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- [00:01]
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- [01:17]
Eleanor Evans
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William Taubman
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- [01:48]
Narrator/Host
Robert McNamara's tenure as a key White House statesman is one of the most consequential of the 20th century. He served as Secretary of Defence under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and in the summer of 1965 he was a leading advocate for American escalation in Vietnam, a conflict responsible for millions of casualties. It's this act for which he is most remembered and often reviled. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, William and Philip Taubman, authors of new biography McNamara at War, show shed light on his motivations and secret battles, revealing a life of intense personal contradictions. They were speaking with Eleanor Evans in.
- [02:32]
Eleanor Evans
Our Life of the Week series. Many of the figures we look at have contradictions, but having read Your book, Robert McNamara is surely one of the most divisive and divided conflicted figures. Bill, if I can come to you first for our listeners who have not yet come across McNamara's impact in career, can you introduce us to him and where he sits in this story of 20th century US and global history.
- [02:54]
William Taubman
Well, McNamara was probably the most effective Secretary of defense the United States has ever had. But interestingly, while he was so effective, he was also one of the most reviled and hated secretaries of defense that the United States has ever had. And I think the effectiveness and the fact that he was reviled go together. That is to say, he was very good at presiding over a war which many people wished we were not in. He managed, managed to antagonize lots of different people. The military whom he was in charge of, the soldiers who fought in a war and felt they were losing it rather than winning it. The people in the United States who resented him because he seemed so arrogant in presiding over this conflict. So all of these things, as you said, Eleanor, showed him to be divided, conflicted in his mind as well as in his policies.
- [03:56]
Eleanor Evans
He's such a significant figure at such a consequential time in this history. And Phil, can I ask you about your approach as a team, as brothers, in writing this book? What did you want to understand about McNamara and where does it sit in terms of how else he's been considered?
- [04:11]
Philip Taubman
Well, you know, it was obviously a challenge. There'd been a lot of books written about Robert McNamara, a lot of books written about the Vietnam War. What spurred us to do this book was a bunch of new material that prior biographers and historians had not had access to, which shed new light on McNamara and the very contradictions that Bill was just talking about. You know, among those documents were an extraordinary set of letters that Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady of the United States and then the widow of the slain president, wrote to McNamara beginning in 1961, when she and her husband moved into the White House, and continuing on not only through the Johnson administration and the heart of the Vietnam War, but long after both Johnson had Left office and McNamara had moved over to become president of the World Bank. We also had access to a secret diary that one of McNamara's top Pentagon aides kept, the very aide who advised him on Vietnam policy issues, a gentleman named John McNaughton. And in that diary, we could see McNamara's doubts rising about the war that he was prosecuting and his misgivings about the strategy. We could see through the Jackie Kennedy letters to McNamara a side of McNamara that was really largely unknown until our book, which is, one might say, the softer side of McNamara. As Bill said, he presided over the Pentagon with a degree of arrogance and management efficiency, cold blooded management efficiency that was very effective but very off putting to many of the people who worked for him. In the Jackie Kennedy letters, you can see through her depiction of McNamara, the man she's writing to. She sees him, him as a peacemaker in the midst of war. The one man in the Johnson administration who can end the war and she believes wants to end the war. A gentleman, a lover of poetry and literature and music, with whom she spent many evenings in her New York apartment. So I think, you know, by the time Bill and I were done, I think we came away with a fully nuanced portrait of McNamara and his contradictions.
- [06:31]
Eleanor Evans
Wonderful. There's lots there that I'm sure we'll pick up on as the conversation progresses. But as you've mentioned, a lot of people who might have heard of McNamara may have heard of him in this cold blooded context. This driven man, perhaps a warmonger or someone who is very sort of, by the book, a human computer, if you like. I wonder if we can go into his earliest years. Can you give us some context of him in terms of where he was from, what he was like as a young man and his key influences? Because I think this perhaps helps to dispel this picture a bit.
