peteg's blog - noise - books - 2025 10 16 Taubman McNamaraAtWar

Kindle. Who wants to read about Robert S. McNamara in 2025? — especially an account that focuses so myopically on the American side of the Việt Nam war when so many far superior and timely books have been available for decades now: David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest (1972), Fred Kaplan's Wizards of Armageddon (1983), and even McNamara's own memoir In Retrospect (1995) and Errol Morris's interview with him The Fog of War (2003). And so on. This journalistic take is such a letdown after reading David G. Marr's excellent history. If the enduring lesson is that the U.S. establishment cannot learn to avoid quagmires then surely it is far more interesting to study organisations that can, such as the structure of the wartime Vietnamese forces. This probably discounts the pleasures of eternal kulturkrieg.

I was disappointed by how shallow and selective this book is as a biography of McNamara. You won't learn what he did at Ford (OK, he wasn't at war then) but not enough is said about his time with Curtis LeMay during World War II (fire bombing Tokyo) and the World Bank (at war with global poverty). Did he make any academic contributions? (Daniel Ellsberg, for instance, contributed to game theory alongside his famous interjections.) The focus is mostly on his relationships with the powerful (consigliere to the Kennedys and LBJ), his womanising, the forbearing wife, the poor parenting of his children, his domineering management style incongruous with his social ease.

There were a few things that stuck, none of any real importance. McNamara was clearly an authoritarian (Chapter 12: "'the more important the issue the fewer people who should be involved,' he had once said at the Pentagon."). He claims to have never read the Pentagon Papers (!) which is weird as he commissioned them as an input to reviewing the decision processes, a task he reckoned with himself from the late 1980s onwards. (Chapter 13 reviews the previous biographies, autobiographies, conferences in Việt Nam etc. of this period in a pile of reductive absolutionist blah.) It is insinuated that McNamara participated in the relaxed sexual (a)morality of Washington during his stint as Secretary of Defence (think JFK).

There is not enough Kissinger here, something I would have doubted was ever possible. Specifically we're told about Kissinger's attempts (?) to open peace talks from 1966/67 (dates are often vague) but not what McNamara thought about his (reputed) sabotaging of them for personal gain; sure, McNamara was gone by the 1968 election but even so.

There are some clangers. As always it is claimed that JFK would have ended the war in his second term (in direct contradiction with LBJ's expansion in 1965) but the provided evidence is thin. (Chomsky has been dismissive of these claims of dovishness for decades.) The authors do not understand mutually-assured destruction (MAD); from Chapter 13:

Neither McNamara himself, nor Kennedy, he insisted at Hawk's Cay, 'ever thought that we would launch a first-strike under any circumstances. Putting moral issues aside,' he continued, 'there was no reasonable chance that we could get away with a first strike unscathed.' To admit that publicly would destroy deterrence, so they 'didn’t tell the military,' and 'the Soviets, of course, had no way of knowing this.'

Nuclear deterrence ala MAD is about having a reliably lethal response to a nuclear attack; it has nothing to do with who shot first. I doubt there were reasonable expectations of escaping blowback since about 1949, even allowing for the famous missile gap. (As canvassed by Fred Kaplan and others, this first-strike ambiguity was US/European mitigation of the superiority in conventional forces the Soviets had at the time. Then as now it was about the resourcing and not the ethics.)

As always the Vietnamese barely exist, except to say afterwards how wronged they were.

James Santel summarised it for the New York Times. Goodreads: "Too much about Jackie."