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McNamara at War: A New History
Robert S. McNamara was widely considered to be one of the most brilliant men of his generation. While he could be cold and arrogant, he was an invaluable friend to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as US secretary of defense and had a deeply moving relationship with Jackie Kennedy. McNamara was the leading advocate for American escalation in Vietnam, even after he concluded that the war was unwinnable. He failed to urge Johnson to cut his losses and withdraw.
In McNamara at War, Philip and William Taubman examine McNamara's life of intense personal contradictions. They trace his career from 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. McNamara at War is a portrait of a man at war with himself--riven by melancholy, guilt, zealous loyalty, and a profound inability to admit his flawed thinking about Vietnam before it was too late.
In McNamara at War, Philip and William Taubman examine McNamara's life of intense personal contradictions. They trace his career from 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. McNamara at War is a portrait of a man at war with himself--riven by melancholy, guilt, zealous loyalty, and a profound inability to admit his flawed thinking about Vietnam before it was too late.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published September 23, 2025
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January 1, 2026
A biography by the Taubman brothers. (One of them, WIlliam, is the author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era.) I'd consider it "late", both in the transient sense that it's the most recent, and the more objective that it was written after McNamara's death.
I'm reading it a short time after The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, which is unfortunate for the book: it does not measure up to it, though few biographies would. I especially miss Slezkine's generous quoting from the letters and diaries; neither McNamara nor his family and associates are given the opportunity to speak for themselves for more than a sentence of two at a time. The sources just aren't cited at sufficent length. Partially as a result, I struggle to get into their heads in the way in which I could into Osinsky's and Voronsky's (even though in terms of values I probably share more with McNamara, and certainly in terms of geography—he grew up in the Bay Area, and like I lived in Cambridge, MA, in his twenties).
One thing that struck me, given the contemporary cost of living debates: McNamara lived what would be considered a very stretched life today. Despite being a professor at Harvard (and a Lt Colonel in the Air Force), he felt he had to leave for a better paid position after his wife contracted polio to pay for her care. He of course did not own a house during this time, even as he fathered two kids.
The chapter on McNamara's time at Ford was disappointing. It doesn't really explain how McNamara turned Ford around, let alone how much credit for this he deserves. It does mention Halberstam's The Reckoning, which perhaps touches on this. (Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize, though for his wartime reporting, long before he wrote this book.) I requested it from the library.
A general weakness of this book is that, while it quotes many sources, these sources speak in generalities. Any number of people are quoted to the effect that McNamara is "brilliant" or "cold" or "efficient" or "has personal integrity", but few and far apart are descriptions of actual situations he encountered, and actual actions he took in those situations that exemplified these abstract qualities. It's like a bad performance review packet.
I'm reading it a short time after The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, which is unfortunate for the book: it does not measure up to it, though few biographies would. I especially miss Slezkine's generous quoting from the letters and diaries; neither McNamara nor his family and associates are given the opportunity to speak for themselves for more than a sentence of two at a time. The sources just aren't cited at sufficent length. Partially as a result, I struggle to get into their heads in the way in which I could into Osinsky's and Voronsky's (even though in terms of values I probably share more with McNamara, and certainly in terms of geography—he grew up in the Bay Area, and like I lived in Cambridge, MA, in his twenties).
One thing that struck me, given the contemporary cost of living debates: McNamara lived what would be considered a very stretched life today. Despite being a professor at Harvard (and a Lt Colonel in the Air Force), he felt he had to leave for a better paid position after his wife contracted polio to pay for her care. He of course did not own a house during this time, even as he fathered two kids.
The chapter on McNamara's time at Ford was disappointing. It doesn't really explain how McNamara turned Ford around, let alone how much credit for this he deserves. It does mention Halberstam's The Reckoning, which perhaps touches on this. (Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize, though for his wartime reporting, long before he wrote this book.) I requested it from the library.
A general weakness of this book is that, while it quotes many sources, these sources speak in generalities. Any number of people are quoted to the effect that McNamara is "brilliant" or "cold" or "efficient" or "has personal integrity", but few and far apart are descriptions of actual situations he encountered, and actual actions he took in those situations that exemplified these abstract qualities. It's like a bad performance review packet.
October 21, 2025
"McNamara at War: A New History" by Phillip and William Taubman
Reading the Taubmans' biography of Robert McNamara feels like watching a Greek tragedy—one where the protagonist's greatest strengths become the instruments of his undoing, and where brilliant intellect collides with seeming moral blindness in ways that some say cost hundreds of thousands or millions of lives.
