Review of “McNamara at war”

I registered for the draft as a high school senior during the Vietnam war. At the time, you registered at 18, your lottery number was assigned at 19, and you were drafted at 20 if your number was low enough. In the event (a) my number was high enough that I wouldn’t get drafted and (b) the draft ended by the time I turned 20.

The Vietnam War was very much a shaping event for me. By the time I was a postdoc, I embarked on a project of learning history the history of war that began with Stanley Karnow’s book “Vietnam.” Eventually, I realized I couldn’t understand the Vietnam war without understanding the Cold War, I couldn’t understand the Cold War without understanding WWII, and I couldn’t understand WWII without understanding WWI. 40 years and over 200 histories and biographies later, I’m still filling in gaps in my understanding of history and how it informs the present.

I just finished “McNamara at war: A new history” by Philip and William Taubman. McNamara, as JFK’s and LBJ’s Secretary of Defense, was a major architect of US policy in Vietnam, and for that reason became a widely reviled figure by the end of his service on Johnson’s cabinet. By then, he had personally realized that the war could not be won by the US but was unable to (a) make the case to Johnson or (b) resign in protest. By this time, his close personal friends and his family had turned against the war. 

It took decades for McNamara to publicly admit that the war was a terrible mistake. Even then, he couldn’t apologize, despite having written two books analyzing what went wrong. David Halberstam, whose book “The Best and the Brightest” is a masterful history of how the US became enmeshed in Vietnam, held a lifelong contempt for McNamara. After leaving Johnson’s cabinet, McNamara directed the World Bank, attempting to atone by his service for the world’s most vulnerable, most of whom lived in third world countries like Vietnam.

I found this book engrossing and revealing. “McNamara at war” has been criticized for sanewashing its protagonist. Maybe because I’ve been a lifelong member of the Church of the Second Chance, I found the efforts to give a human face to the historical character of Bob McNamara to be credible without eliding his failings. I think the episodes describing his various relationships/affairs after his wife died were part of this attempt to humanize him, but they were too detailed for my taste. More useful and telling were the challenges he had with his children, particularly his son. McNamara had a poor relationship with his father growing up, and the book uses that to explain his relative aloofness with his own kids.

If this book was intended as an antidote to “The Best and the Brightest,” where McNamara is front and center and comes off badly, it did some useful work. McNamara spent his adult life in a cage of his own making and never really broke free from his public image or his private demons.

In an Afterward, the authors direct us to the possible lessons of the Vietnam War.

“Years later, Army general H.R. McMaster, a thoughtful student of military history, critiqued the military leadership’s acquiescence to the Johnson-McNamara approach [to the Vietnam War] in “Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.” McMaster argued that the Johnson-McNamara policies required selling “a strategy for Vietnam that appeared cheap and could be conducted with minimal public and Congressional attention.” It demanded “carefully controlled and sharply limited military action” that was “reversible and therefore could be carried out at minimal risk and cost.”

Certainly, the US failed to learn this lesson in Afghanistan and Iraq, and if Trump commits troops to Iran, we may repeat the same mistakes there.