McNamara at War

by William Taubman, Philip Taubman

Overview

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. He was an invaluable ally of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson as U.S. secretary of defense, and he had a deeply moving relationship with Jackie Kennedy. But to the country, McNamara was the leading advocate for American escalation in Vietnam. He strongly advised Johnson to deploy hundreds of thousands of American ground troops, just weeks before concluding that the war was unwinnable, and for the next two and a half years, McNamara failed to urge Johnson to cut his losses and withdraw.

McNamara at War examines McNamara’s life of intense personal contradictions, following his childhood, his career as 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. Philip and William Taubman had access to materials previously unavailable to McNamara biographers, including Jacqueline Kennedy’s warm letters to McNamara during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and beyond; family correspondence dating back to McNamara’s service in World War II; and a secret diary maintained by McNamara’s top Vietnam policy aide. What emerges is the comprehensive story of the infamous former leader of the Pentagon: riven by melancholy, guilt, zealous loyalty, and a profound inability to admit his flawed thinking about Vietnam before it was too late. McNamara at War is a portrait of a man at war with himself—with a grave influence on the history of the United States and the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324007173
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/23/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512

About the Author

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 Washington Bureau Chief, 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

Editorial Reviews

"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."

David Kennedy

"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."

Susan Eisenhower

"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 traits—such as confidence he was the smartest man in the room and a deep-seated reluctance to change his mind or admit he was wrong—would play an important part in his downfall. A transfixing tale of tragedy."

Robert M. Gates

"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."

Madeleine Blais

"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."

Anthony Lake

"A major achievement of research and writing."

Peter Osnos

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

Bob Woodward

"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."

Michael Mandelbaum

"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?"

Joseph J. Ellis