A deeply humane dissection of McNamara’s tragic failures in Vietnam.
The blind hubris of waging war by the numbers.
Drawing on previously unknown notes, letters, and private diaries, journalist Philip Taubman and his brother, political scientist William Taubman, present a fresh look at the much-scrutinized life of Robert McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War. The secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara has been viewed by historians as a brilliant, driven man forever stained by his mismanagement of the war. This volume reexamines his motivations, loves, and rivalries. From his modest San Francisco childhood, with a distant father and a hovering mother, to his academic success, the authors explore what made the intensely competitive McNamara tick. At Harvard Business School, as new thinking about data as a management tool was taking shape, McNamara helped develop “managerial accounting.” The 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed his trajectory, and he was recruited to the U.S. Air Corps by officers seeking statistical controllers or “balance sheet warriors” to improve military management. McNamara’s success led to a postwar career at Ford Motor Company, constrained by antiquated practices. His brief corporate experience shaped McNamara’s outlook in the most notorious phase of his life, as he was invited to join the newly elected Kennedy administration on the brink of the Vietnam War. Private documents reveal the whirl of activity at the heart of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ social and political networks. McNamara’s loyalty to Johnson and passionate embrace of the Kennedy family, especially Jacqueline, exacerbated the deep despair he felt for the massive loss of life in Vietnam, the impossibility of winning the war, and his failure to push for withdrawal. Intense contradictions infuse his conversations and correspondence in this absorbing journalistic account. Extensive notes, bibliography, and photographs make for a nuanced, rich portrayal of a difficult man.
A deeply humane dissection of McNamara’s tragic failures in Vietnam.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781324007166
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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