The Making of a Manager
McNamara emerges from these pages as a figure of stark contradictions. His colleagues at Harvard just prior to World War II described him as someone who "liked to be in the spotlight" and nyet was "the most aloof man I ever met"—a man who "did not tolerate fools lightly." This personality crystallized during World War II, where as a lieutenant colonel he imposed "managerial accounting" systems on the Air Corps with devastating efficiency. He helped orchestrate the B-29 firebombing of Tokyo, an operation that killed 100,000 civilians and left a million homeless. Years later, he would admit that he and General Curtis LeMay—whom he described as "without question the most outstanding combat commander I observed"—were "behaving as war criminals."
Yet at the time, McNamara was simply doing what he excelled at: applying rational systems to achieve "target destruction," as LeMay defined the mission. This was McNamara's genius and his curse—the ability to reduce human catastrophe to statistical problems requiring optimal solutions.
The Ford Years: A Preview
His post-war tenure at Ford Motor Company revealed the pattern that would define his Pentagon years. Colleagues noted that "Bob hated to change the course of action after he got going on something"—"After I make up my mind I don't have time to go back and keep going through it all again." "Working for Bob is a chore, because you can't loaf." When he left for Washington just 51 days after becoming Ford's president, Henry Ford lamented the years of training lost, later saying he couldn't find "a place worthy of him." If I offered him a job as head of the Ford Foundation, it would become "the McNamara Foundation."
The Pentagon: Management Meets Vietnam
At the Pentagon, McNamara's relentless rationalism reached its apex—and its nadir. He reorganized the armed forces, pushed computer systems so aggressively that staffers joked IBM stood for "I, Bob McNamara," and centralized power so that the Joint Chiefs reported to him rather than directly to the president. His confidence was breathtaking: "it never bothered me that I overrode the majority of the Chiefs or even occasionally their unanimous recommendations."
But Southeast Asia was different from Ford's production lines or Air Corps logistics. The Taubmans note that Southeast Asian experts were shocked in early 1963 by how little McNamara, Dean Rusk, MAcGeorge Bundy, Maxwell Taylor, and William Colby knew about the region. McNamara simply applied the Cold War framework—the domino theory, the loss of China in 1949, Korea in 1950—without understanding Vietnamese nationalism or culture. As he much later concluded, he was operating in "mirror imaging," assuming the enemy thought like Americans.
The Loyalty Question
What is most haunting in this account is McNamara's concept of loyalty. He believed that his paramount duty as Defense Secretary was to serve the president loyally—yet he and all cabinet members took an oath to uphold the Constitution. Was there a conflict or was serving the President’s goals precisely what was needed? This confusion between personal loyalty to a president and duty to the nation becomes painfully clear in his later admission to Ambassador to the U.K. David Bruce, with whom McNamara had an extended argument about whether to remain in Vietnam. McNamara told Bruce after the argument, "I just wanted you to know that I agree with everything you said. But in my position as defense secretary, I can't give any hint of that."
By 1965, McNamara much later admitted, "it was clear to me...that we were not going to achieve our objective in Vietnam." In 1966, he told a close associate, "I want to give the order to get our troops out of there so bad that I can hardly stand it." Yet he continued publicly defending policies he privately opposed. His philosophy was clear: "Once the objective has been established you must press on. If each person begins to substitute his own judgment you fragment and weaken the organization." But what happens when moving "together towards a reasonably acceptable goal" means moving together toward catastrophe?
LBJ understood McNamara's doubts and in 1967 effectively pushed him out by offering him the World Bank. In a November 1, 1967 memo, McNamara told to LBJ that his personal views were "incompatible with your own," explaining that "the present course of our action in Southeast Asia is dangerous, costly in lives and unsatisfactory to the American people." His last day as Defense Secretary was February 29, 1968—the day, as I note with personal significance, that my Brown classmate, an F-4 pilot, Fran Driscoll was killed.
Regret Without Responsibility
What does one make of McNamara's later attempts at reckoning? In December 1993, 25 years later, he confessed: "I've killed people, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands by my mistakes. I owe an explanation to those I killed." But that's not how it works. The dead don't need explanations; they needed someone in power to have made different choices when it mattered. His much delayed 1995 memoir "In Retrospect" prompted David Halberstam to write a devastating review - calling it "shallow, mechanistic, immensely disappointing...it could've been valuable had it been published 25 years earlier." A New York Times editorial captured the bitter irony: Mr. McNamara wants us to know that the war had to be stopped to avoid a national disaster, but the war's combat deaths cannot be repaid by “prime time apology and stale tears three decades later."
