McNamara at War: A New History

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. (Sept.)