- [07:01]
William Taubman
Yes, I think what we do in our book is we trace his evolution from his childhood to his high school to University of California at Berkeley, Harvard Business School, wartime During World War II, Ford Motor Company, which he becomes the first non Ford family member to be president of. And as we watch him evolve, I think what we find is, first of all, he's brilliant. He is one of three students at the University of California at Berkeley out of 3,000 in his class who get admitted to Phi Beta Kappa. In his junior year, he is the number one student in the class at Harvard Business School. During wartime, he advises three or four fierce, tough American generals, including one who launches the infamous fire bombing of Tokyo, which kills 100,000 Japanese, even more than the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So he is brilliant, and that's the first thing we see. The second thing we see is that he not only wants to do well, he wants to do good. That is, he sees himself as attempting to be honest and wise and helpful to people who are downtrodden. And the third thing we notice is that this man who's brilliant but wants to do good as well as doing well, needs affirmation from powerful men for whom he works. And I think these three features, brilliance, needing to do good as well as well and needing affirmation from the bosses for whom he works, drive him, in a sense, into a cul de sac. And he ends up conflicted as a result of trying to do all of these things. And we see him evolving these three features in his life. One thing that we also notice is the degree to which he is shaped by his parents. His father is cold and distant, and that's part of McNamara. And his mother is passionate and intense and pushes him, drives him to excel, and also pushes him to be a good man as well as a brilliant man. And we have letters that she writes to him when he is at Berkeley and when he's at Harvard Business School and when he's in the military. And these letters are painful to read because she's pushing him so hard to do good and to do well. So we see him evolving and becoming the man whom the world begins to admire in some ways and hate in other ways. At one point after the war, when he is fully planning to go back to Harvard Business School and become a professor, he's dissuaded from doing so because his wife comes down with polio at very severe case. And in order to earn enough money to take care of her, he decides that rather than going back to Harvard Business School and becoming a professor, he'll go to Ford Motor Company and become a rich businessman. And that, in a way, deflects him from a career which might will have been even more satisfying to him. Because at one point he says, the best time in our lives was at Harvard Business School. But he can't go there. He becomes a businessman, and from there he becomes Secretary of Defense. And it's as if that trajectory takes him away from what he's been most happy doing and takes him into the conflicting demands of being a Secretary of Defense who's one of the most powerful men in Washington and in the United States.
- [11:07]
Eleanor Evans
Let's stay on this moment for a bit then, because it really is hugely consequential. It's 1961. You summarize in your book that he was a great student, married his college sweetheart, he had a good assignment at Harvard. He was very successful during World War II, and then at Ford. So what happens in 1961, Phil? How is he brought into this presidential circle?
- [11:28]
Philip Taubman
Well, it's interesting. When John F. Kennedy brought him to Washington, first asked him if he would be Secretary of the treasury, which actually might have been a better match for McNamara. Coming out of a business background, he told Kennedy he didn't feel qualified. So he was then offered the job of Defense Secretary, and he doubted his own capacity in that job as well. There's a wonderful scene, actually, where he's in the Kennedy residence in Georgetown in Washington. This is in late 1960. We're now dealing with, dealing with the president elect. And McNamara is there meeting with Bobby Kennedy, the brother of the President and soon to be Attorney General. And they're talking about the defense job. And McNamara says, you know, I'm really not qualified for this. And Kennedy jokes back to him, well, Bob, you know, there's no school for presidents either. So he winds up as Defense Secretary. They actually thought, the Kennedy brothers, that they were hiring a Republican, which was something that the President wanted to do to show a bipartisan cabinet. He ended up with a Republican Treasury Secretary. But McNamara was a Democrat. And he comes into the job and he puts his very, very effective managerial skills to work to reform the Pentagon. And that really was the mandate that he had from jfk. Vietnam was a distant, faraway, small time conflict when Kennedy took the office. And so McNamara concentrated during the Kennedy years on asserting civilian control of the military, which actually hadn't been the case since the Defense Department had been formed in the late 1940s. It had been run by the military services with a titular defense secretary. McNamara comes in and basically upends the practices at the Pentagon, particularly the making of budgets. He produces a budget making process that eliminates duplication of weapons systems, that gives civilians control over the budgets of the different services. The Air Force, the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps. And if one were to judge Robert McNamara solely on his performance as Defense Secretary during the Kennedy presidency, he would be regarded without a doubt as the most effective US Defense Secretary in modern American history. But then, of course, Kennedy is assassinated November 22, 1963, and McNamara is thrown into the arms of a very different president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and clearly wants to keep his job. And it doesn't take very long before he and Johnson decide that Vietnam is a vital battlefield in the Cold War and that they must not be defeated there. And that is the beginning of the tragedy of Vietnam. It's really once Johnson takes office, I.
