For McNamara, Redemption Denied

Can we honor and respect Robert McNamara? From the time the young California native left a teaching position at Harvard Business School to join the Army Air Corps during the Second World War, McNamara has been a tireless improver and rationalizer of military and industrial institutions, even of the world. But as Deborah Shapley makes abundantly clear in Promise and Power, her eminently readable and cleverly crafted biographical study of McNamara, what the nation needed during the Vietnam War era was not a whiz kid, not a supreme bean-counter, but a leader of vision, moral courage and scrupulous honesty. And here McNamara's flaws overwhelm a lifetime of achievements, for the portrait that emerges from Shapley's book is of a man who was the primary culprit in America's ill-fated military engagement, a historical assessment that is likely to stick no matter how many nuclear arms reduction speeches and articles he churns out. The McNamara story is one of tragedy, for a dedicated public servant and for America, fueled by our frustration that a man of such promise chose, out of a misguided sense of mission, not to tell the American people what he knew about the dim prospects for victory in the Vietnam War when it might have made a difference.