More than 50 years after Robert McNamara left his teaching post at Harvard Business School, he received a letter from a former student stating that “I have told many of my friends that nothing you’ve said or done in your very illustrious career will ever diminish my opinion of you or the regard in which you are held by my family.” This ungainly equivocation might seem unfair or even insulting — wasn’t McNamara the man who saved Ford from bankruptcy, worked tirelessly to lay the foundations for President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” and all but eliminated the horrific African disease onchocerciasis, also known as “river blindness,” during his tenure as president of the World Bank?
He was, and many admirable things besides. But he was also the defense secretary from 1961 to 1968 and the architect of what would come to be known as “McNamara’s War” in Vietnam. As Philip and William Taubman explain in their new biography, McNamara understood as early as June 1965 that it would be impossible to beat Ho Chi Minh or even fight him to a draw. Yet his continued public support for the war effort would lead to the deaths of more than 41,000 American service members after that date.
McNamara’s 1996 memoir, In Retrospect, was meant to serve as a public accounting of the errors made by him and others during Vietnam. “We were wrong, terribly wrong,” he noted. “We owe it to future generations to explain why.” His earnestness in this effort was such that he requested, and in one case received, permission to reprint the most virulent reviews of the book as footnotes in the subsequent paperback edition. Yet the relative tardiness of this explanation, coupled with the fact that McNamara was unwilling to make the sort of direct, prostrated apology for which his critics had been calling since the ’70s, did nothing to erase his broadly sketched public image as a man whose devotion to “statistical control” and modern management techniques, regardless of cost, utterly eclipsed any decency or humanity he might have otherwise claimed to possess.
McNamara at War: A New History, released this month, will do little to change that perception, even though it is unusual in devoting a full quarter of its length to McNamara’s youth and another quarter to his career and personal life after leaving the Defense Department. “Our aim in this book is neither to bury McNamara nor to praise him,” the authors caution. “It is to better understand him.” In doing so, they had access to some previously unseen information, mostly correspondence within the McNamara family and a series of shockingly intimate letters between McNamara and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, plus the private diary of McNamara’s Pentagon aide, John McNaughton.
This additional material is thin gruel with which to prepare a 417-page book, so the Taubmans have chosen to spackle the considerable gaps in their foundation with a healthy dollop of pop-psychology-at-a-distance. Often, this takes the form of broad or shocking assertions that receive little or no reinforcement after their deployment. We are told that McNamara “learned to lie at his mother’s knee” — the source of this is, apparently, an email from another biographer. Various theories of “control” or “mastery” appear throughout the book, but they are never tied together in any convincing fashion. “McNamara … met and mastered nearly every major challenge in his life … but the Vietnam War mastered him.” Does one really need a $39.99 book to achieve or deliver this level of insight? It’s available, for free, on Reddit.
Much of McNamara at War is simply a slog through the highlights of other, more interesting biographies. A footnote in the “Swords To Plowshares” chapter is illustrative: “This episode quotes from, paraphrases, and in large part relies on Hendickson, The Living And The Dead.” The original parts, where they appear, are often unpleasant. Personal characterizations are treated as plain fact: “Johnson not only thwarted McNamara but, [McNamara’s second wife] correctly insists, corrupted him.”
Yet this is an indispensable book for anyone interested in the former defense secretary, solely because of the correspondence between Jackie and “Bob.” They gave each other personalized gifts, including a watercolor by Jackie of a stuffed tiger Bob had brought back from Vietnam for her. They appear to have made a habit of listening to the same music and reading the same poetry, often when physically together. “Dear, dear Bob,” she wrote, “I am thinking so many kind thoughts of you tonight.” In another, she asserted that “I love you — for what you are — and for what you suffer — and for all you are to me, my dear Bob.”
McNamara was hardly less intimate in his notes to her: “As I was leaving you, I fear I revealed, unintentionally, how much I miss you and how deep my love for you remains — perhaps it was because your smile was never more beautiful.” They continued in this vein after McNamara’s departure for the World Bank. Yet when Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis, the ardor and intimacy of her letters cooled, and she responded to him less and less frequently.
Again and again, the Taubmans dance on the edge of calling McNamara an adulterer, making much hay of the fact that he would occasionally spend the night at Kennedy’s house, but they always stop short of making the plain accusation, substituting instead more of their cherished pop-psych theories. “Jackie’s exuberant handwritten notes … reveal a deepening relationship, possibly fueled by a sense that McNamara offered a stable, supportive refuge from her husband’s predatory sexual pursuits.” At best, this is sailing next to the wind. At worst, it is salacious, but timidly expressed, fan fiction. This would be a better book had the Taubmans been willing to include more of this previously unseen material. It is common in biographies to include entire letters. Why not do so here? Is it because the unquoted bulk of the material would contradict the authors’ interpretations?
The second-to-last chapter, nastily titled “Lonely Widower Seeks Companionship,” contains a cringeworthy and overlong examination of sexual adventurism and/or polyamory on the part of McNamara’s companion Joan Braden and her husband Tom. It is difficult to imagine what this adds to the historical record, if anything — doubly so because it was already thoroughly explored in Braden’s autobiography.
Perhaps out of fealty or gratitude to Craig McNamara, who materially assisted the Taubmans in their work, McNamara at War closes with a mopey discussion of how Craig McNamara’s wife and sister had to buy his father’s 1962 calendar from an estate sale organized by Robert McNamara’s second wife. This damp squib of an event is not elevated by the book’s final sentence:
But the final ironies of [McNamara’s] life are that many who continued to pursue peace among peoples and nations and to help the least advantaged among us have been no more successful than he was, and that what has remained in the hearts and memories of his children may be warmer and closer than was the case during some periods of his life.
THE RESURGENCE OF THE HANDWRITTEN
Which is a long-winded way of saying … what, exactly? Would-be readers who are bewildered or put off by this summary should consider themselves warned: Most of the book is like that. It bears all the marks of being done in haste by two men who rarely compared notes. There is occasional doubling of quotes and assertions across chapters that is surely the product of separate authors.
As biographers, the Taubmans bring an enviable resume to their latest task, but so did Robert McNamara in 1961 — it doesn’t always mean you’re the right man for the job. McNamara at War is fundamentally fuzzy, doing little justice to the works from which it draws and almost none to its unique source material. And while it must almost always be the case that the subject of a biography is a fundamentally greater human being than is the biographer, the discrepancy seems almost cartoonish in its exaggeration here. The Taubmans, who admit that they were both able to skip serving in Vietnam through various privileges, come across as ankle-biters hoping to elevate themselves by sitting in unearned judgment of a genuinely tragic man. Yet even in this effort, they pale by comparison: When, in October 2002, Fidel Castro suggested that McNamara return to Cuba 10 years hence to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bob’s answer was as pithy as it was pitiless. “I will not be in Havana,” he replied. “I will be in Hell.”
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver, a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines, and writer of the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.