- [14:36]
William Taubman
Might add, that as Johnson escalates the war in the spring and summer of 1965, McNamara is the most fierce advocate of that escalation. And that escalation constitutes the Americanization of, of the war. Kennedy had thought that if the war was to be won, it had to be won by the South Vietnamese themselves. McNamara insists on sending American combat troops. And we have testimony by others involved in that process that McNamara makes the case for war using the most extreme version of the domino theory. Namely, he argues that if South Vietnam is lost to North Vietnam, then all of Southeast Asia will be lost. And if all of Southeast Asia is lost, then Japan will be lost. And if Japan is lost, then Greece and Turkey will be threatened. And if Greece and Turkey are threatened, then all of Africa will be threatened with communization. So he is this fierce exponent of the war. And yet we discovered in the diary that Phil described, compiled by his aide John McNaughton, that a few months after McNamara has made this case for escalating the war, he tells McNaughton, and this is almost an exact quote, I want so badly to pull our American boys out of Vietnam that I can hardly stand it. This is April 1966, just a few months after the escalation in 65.
- [16:27]
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- [17:39]
William Taubman
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- [18:39]
Eleanor Evans
So he's this highly effective administrator who is pressing on with a war that he's clearly deeply conflicted about. And something that struck me when I was reading your book is that Bill, when We spoke in 2022 about the Cuban Missile crisis, you mentioned that Kennedy was surrounded by hawks, by hawkish advisors. Where did McNamara sit in this picture and is that part of that contrast?
- [19:03]
William Taubman
Well, actually, in the Cuban missile crisis, McNamara was one of the most visible and important doves rather than hawks. When it was discovered that the Soviets had put intermediate range missiles in Cuba, many of the advisors of Kennedy said this would change the balance of power and that the United States would be suddenly at a disadvantage. Whereas McNamara said, no, that's not true, actually, we're going to be fine. Because we had discovered, that is, in the meantime, that we had many more intercontinental rockets or missiles than the Soviets had and we could beat them, if that's the word to use in a nuclear war, if it ever came to that. Therefore, there was no need immediately to bomb the Soviet missile bases in Cuba, no need immediately to threaten the Soviet Union because we were in fact ahead of them. So in that sense, he was a dove rather than a hawk.
- [20:05]
Eleanor Evans
We haven't yet picked up on his relationship with Jackie. Phil, you mentioned in your opening answer to me that one of the remarkable things flagged in Your book is McNamara's intimate relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy, both when she was first lady and after Kennedy's assassination. Can you take us into this relationship? How did it begin, how did it form and what did it mean for McNamara?
- [20:26]
Philip Taubman
So, you know, it was a very improbable relationship when you think about at least the public image of these two people. There's Jacqueline Kennedy, this refined, highly sophisticated, highly intellectual first lady, a gentle woman, she seemed soft spoken in public, very elegant. And here's McNamara, this Barry Goldwater said, computer with legs, this cold blooded prosecutor, eventually of the war in Vietnam, someone who seemed humorless to his colleagues at the Pentagon and had at the Ford Motor Company. So in early 61, not long after Kennedy becomes President, the first of these exchanges of correspondence appears. And it has to do with Valentine's Day, of all things. And here you find Jackie Kennedy and Robert McNamara exchanging Valentine's greetings and then it moves on from there becomes a seemingly somewhat deeper relationship as the Cuban Missile crisis is unfolding and people like Dean Rust, the Secretary of State, are staying overnight at the White House. They're so exhausted, you know, managing this potential nuclear crisis. She writes a very emotional letter to McNamara, talking about how she has come to understand the severity, intensity of the crisis. And then from there on, dozens and dozens of letters that extend out over the decades in which she speaks to him like a confidential, intimate friend. Now, Bill and I do not know if this relationship ever became physical. We don't have evidence that it did. We don't have a letter in which they reference any kind of physical connection. But it's clearly, it seems as if she is in love with him, at least in a platonic way. And we do not have his letters to her. They were returned to him by Jackie Kennedy's daughter Caroline in the late 1990s. And in her letter to McNamara with her mother's letters, Caroline said she hoped that he would eventually donate some of them to the Kennedy Library. But she also understood that given her mother's extreme desire to maintain her privacy, that McNamara would deal with letters. Understanding that, and it's at least my belief that McNamara may have destroyed the letters that he wrote to Jackie. But you can just see this if you track the letters across the decades, the warmth, the affection, the mutual trust between these two figures. It was a major, major dynamic in both of their lives for at least a decade and a half.
