the number of U.S. troops in South Vietnam approached half a million. He could find no exit, even as his anxiety and guilt placed him on the cusp of a nervous breakdown. Could he have broken publicly with the White House as his critics in 1995 claimed? The portrait here suggests otherwise. Setting aside McNamara’s specific rapport with Johnson, Cold War politics and mores rendered public dissent something unthinkable for administration insiders, even disaffected ones. McNamara played a pivotal role, by the Taubmans’ account, but the trail of responsibility ultimately leads back to the domineering LBJ.
In a less constrained era, McNamara tried to atone and make sense of his life, sensing that it could serve cautionary purposes. However belated the effort, it merited serious public consideration. As the Taubmans note in a mournful epilogue, his lessons went unnoticed by his successors. McNamara at War offers a timely reminder of the potent power wielded by ambition, psychology, and rapport—often at the expense of principle and humanity.•
MCNAMARA AT WAR: A NEW HISTORY, BY PHILIP TAUBMAN AND WILLIAM TAUBMAN
Robert B Rakove is a lecturer in international relations at Stanford University and the author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World and Days of Opportunity: The United States and Afghanistan Before the Soviet Invasion.
