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MCNAMARA AT WAR

Philip Taubman William Taubman

A New History

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. 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 during the summer of 1965, strongly urging Johnson to send hundreds of thousands of American ground troops just weeks before he concluded that the war was unwinnable. For the next two and a half years, despite his doubts, 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 himselfriven by melancholy, guilt, zealous loyalty, and a profound inability to admit his flawed thinking about Vietnam before it was too late.

William Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College. His book, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of McNamara at War: A New History and Gorbachev: His Life and Times. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Philip Taubman, a former New York Times reporter, is affiliated with Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is the author of In the Nation's Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz

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Book Published 2025-09-23 by W. W. Norton & Company

Comments

The Taubman brothers have given us the deepest probe into the formative years of Robert McNamara, seeking an answer to the following question: how could such a brilliant man lead the United States into an unnecessary and unwinnable war in Vietnam, and then become the designated face of that failure?

Major achievement of research and writing.

Philip and Willam Taubman have written a remarkable book. I was fortunate to work with Robert McNamara, not just on a non-profit board, but also on issues regarding nuclear weapons and arms control. The Taubmans have done a brilliant job of putting McNamara into vitally important context; showing the complexities of his relationships and the challenges they posed to his aspirations. McNamara was trapped by his sense of duty and his own ambivalence regarding his choices. But he was honest about his pain. As his friend, I will remember him with compassion and an appreciation for the loneliness he felt as he grappled with what he had done, and what he had hoped he could do.

Excellent and probing about one of the central figures of the Vietnam War.

At last, we have the man in full. McNamara at War illuminates the high-octane ambition and ability that propelled Robert McNamara to the pinnacles of power in both the private and political realms. With penetrating insight and capacious sensitivity, the authors give us nothing less than McNamara Agonistes: a vivid portrait of this uncommonly brilliant and uncommonly complex soul tormented by trials of intelligence, will, morality, and loyalty. A compelling, memorable read. It reveals much about the waging of the Vietnam War as well as the often-baffling labyrinths of human nature.

Philip and William Taubman's McNamara at War is a compelling biography of McNamara's life. The Taubmans meticulously explore McNamara's life before, during and after becoming Secretary of Defense, identifying from early days an exceptionally complicated man whose traitssuch as confidence he was the smartest man in the room and a deep-seated reluctance to change his mind or admit he was wrongwould play an important part in his downfall. A transfixing tale of tragedy.

An exhaustive account of a fascinating man whose high intelligence was matched by his personal complexity. It shows that his intellectual arrogance helped make him unwilling to account publicly for the extent of his mistakes about the Vietnam war while his personal decency made him privately suffer for the vast costs of his and his colleagues' failures there as they prolonged and widened the war.

In McNamara at War two brothers, a top-flight biographer and a top-flight journalist, have joined forces to create a character study of Robert McNamara, one of the most complicated figures in modern American history. The resulting work is an evidence-based meditation on McNamara's agonizing relationship to himself, his family, and the nation and on the power of the government to create mass destruction, with seemingly less power, or inclination, to stop it. Confident, thorough, compassionate, and yet clear-eyed, this masterful work should be required reading for those who lived through the daily televised body counts and for anyone who hopes not to ever again.

Philip and William Taubman have written a compelling, fluid, and insightful biography of one of the most important figures in American foreign policy in the second half of the twentieth century, a man known to history as the architect of the Vietnam War. Readers who have no personal memory of the Vietnam period as well as those who remember it vividly will find McNamara at War fascinating.