McNamara's later trips to Vietnam and his meetings with former adversaries, where he was greeted "not just cordially, but warmly," raise uncomfortable questions. The Vietnamese lost 3.2 million dead with 400,000-800,000 missing. What does it say that they could welcome him while Americans remain divided over whether his belated admissions deserve forgiveness or contempt?
The Unanswered Question
McNamara's takeaways from his "review" of the war read like an undergraduate term paper: don't mirror image, understand nationalism, know the culture, recognize technology's limits, level with Congress and the people. These are lessons that should have been obvious to anyone before sending thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese to their deaths.
But the haunting question remains: Could it possibly have made a difference if McNamara had publicly resigned and opposed LBJ's policy? Wouldn't another Secretary of Defense have been found to carry on? If so—and I suspect the answer is yes—what does that tell us about how we operate as a nation? It seems our systems and institutions can propel us toward disaster even when individuals within them recognize the trajectory?
Perhaps McNamara's tragedy is not just personal but structural. He was the right manager for the wrong war, the rational man in an irrational situation, the loyal subordinate in a system that confused loyalty to a president with duty to the country. His story suggests that sometimes the most dangerous people in government are not the incompetent but the supremely competent—those who can make terrible policies work efficiently, who can marshal resources brilliantly toward disastrous ends, and who confuse their organizational skills with wisdom. Then again, why was such a very intelligent man with “statistical fluency” but not one day of combat experience in a position to “run the war?” Management of the Defense Department does not equal designing military strategy. But in the event, do we believe the Vietnam War would have been different if McNamara had stuck to merely managing and imposing efficiency?
The Taubmans have given us not just a biography but a mirror in which to examine how intelligence without wisdom, efficiency without ethics, and loyalty without courage can combine to produce tragedy on a massive scale. McNamara lived to be 93, long enough to express regret but perhaps not long enough to fully comprehend the difference between explaining one's mistakes and taking responsibility for them.
Reading the Taubmans' biography of Robert McNamara feels like watching a Greek tragedy—one where the protagonist's greatest strengths become the instruments of his undoing, and where brilliant intellect collides with seeming moral blindness in ways that some say cost hundreds of thousands or millions of lives.
The Making of a Manager
McNamara emerges from these pages as a figure of stark contradictions. His colleagues at Harvard just prior to World War II described him as someone who "liked to be in the spotlight" and nyet was "the most aloof man I ever met"—a man who "did not tolerate fools lightly." This personality crystallized during World War II, where as a lieutenant colonel he imposed "managerial accounting" systems on the Air Corps with devastating efficiency. He helped orchestrate the B-29 firebombing of Tokyo, an operation that killed 100,000 civilians and left a million homeless. Years later, he would admit that he and General Curtis LeMay—whom he described as "without question the most outstanding combat commander I observed"—were "behaving as war criminals."
Yet at the time, McNamara was simply doing what he excelled at: applying rational systems to achieve "target destruction," as LeMay defined the mission. This was McNamara's genius and his curse—the ability to reduce human catastrophe to statistical problems requiring optimal solutions.
The Ford Years: A Preview
His post-war tenure at Ford Motor Company revealed the pattern that would define his Pentagon years. Colleagues noted that "Bob hated to change the course of action after he got going on something"—"After I make up my mind I don't have time to go back and keep going through it all again." "Working for Bob is a chore, because you can't loaf." When he left for Washington just 51 days after becoming Ford's president, Henry Ford lamented the years of training lost, later saying he couldn't find "a place worthy of him." If I offered him a job as head of the Ford Foundation, it would become "the McNamara Foundation."
The Pentagon: Management Meets Vietnam
At the Pentagon, McNamara's relentless rationalism reached its apex—and its nadir. He reorganized the armed forces, pushed computer systems so aggressively that staffers joked IBM stood for "I, Bob McNamara," and centralized power so that the Joint Chiefs reported to him rather than directly to the president. His confidence was breathtaking: "it never bothered me that I overrode the majority of the Chiefs or even occasionally their unanimous recommendations."
