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.)

The blind hubris of waging war by the numbers. Drawing on previously unknown notes, letters, and private diaries, journalist Philip Taubman and his brother, political scientist William Taubman, present a fresh look at the much-scrutinized life of Robert McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War. The secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara has been viewed by historians as a brilliant, driven man forever stained by his mismanagement of the war. This volume reexamines his motivations, loves, and rivalries. From his modest San Francisco childhood, with a distant father and a hovering mother, to his academic success, the authors explore what made the intensely competitive McNamara tick. At Harvard Business School, as new thinking about data as a management tool was taking shape, McNamara helped develop "managerial accounting." The 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed his trajectory, and he was recruited to the U.S. Air Corps by officers seeking statistical controllers or "balance sheet warriors" to improve military management. McNamara's success led to a postwar career at Ford Motor Company, constrained by antiquated practices. His brief corporate experience shaped McNamara's outlook in the most notorious phase of his life, as he was invited to join the newly elected Kennedy administration on the brink of the Vietnam War. Private documents reveal the whirl of activity at the heart of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations' social and political networks. McNamara's loyalty to Johnson and passionate embrace of the Kennedy family, especially Jacqueline, exacerbated the deep despair he felt for the massive loss of life in Vietnam, the impossibility of winning the war, and his failure to push for withdrawal. Intense contradictions infuse his conversations and correspondence in this absorbing journalistic account. Extensive notes, bibliography, and photographs make for a nuanced, rich portrayal of a difficult man. A deeply humane dissection of McNamara's tragic failures in Vietnam. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.