LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail

PublicAffairs founder and former Washington Post correspondent Osnos (editor of George Soros: A Life in Full) takes on the much-written-about relationship between President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and their prosecution of the Vietnam War in a lightweight book he categorizes as “history written by a journalist who was there.” In reality, this book, in which Osnos refers to his main subject as “my friend Bob,” is a weak attempt to whitewash McNamara’s reputation as the man most responsible for the debacle of the Vietnam War. Osnos points out many of McNamara’s failings as the war’s manager, then counters with unconvincing excuses. By not telling Johnson, for example, that he believed the war was a mistake and unwinnable in 1965, and by continually obfuscating and dissembling about it in public, McNamara, Osnos says, was simply “doing his duty to the presidency as he saw it.” Elsewhere, he writes that the perception of McNamara’s “intensity and his publicly bumptious certainty,” rather than his outright lying, “defined his lasting reputation.” Padded out with several pages of excerpts from McNamara’s self-serving apologia In Retrospect, this fails to persuade. (Nov.)

This review has been updated.