What Robert McNamara learned from the war

Robert McNamara was considered one of the brightest stars of his generation. He excelled at Harvard Business School, where he went on to teach, rose through the ranks of the Ford Motor Company to become chief executive, and was appointed secretary of defense by president John Kennedy at the age of 44. He capped his career serving for over a decade as president of the World Bank.

In charge of the Pentagon under presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson from 1961 to 1968, McNamara was one of the key architects of the Vietnam war. However, the war also proved to be his personal undoing.

Starting from 1965, McNamara oversaw the massive deployment of US troops to Vietnam, whose field presence peaked in the late 1960s at over half a million. In what is generally seen as his greatest military misjudgement, McNamara continued the deployment for more than two years after he had received intelligence indicating that the war was unwinnable, failing to urge Johnson to cut his losses and withdraw.

Peace was only reached years after Johnson and McNamara left office. Ultimately, the conflict claimed the lives of over 60,000 US servicemen and an estimated 1–3 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. McNamara took much of the blame for the unpopular war, which weighed on him personally for the rest of his life.

Relying on newly disclosed diaries and letters, and recent interviews, in McNamara at War, Philip and William Taubman paint a fresh picture of this controversial figure, disclosing his professional and personal vulnerabilities. They also provide valuable insights into the lessons that McNamara took away from Vietnam.

Philip Taubman, a former New York Times Washinton bureau chief, is currently affiliated with Stanford University and has written an acclaimed biography of US statesman George Schultz. His co-author and brother William teaches political science at Amherst College and has published a Pulitzer prize-winning biography of the Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev.

From childhood, McNamara aspired to excel at everything he tackled. And throughout his career he was notorious for his obsession with numerical efficiency. The authors shed important new light on McNamara’s assignment as a staff officer at the Guam headquarters for the 1945 firebombing air attacks on Tokyo. While reviewing how to streamline operations, he noted that to avoid being shot down, US bomber pilots were flying at high altitudes and often missed their targets. Pilots were subsequently ordered to fly much lower, which compromised safety but enhanced efficiency in terms of ‘units of destruction’.

During his Pentagon years, McNamara had to deal with widespread public opposition to the Vietnam War. The authors describe in fascinating detail how McNamara was caught between Johnson, to whom he felt great loyalty; the administration’s hawks, led by secretary of state Dean Rusk, and senior generals in the Pentagon; and critics of the war, including John Kennedy’s influential widow, Jackie, and brother, Robert Kennedy, who were also McNamara’s close family friends.

Prioritising loyalty, McNamara stayed on as secretary of defense long after he had lost faith in the war. Ultimately Johnson had to ease him out of the Pentagon and into the World Bank, where he could focus on what he by then saw as more socially deserving challenges. Interestingly, at the World Bank McNamara set about tackling poverty reduction with the same relentless focus on numbers and targets that he had applied at both Ford and the Pentagon.

The book’s most valuable chapters discuss McNamara’s own perception of his mistakes, and of the lessons that the United States learned from Vietnam and the Cuban missile crisis, which also took place on his watch. The US’s experience in Vietnam marked a turning point in its strategic thinking about putting boots on the ground far from its own borders. And it taught US leaders about the limits of military power and the importance of public opinion.

McNamara was also keenly aware of the impact of the nuclear threat on military decisions. In what he dubbed McNamara’s law, he highlighted the difficulty in the nuclear age of predicting the effects of the use of force ‘because of the risks of accident, misperception, miscalculation and inadvertence’.

As secretary of defense, McNamara came to realise how little US decision-makers actually knew about Vietnam. In retrospect, he stressed the importance of understanding local conditions and having an exit strategy: ‘Before each operation there should be a paper on how to get out. And if you can’t get out, don’t do it’.

McNamara spent his retirement reflecting, writing and lecturing about his lessons from Vietnam, and was frustrated that they generated only limited interest among US leaders. With Russia mired in its war on Ukraine with no clear way out, McNamara’s lessons remain relevant today and deserve to be revisited.

This review was published by The Strategist.