- [23:24]
Eleanor Evans
So further evidence of the conflict that's living in this man. And, you know, just years later in Johnson's administration, he becomes this significant advocate for war, for the containment of communism. Going into the Johnson story a little bit more, can we pick up on the personal reliance of Johnson on McNamara? Can you take us into this relationship and the complications therein?
- [23:46]
Philip Taubman
Johnson relied very heavily on McNamara. As Lady Bird recorded in her diary. And as LBJ said at various points, McNamara was the indispensable man in the Johnson cabinet. And when McNamara traveled to Vietnam, Johnson worried that he would be harmed there and told Lady Bird he didn't think he could go on as president without McNamara. And so McNamara quickly emerged in the Johnson Cabinet as he had in the Kennedy Cabinet, as the star figure of the Cabinet, the most influential advisor to the president, and someone who drew close to both presidents that he served. And this is part of the story here, because at the assassination, suddenly McNamara, as I said, is now working for a very coarse, smart political deal maker, many ways more effective as a maker of American legislation than Kennedy had proved to be. And it's clear over time that he picks up very early on from Johnson that Johnson wants action in Vietnam. Johnson's not content to let the standoff that existed at the time of the assassination to proceed. And it becomes very clear that McNamara picks up on that attitude and then decides that he will support what Johnson wants. And it's very illuminating as a characteristic of McNamara, if you go back to early Kennedy administration. McNamara comes into a decision making meeting about Vietnam with John F. Kennedy and recommends the use of combat troops in Vietnam. Okay, here we are in late 1961. And to his surprise, Kennedy does not want to send combat troops and makes clear he thinks that would be a mistake. There is this kind of heartbreaking line that's recorded of Kennedy telling his cabinet members, including McNamara, yes, we can send troops and the bands will play and then they will come home in body bags. And so McNamara picks up on that Kennedy attitude almost instantaneously and flips his position and suddenly is saying to the President, you know what? We shouldn't send combat troops to Vietnam. So that's an insight into how McNamara adjusts his position to fit that of his president. And with LBJ, it became clear to McNamara that the president wanted to commit more American forces to Vietnam and then proceeded to support that. And Bill can describe to you this kind of vicious cycle that became effective and really is one of the key drivers of the Vietnam War.
- [26:51]
William Taubman
I would put it this way. Eleanor McNamara, when Kennedy is assassinated, is not certain of what to do in Vietnam, and Johnson is not certain either. But then they mutually reinforce each other's determination to fight and win the war. And it works this way. McNamara hears Johnson say, we've got to fight and win. And what does McNamara do? He does what he's always done in life as a brilliant man. He takes what Johnson wants to do and turns it into a series of imperatives. And that strengthens Johnson's desire to fight and win. But then when McNamara hears Johnson's strengthened desire to fight and win, that strengthens McNamara's desire to fight and win. And there's a quote which I'd like to read to you from the book. This is something that is said by a man named Eugene Zuckert, who was a CO instructor with McNamara at Harvard Business School and later was McNamara's secretary of the Air Force. And he says McNamara, quote, was never more vigorous in defending a position than the one his boss had told him to take, which he didn't really believe in. And he always overcompensated to make sure that his boss's position was the one that prevailed. So they strengthened each other's position in being determined to fight and win a war. That McNamara had come to believe was unwinnable.
- [28:34]
Eleanor Evans
This is definitely a tragic sort of cyclical reliance on the other. I wonder if we can just return to that sense of conflict within him, what you found in his own writings or other testimonies that he expressed privately versus what he was saying on a public stage.