But Southeast Asia was different from Ford's production lines or Air Corps logistics. The Taubmans note that Southeast Asian experts were shocked in early 1963 by how little McNamara, Dean Rusk, MAcGeorge Bundy, Maxwell Taylor, and William Colby knew about the region. McNamara simply applied the Cold War framework—the domino theory, the loss of China in 1949, Korea in 1950—without understanding Vietnamese nationalism or culture. As he much later concluded, he was operating in "mirror imaging," assuming the enemy thought like Americans.
The Loyalty Question
What is most haunting in this account is McNamara's concept of loyalty. He believed that his paramount duty as Defense Secretary was to serve the president loyally—yet he and all cabinet members took an oath to uphold the Constitution. Was there a conflict or was serving the President’s goals precisely what was needed? This confusion between personal loyalty to a president and duty to the nation becomes painfully clear in his later admission to Ambassador to the U.K. David Bruce, with whom McNamara had an extended argument about whether to remain in Vietnam. McNamara told Bruce after the argument, "I just wanted you to know that I agree with everything you said. But in my position as defense secretary, I can't give any hint of that."
By 1965, McNamara much later admitted, "it was clear to me...that we were not going to achieve our objective in Vietnam." In 1966, he told a close associate, "I want to give the order to get our troops out of there so bad that I can hardly stand it." Yet he continued publicly defending policies he privately opposed. His philosophy was clear: "Once the objective has been established you must press on. If each person begins to substitute his own judgment you fragment and weaken the organization." But what happens when moving "together towards a reasonably acceptable goal" means moving together toward catastrophe?
LBJ understood McNamara's doubts and in 1967 effectively pushed him out by offering him the World Bank. In a November 1, 1967 memo, McNamara told to LBJ that his personal views were "incompatible with your own," explaining that "the present course of our action in Southeast Asia is dangerous, costly in lives and unsatisfactory to the American people." His last day as Defense Secretary was February 29, 1968—the day, as I note with personal significance, that my Brown classmate, an F-4 pilot, Fran Driscoll was killed.
Regret Without Responsibility
What does one make of McNamara's later attempts at reckoning? In December 1993, 25 years later, he confessed: "I've killed people, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands by my mistakes. I owe an explanation to those I killed." But that's not how it works. The dead don't need explanations; they needed someone in power to have made different choices when it mattered. His much delayed 1995 memoir "In Retrospect" prompted David Halberstam to write a devastating review - calling it "shallow, mechanistic, immensely disappointing...it could've been valuable had it been published 25 years earlier." A New York Times editorial captured the bitter irony: Mr. McNamara wants us to know that the war had to be stopped to avoid a national disaster, but the war's combat deaths cannot be repaid by “prime time apology and stale tears three decades later."
McNamara's later trips to Vietnam and his meetings with former adversaries, where he was greeted "not just cordially, but warmly," raise uncomfortable questions. The Vietnamese lost 3.2 million dead with 400,000-800,000 missing. What does it say that they could welcome him while Americans remain divided over whether his belated admissions deserve forgiveness or contempt?
The Unanswered Question
McNamara's takeaways from his "review" of the war read like an undergraduate term paper: don't mirror image, understand nationalism, know the culture, recognize technology's limits, level with Congress and the people. These are lessons that should have been obvious to anyone before sending thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese to their deaths.
But the haunting question remains: Could it possibly have made a difference if McNamara had publicly resigned and opposed LBJ's policy? Wouldn't another Secretary of Defense have been found to carry on? If so—and I suspect the answer is yes—what does that tell us about how we operate as a nation? It seems our systems and institutions can propel us toward disaster even when individuals within them recognize the trajectory?
Perhaps McNamara's tragedy is not just personal but structural. He was the right manager for the wrong war, the rational man in an irrational situation, the loyal subordinate in a system that confused loyalty to a president with duty to the country. His story suggests that sometimes the most dangerous people in government are not the incompetent but the supremely competent—those who can make terrible policies work efficiently, who can marshal resources brilliantly toward disastrous ends, and who confuse their organizational skills with wisdom. Then again, why was such a very intelligent man with “statistical fluency” but not one day of combat experience in a position to “run the war?” Management of the Defense Department does not equal designing military strategy. But in the event, do we believe the Vietnam War would have been different if McNamara had stuck to merely managing and imposing efficiency?
The Taubmans have given us not just a biography but a mirror in which to examine how intelligence without wisdom, efficiency without ethics, and loyalty without courage can combine to produce tragedy on a massive scale. McNamara lived to be 93, long enough to express regret but perhaps not long enough to fully comprehend the difference between explaining one's mistakes and taking responsibility for them.