- [28:50]
Philip Taubman
So the McNamara, the public knew, was very optimistic constantly about progress in Vietnam, even as he came to see there had been no progress. And on every trip that he took to Vietnam, and he took many as defense secretary, both there and upon returning to Washington, he would tell the American public that things were going very well, but. But he knew they weren't going well. And you can see this repeatedly in private communications. For example, the line that Bill cited to John McNaughton, I want to get the boys home so bad I can hardly stand it. You can see in late 1966, he goes back up to Cambridge, to Harvard, where he thinks he's going to spend the day in a kind of vigorous debate about the Vietnam war. Instead, he encounters a mob scene of war protesters. He retreats from that and goes to a meeting with senior Harvard faculty, including a young professor named Henry Kissinger. And the note taker of that meeting, Graham Allison, who himself goes on to become an assistant secretary of defense, later records in his notes that McNamara sounds more like an anti war leader in his conversations with the Harvard faculty than the secretary of defense who is managing the war. And so you see this repeatedly. There's a very dramatic scene in Jackie Kennedy's apartment in Manhattan, overlooking Central park one evening. McNamara is there, and Jackie becomes very animated by this point. She's become a fierce opponent of the war, and she believes McNamara is the one person in the administration who can end the war and wants to end it. And so they're sitting on the couch, and she turns to him and starts pounding him on the chest with her fists. And she says, bob, you've got to end the slaughter. You've got to end the slaughter. And what he tells her, he later recalls, is basically, yes, we need to end the slaughter, but I don't know how to do it. So you see in that one scene is the microcosm of a man who is prosecuting a war he no longer believes in and doesn't know how to extricate the country from that war.
- [31:24]
William Taubman
And yes, Eleanor, if I may add that later on in life, he says some things about how in his memoirs published in 1993, he says, we were wrong, terribly wrong in Vietnam. And then on another occasion, when he's working on his memoirs. He says, I have killed thousands, tens of thousands of people, and I owe them an explanation, even though they're now dead. And I want to cite two other examples from late in life. One of them, he's at Brown University for a discussion of the war. And one of the people in the audience, a Vietnam veteran, comes up to him and says to McNamara's face, you are a son of a bitch. And McNamara says, you're right. I am a son of a bitch. And then the final example. In 2002, McNamara is back in Cuba and he's talking to Fidel Castro. And Castro says, 10 years from now, on the anniversary of the Cuban Missile crisis, you must come back to Cuba and we'll discuss it. And McNamara says, In 10 years, I can't come back to Cuba, because in 10 years, I will be in hell.
- [32:50]
Eleanor Evans
It shows somebody who's really not afraid to reflect on his own culpability, the staggering nature of that, even as he was the architect of so much of this tragedy. I also wanted to refer to an event on a ferry to Martha's Vineyard in September 1972. Can you take us into this episode?
- [33:09]
Philip Taubman
Yeah. Well, McNamara had a summer place on the Vineyard, and he's on the ferry on the way over, when someone who opposed the war, McNamara is no longer the Defense secretary at this point, feels very strongly that McNamara was responsible for the war and the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers. Waits, and McNamara steps out on the deck near the rail, and this gentleman tries to toss him overboard and almost succeeds. He has him over on the other side of the rail, and McNamara is clinging for dear life to the rail. And had he fallen into the ocean, there's no way that he would have been recovered. The temperature of the waters off the coast of Massachusetts, even in the summer, is in the 50s, so he wouldn't have lasted very long from hypothermia. Well, he was saved. And very typical of McNamara, he did not want the person to be prosecuted.
- [34:13]
Eleanor Evans
So he's grappling with this legacy, as you've mentioned. He is writing about it. He's writing his memoirs. He appears in a documentary, the Fog of War. And if I can quote your own words back to you, you write that perhaps the greatest irony of McNamara's life is that the wise lessons he painfully distilled from his mismanagement of the Vietnam War, they went largely unnoticed and unattended by many of the American leaders who succeeded him. Can I come to you, Bill, first on this? But I'd love to put it to you as well, Phil. What lessons do you think are the most important there?
- [34:43]
William Taubman
Well, we describe in our epilogue a series of lessons that McNamara himself drew. And they had to do with, for example, not misunderstanding the power of nationalism, which indeed was motivating the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. There were a series of other policy recommendations which Phil will be able to cite specifically. But in addition to those policy recommendations, there were the lessons that reflected McNamara's own personal flaws and those he was not so good at identifying and pushing forward because the truth was he was unable to explain his own personal flaws. That was a flaw in itself of being unable to analyze his personality and see the way in which it had led him astray. But, Phil, perhaps you would be able to name some of the policy recommendations that we cite in our epilogue.
- [35:48]
Philip Taubman
Well, they're all very astute and very relevant even to this day, and certainly were relevant when the United States intervened in Afghanistan after the attacks of supreme September 11 and later when the United States invaded Iraq. The lessons that McNamara drew from Vietnam included, if you're going to go to war, be ready with an exit plan before you begin the war. Secondly, make sure that the Congress of the United States understands what you're planning to do and supports it. Number three, make sure the American people understand there are going to be casualties and the expenditure of large sums, sums of money, and supports it. Make sure that you understand the political, religious and cultural history of the country into which you're intervening because they did not understand the history of Vietnam. It seems stunning in retrospect that neither the Kennedy or Johnson administrations understood that the historic antagonist of Vietnam was China. We acted as if we were going to go to war in Vietnam because of our opposition to China. Well, the North Vietnamese hated the Chinese, so it was a very sad coda in some ways on McNamara's life. He wrote the book, it contained these 10 or 11 lessons, and he desperately wanted his successors in the Pentagon and the White House to read those lessons. We're now talking. The book is published in 95. And so he inscribes a copy of the book to the new Defense Secretary, William Perry, and he manages to arrange to have the inscribed copy of the book on the desk the day that Perry steps into the Defense Secretary's office for the first time as Defense Secretary. And the inscription says, dear Bill, I hope you will not make the same mistakes we made. Well, as far as we know. I know Perry. He's a friend of mine, lives out here near Stanford University. He may be the only defense secretary after the publication of McNamara's book who bothered to read it. He did read it. And McNamara, late in life, lamented the fact that he didn't think any of his successors had read his book so late in life.
- [38:21]
Eleanor Evans
These are many of the things he's grappling with, his own legacy and how he can maybe begin to set elements right or pass on the learnings that he's had. When does he die and in the sort of couple of decades since? How do you think he can be characterized in terms of his own legacy in the public consciousness?
- [38:41]
Philip Taubman
Well, he died in 2009, and by that point, he was in bad shape physically and mentally, because the last decades of his life he'd been a tormented man. And that torment began during the war because of the conflicts within him about the war and what should be done about it. And then he spent several decades admirably, one thinks, addressing his own failures, although, as Bill said, not his own character flaws, but the policy failures of Vietnam. And so very late in life, in his last years, he was frail physically. He was much reduced intellectually, and, you know, he died with his family at his side. And in the hours before his death, he said to his son, Craig, God has abandoned me. And he died thinking that was the case.
- [39:35]
William Taubman
We learned from his widow, his second wife, and also from his son that he had considered suicide but refrained from it lest the stigma of his doing it would be attached to his family.
- [39:49]
Eleanor Evans
So a troubled man and a troubled legacy, and somewhat in conflict with the idea of him as a human computer who doesn't feel and had this sort of steely determination to proceed with things no matter what. I think that is such a contrast that comes out of the book. I wonder if there are any final thoughts that you can leave us with on McNamara today.
- [40:09]
Philip Taubman
Well, you know what I would say, and it's partly in response to your previous question, as the book was published two months ago and we've been out talking about it and meeting with people, it's quite extraordinary to me that on a number of occasions, the audience has included Vietnam veterans, Americans who fought in Vietnam, some of whom were injured and recovered, and the families of some of the men who died in Vietnam. And in those encounters which I've had, the emotions still run high and people come to tears or they begin to shout in these encounters about the evils that McNamara perpetrated as defense secretary. So the wounds of Vietnam linger now, many decades after the war ended and with the publication of our book, I think you see that it brings back to people's minds terrible memories of their own family losses. And their antagonism to McNamara persists to this day. It's quite an extraordinary expression of the deep, deep wounds that the war inflicted on American society.
- [41:30]
Narrator/Host
That was William and Philip taubman, authors of McNamara at a new History. William is professor emeritus of history at Amherst College, and Philip is a longtime political reporter, editor and correspondent.