November 29, 2025
« Still another sign of McNamara's political inexperience concerned the alleged "missile gap" in Moscow's favor for which Kennedy had successfully blamed the Republicans during his presidential campaign. The charge that Moscow possessed far more intercontinental missiles capable of striking the United States than Washington had rockets capable of reaching the USSR derived from an air force intelligence report that had been leaked to the Democrats. But since the CIA's classified estimate, based on the initial flights of a highly secret new American satellite reconnaissance system that had photographed Soviet missile bases in 1960, was more reassuring. McNamara was determined, upon taking office, to settle the dispute and to close the gap if, indeed, it existed. He and Gilpatric spent several weeks scrutinizing the data and concluded: "There was a gap — but it was in our favor!"
That conclusion was stunning. It revealed not only that a key plank in the Democratic campaign platform was bogus but that the alleged nuclear imbalance of power, which Moscow was counting on to expand its world influence and which Washington had feared was eroding its own, could now have the opposite effect. In October 1961, the administration would officially reveal the truth (in a speech by Gilpatric) that helped prompt Nikita Khrushchev to send intermediate range missiles to Cuba. But on February 6, 1961, when McNamara held his first meeting with the Pentagon press corps, what he and Gilpatric had discovered was still top secret, as were the spy satellite operations that revealed the truth.
Arthur Sylvester, McNamara's assistant secretary for public affairs, had urged him to meet the press: "Bob, you haven't met the Pentagon press yet, and you have to do that." McNamara replied that he "knew nothing about the Washington press and was totally unprepared to meet them," but Sylvester praised them as "a fine bunch" who would "treat you well." Actually, McNamara wrote later, "they were sharks, as they themselves would have admitted."
McNamara thought the meeting was "off-the-record," meaning that it could not be cited. In fact, it was "on background," permitting the press ro report what they heard without attributing it directly to McNamara.
The first question concerned the missile gap. McNamara replied that if one existed it was in our favor.
"My God," McNamara remembered. The newsmen "damn near broke the door down to get out!" The next morning's New York Times ran the story on page one. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) called for McNamara to resign.
"God almighty!" McNamara recalled. "I remember going to see Kennedy: 'Mr. President, I came down here to help you and all I've done is stimulate demands for your resignation. I'm fully prepared to resign.'"
"Oh, come on, Bob. Forget it. We're in a helluva mess, but we all put our foot in our mouth once in a while. Just forget it. It'll blow over." It eventually did, McNamara admitted, but he never forgot "the generous way he forgave my stupidity." Kennedy's understanding response to McNamara's mistakes won his undying respect, loyalty, and affection. His willingness to have McNamara appoint aides regardless of political affiliation was "magnificent." Kennedy's acquiescence in Roosevelt [Jr.]'s nonappointment was "one of the reasons I loved him." The missile gap mess? "Another reason I loved him." "It still amazes me," McNamara wrote in his 1995 memoir, "that my naivete never seemed to annoy President Kennedy." »
That conclusion was stunning. It revealed not only that a key plank in the Democratic campaign platform was bogus but that the alleged nuclear imbalance of power, which Moscow was counting on to expand its world influence and which Washington had feared was eroding its own, could now have the opposite effect. In October 1961, the administration would officially reveal the truth (in a speech by Gilpatric) that helped prompt Nikita Khrushchev to send intermediate range missiles to Cuba. But on February 6, 1961, when McNamara held his first meeting with the Pentagon press corps, what he and Gilpatric had discovered was still top secret, as were the spy satellite operations that revealed the truth.
Arthur Sylvester, McNamara's assistant secretary for public affairs, had urged him to meet the press: "Bob, you haven't met the Pentagon press yet, and you have to do that." McNamara replied that he "knew nothing about the Washington press and was totally unprepared to meet them," but Sylvester praised them as "a fine bunch" who would "treat you well." Actually, McNamara wrote later, "they were sharks, as they themselves would have admitted."
McNamara thought the meeting was "off-the-record," meaning that it could not be cited. In fact, it was "on background," permitting the press ro report what they heard without attributing it directly to McNamara.
The first question concerned the missile gap. McNamara replied that if one existed it was in our favor.
"My God," McNamara remembered. The newsmen "damn near broke the door down to get out!" The next morning's New York Times ran the story on page one. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) called for McNamara to resign.
"God almighty!" McNamara recalled. "I remember going to see Kennedy: 'Mr. President, I came down here to help you and all I've done is stimulate demands for your resignation. I'm fully prepared to resign.'"
"Oh, come on, Bob. Forget it. We're in a helluva mess, but we all put our foot in our mouth once in a while. Just forget it. It'll blow over." It eventually did, McNamara admitted, but he never forgot "the generous way he forgave my stupidity." Kennedy's understanding response to McNamara's mistakes won his undying respect, loyalty, and affection. His willingness to have McNamara appoint aides regardless of political affiliation was "magnificent." Kennedy's acquiescence in Roosevelt [Jr.]'s nonappointment was "one of the reasons I loved him." The missile gap mess? "Another reason I loved him." "It still amazes me," McNamara wrote in his 1995 memoir, "that my naivete never seemed to annoy President Kennedy." »
November 19, 2025
This 18 hour audiobook was just too long. I think it was at 7 hours in when he got the Sec of Defense job. These first 7 hrs are boring…the authors either found anyone who knew him at the time (neighbors, friends, other parents, teachers, work colleagues), or repeated quotes from other books about him, all with very glowing comments about him. Really? This could have used a good editor to shorten it and also cut down the hagiography.
I’m NOT a fan of JFK*, and really NOT a fan of his tag along brother. It seems McNamara was taken (wowed) by this family, and especially Jackie, who comes cross as too flirty and odd (she really likes the number 3). McNamara calls his wife an angel, but I wonder how she felt that whenever she “was out of town”, which seemed to be a lot, he would spend the night at Jackie’s. Also, hard to imagine him reading books and poetry aloud to Jackie. McNamara seemed to have a thing for married/unavailable women cuz years after his angel died, he had an open relationship with Joan Braden who was married and living with her hubby. (NOT in the book, Adlai …see below…had a long term relationship with married Marietta Peabody Tree.)
I was hoping to learn more than I already knew about McNamara and his time as Secretary. I guess all around this was too long, which would have been ok if it was interesting, and there was too much hagiography of McNamara, JFK and Tag.
* From the audiobook. I tried to recreate as accurately as possible.
JFK was lamenting why so many women are attracted to Adlai Stevenson. JFK once told Clayton Ritchie (who worked for Adlai) he didn’t understand why women, including his wife Jackie, liked and admired Stevenson so much, confessing that he didn’t feel as comfortable with women as Adlai did. “What do you suppose it means?” Kennedy asked, “Look, I may not be the best looking guy out there but for God sake Adlai’s half bald, he’s got a paunch, he wears his clothes in a dumpy sort away. Whats he got that I haven’t got?” Ritchie’s response Kay Graham wrote, pointed to what Graham herself thought women saw in Stevenson. “While you both love women, Adlai also likes them and women know the difference. He conveys the idea that they are intelligent and worth listening to. He cares about what they’re saying and what they’ve done. And that’s really very fetching. To which Kennedys response was “Well I don’t say you’re wrong, but I’m NOT sure I can go to those lengths”.
This 18 hour audiobook was just too long. I think it was at 7 hours in when he got the Sec of Defense job. These first 7 hrs are boring…the authors either found anyone who knew him at the time (neighbors, friends, other parents, teachers, work colleagues), or repeated quotes from other books about him, all with very glowing comments about him. Really? This could have used a good editor to shorten it and also cut down the hagiography.
I’m NOT a fan of JFK*, and really NOT a fan of his tag along brother. It seems McNamara was taken (wowed) by this family, and especially Jackie, who comes cross as too flirty and odd (she really likes the number 3). McNamara calls his wife an angel, but I wonder how she felt that whenever she “was out of town”, which seemed to be a lot, he would spend the night at Jackie’s. Also, hard to imagine him reading books and poetry aloud to Jackie. McNamara seemed to have a thing for married/unavailable women cuz years after his angel died, he had an open relationship with Joan Braden who was married and living with her hubby. (NOT in the book, Adlai …see below…had a long term relationship with married Marietta Peabody Tree.)
I was hoping to learn more than I already knew about McNamara and his time as Secretary. I guess all around this was too long, which would have been ok if it was interesting, and there was too much hagiography of McNamara, JFK and Tag.
* From the audiobook. I tried to recreate as accurately as possible.
JFK was lamenting why so many women are attracted to Adlai Stevenson. JFK once told Clayton Ritchie (who worked for Adlai) he didn’t understand why women, including his wife Jackie, liked and admired Stevenson so much, confessing that he didn’t feel as comfortable with women as Adlai did. “What do you suppose it means?” Kennedy asked, “Look, I may not be the best looking guy out there but for God sake Adlai’s half bald, he’s got a paunch, he wears his clothes in a dumpy sort away. Whats he got that I haven’t got?” Ritchie’s response Kay Graham wrote, pointed to what Graham herself thought women saw in Stevenson. “While you both love women, Adlai also likes them and women know the difference. He conveys the idea that they are intelligent and worth listening to. He cares about what they’re saying and what they’ve done. And that’s really very fetching. To which Kennedys response was “Well I don’t say you’re wrong, but I’m NOT sure I can go to those lengths”.
October 27, 2025
A loving look at a professional chronic liar. How do you sell the Vietnam War to a gullible audience of Americans? Simple, if your Lyndon Johnson and his Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. You privately admit to yourselves and a few key White House aides during taped conversations, meticulously reproduced here, that this war has no chance of succeeding, while publicly plugging the war as necessary to prevent the "falling dominoes" effect in Southeast Asia and shooting down critics, such as Clark Clifford, McNamara's successor on the job, for being hysterical and cowardly. Why would any rational and half-decent human commit such perfidy? Philip Taubman digs into the background of the boy wonder, a Republican who ran Ford Motor company before John F. Kennedy tapped him for the post at Defense in 1960. Taubman thinks McNamara's life-long, all-American, can-do spirit is to blame. When Kennedy called him with the job offer McNamara replied he had no credentials for running the Pentagon, and JFK retorted, "that's alright. I don't know of any schools for President either". A true meeting of minds. Yet, there may be a simpler explanation. Hannah Arendt argued in LYING IN POLITICS, her study of the Pentagon Papers, commissioned by McNamara, that by the Sixties the European concept of "reasons of state" had been imported into the United States. The public had no right to know of critical, indeed, life-and-death decisions. Americans only needed to be told their government had designated an issue so important that the security of the country was at stake and dissent, even knowing the truth, was unpatriotic. McNamara's life is not a personal Greek tragedy of hubris leading to a fall. It's the story of a nation that lost its moral compass and paid for it, with young men's blood, on the battle fields of Vietnam.
November 8, 2025
The Vietnam war was one of the most terrible tagedies in American history, which cost the American people more than 58000 deaths. This redundant war, which was part of the domino theory of the Cold War,was considered by many to be one which could be won. But, alas, this was not to be the case. As the authors of this excellent book show, McNamara ,who judged everything by statistics, shows that the policy makers had some fixed idea:the more dead, the better the chances would be to the winners in this conflict. McNamara was a victim of his own flawed statistical thinking. He also had doubts about the war some years before going to his next job becoming the President of the World Bank.
The book shows his many positive and negative sides in an environment where President Johnson and his other advisors were certain that victory would soon come to America. Just pour more and more soldiers, as General Westmoreland demanded and got, and ,voila, they will soon be having a field day against Hanoi. How wrong they were. Waht a price America paid. And what a humiliation the best army in the world had to endure.
What is stunning is that I do not know of any army which has won a war against guerrilla fighters, like the Americans who were bleeding to death by the primitive means encountered against them and executed by the Viet Cong.
Leaders and everyone should learn a lesson: a regular army cannot beat guerrillas. Never. Take the case of Napoleon and Spain of the 19th century, where he had to give up Spain because of the Spanish guerrilla fighters, calling Spain before he ordered his army from the :" my Spanish Ulcer:".
This is a very deeply and impressively researched book and riveting, original, quoting many new and untapped new sources. Much recommended.
The book shows his many positive and negative sides in an environment where President Johnson and his other advisors were certain that victory would soon come to America. Just pour more and more soldiers, as General Westmoreland demanded and got, and ,voila, they will soon be having a field day against Hanoi. How wrong they were. Waht a price America paid. And what a humiliation the best army in the world had to endure.
What is stunning is that I do not know of any army which has won a war against guerrilla fighters, like the Americans who were bleeding to death by the primitive means encountered against them and executed by the Viet Cong.
Leaders and everyone should learn a lesson: a regular army cannot beat guerrillas. Never. Take the case of Napoleon and Spain of the 19th century, where he had to give up Spain because of the Spanish guerrilla fighters, calling Spain before he ordered his army from the :" my Spanish Ulcer:".
This is a very deeply and impressively researched book and riveting, original, quoting many new and untapped new sources. Much recommended.
October 2, 2025
it's hard to write a book about someone's inherent contradictions, because the book itself comes out uneven. IMO McNamara is one of the most interesting figures of the 20th century: the braniac, supreme manager, Kennedy Confidante who led the US into the war of Vietnam and could never fully articulate his reasoning. This book seeks to uncover McNamara as a man, through his friendships (particularly his very very very close relationship with Jackie Kennedy.... wow) and his insecurities.
where it struggles is in pacing, a few instances are repeated and rehashed especially toward the back half of the book. Its focus on McNamara also severely understates the human destruction of the war. I think a mid point chapter devoted to the tragedy of Vietnam would have been extremely helpful in grounding the reader. Also underplayed is the impact of domestic politics, especially the fear of capitulation. it's never a central theme.
next up: re read of The Best and the Brightest.
where it struggles is in pacing, a few instances are repeated and rehashed especially toward the back half of the book. Its focus on McNamara also severely understates the human destruction of the war. I think a mid point chapter devoted to the tragedy of Vietnam would have been extremely helpful in grounding the reader. Also underplayed is the impact of domestic politics, especially the fear of capitulation. it's never a central theme.
next up: re read of The Best and the Brightest.
December 10, 2025
Review: "I know of no one in America better qualified to take over the post of Defense Secretary than Bob McNamara,” wrote Ford chief executive Henry Ford II in late 1960.
It had been only fifty-one days since the former Harvard Business School whiz had become the automaker’s president, but now he was off to Washington to join President-elect John F. Kennedy’s brain trust. At 44, about a year older than JFK, Robert S. McNamara had forged a reputation as a brilliant, if arrogant, manager and problem-solver with a computer-like mastery of facts and statistics. He seemed unstoppable.
Yet, despite sterling qualifications to run the Pentagon, McNamara would encounter a problem his managerial acumen could not solve — at least not in the way the Cold War consensus may have demanded. Under two presidents, he sank the country into an unwinnable war in Vietnam. He misled the American people, drove decisions that brought about the deaths of 58,000 U.S. service members and millions of Vietnamese, and lived out his last decades a tormented man, wracked by guilt and regret but never formally apologizing for the epic disaster he helped create in Southeast Asia, as his personal correspondence and his public memoirs attest.
In all his charts and graphs and body count stats, McNamara failed to measure what mattered most: the unrelenting determination of the Vietnamese people to liberate their country from foreign occupation...
More...
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/rob...
It had been only fifty-one days since the former Harvard Business School whiz had become the automaker’s president, but now he was off to Washington to join President-elect John F. Kennedy’s brain trust. At 44, about a year older than JFK, Robert S. McNamara had forged a reputation as a brilliant, if arrogant, manager and problem-solver with a computer-like mastery of facts and statistics. He seemed unstoppable.
Yet, despite sterling qualifications to run the Pentagon, McNamara would encounter a problem his managerial acumen could not solve — at least not in the way the Cold War consensus may have demanded. Under two presidents, he sank the country into an unwinnable war in Vietnam. He misled the American people, drove decisions that brought about the deaths of 58,000 U.S. service members and millions of Vietnamese, and lived out his last decades a tormented man, wracked by guilt and regret but never formally apologizing for the epic disaster he helped create in Southeast Asia, as his personal correspondence and his public memoirs attest.
In all his charts and graphs and body count stats, McNamara failed to measure what mattered most: the unrelenting determination of the Vietnamese people to liberate their country from foreign occupation...
More...
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/rob...
November 25, 2025
David Halberstam characterized Robert McNamara as an incomplete man. This biography delves deep into McNamara’s many many complexities and reveals a much more deeply conflicted person than I, at least, had ever believed. It is a very readable history with many — for me —fresh insights. My one criticism is there are too many musings— what if this; does this suggest; etc. But otherwise heartily recommended.
November 23, 2025
I gave it a hire grade than many of the reviewers primarily because the authors used new sources and elaborated on McNamara later years and his relationship with Jackie Kennedy and the Kennedy's in general. He evidently was a smart person but doesn't come off as a warm human being. Good insights how the Vietnam war impacted his family and his life after being Secretary of Defense.
November 28, 2025
I was a young man during the Vietnam War so this book was of interest to me. An interesting perspective about the man who had a key role in that war. I didn't give it 5 stars because it seemed too heavy on quotes.
September 28, 2025
Too much about Jackie
November 14, 2025
Makes me desperate for Caro’s final LBJ book
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