LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail
by Peter L.W. Osnos, Rivertowns Books, 2024
McNamara at War: A New History
by Philip Taubman and William Taubman, W.W. Norton & Company, 2025
Fifty years after it ended, the American war in Vietnam remains controversial. That is because it turned out very differently than had been anticipated when it began. It did not achieve its goal of preserving a non-communist South Vietnam, but it did sharply divide the United States, damaging the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and dramatically increasing the public distrust of the American government that has persisted five decades later. Because its costs were so high and the gains from it, such as they were, so meager, a widespread retrospective judgment has taken hold that it should never have been waged in the first place. This raises the question of why the responsible American officials decided to go to war in the first place.
Now, two books have appeared that address that question by exploring the role of Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense in the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and the man who came to be regarded as the principal architect of that war.
LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail, comes out of the experience of its author, Peter L.W. Osnos, as the publisher of McNamara’s 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, as well as his time as a wartime correspondent in Vietnam for The Washington Post. He has produced a concise, useful overview of the course of the war when McNamara was in office and of the secretary’s role in directing it. McNamara at War, by the brothers Philip and William Taubman, the first a longtime reporter for The New York Times as well as the author of several books, the second a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Amherst College, have written a penetrating full-scale biography. It follows its subject from his years growing up in the San Francisco Bay area to his student days at the University of California at Berkeley and the Harvard Business School, his experience in World War II and his career as an executive at the Ford Motor Company, his ultimately tormented seven years at the Pentagon, and finally his life thereafter, the highlight of which was his thirteen years as president of the World Bank. They devote considerable attention to McNamara’s personality traits and connect them to his public career.
Why does McNamara hold such interest? After all, during those years Presidents Kennedy and Johnson made the major decisions about Vietnam. Their secretary of defense, however, was their most trusted advisor, the person with responsibility for managing the American side of the conflict, and the most visible public spokesman for it and thus a lightning rod for the public dissatisfaction – and ultimately anger – that the war provoked in the United States. Moreover, early on he harbored serious doubts about whether the war could be won, and in his memoir he revealed those doubts and expressed his regrets, indeed his anguish, at not having done more to stop it while he was in office. This makes him a tragic figure to some, although, as both books make clear, others regarded him as a despicable character to the end of his life. Either way, his brilliance as an administrator and his early reservations about the course of American policy in Southeast Asia make him a logical focal point for the question that haunts retrospective consideration of Vietnam: how could it have happened?
McNamara’s character and background, as portrayed by the Taubmans, surely had something to do with the American misadventure with which he was so closely associated. He belonged to the generation that had fought and won World War II and took from that experience the lesson that the United States was capable of meeting any challenge. His managerial background gave him confidence that all problems could be quantified and then solved; but in Vietnam, the numbers fed into the analyses he commissioned, the total of enemy killed for example, were not always accurate and the most important factor of all – the communists’ will to fight despite suffering enormous losses – could not be translated into numbers at all.
Yet neither book imputes what happened in Vietnam solely to the shortcomings of the officials responsible for American foreign policy at the time. Neither overlooks the framework of ideas about the world and the American role in it in which they operated and that exerted powerful pressure to follow the course that they chose. The distinguished historian Ernest May wrote in 1973 that “[g]iven the assumptions generally shared by Americans in the 1960s, it seems probable that any collection or men or women would have decided as did the members of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.” Those assumptions came into play at the two major turning points in American policy toward Vietnam: Kennedy’s decision, in 1961, to increase the number of American military advisors in the country from 900 to 3200; and Johnson’s decision, in 1965, to dispatch American ground troops there in large numbers, both initiatives undertaken in order to preserve a non-communist South Vietnam.
In both cases, what came to be known as “the domino theory” had a powerful influence. Originating with President Eisenhower, the term refers to an analogy between the countries of Southeast Asia and a row of standing dominoes. Just as the fall of one domino would lead to the toppling of all the others, so, American officials believed, the loss of South Vietnam to communism would lead to the communist conquest of the other countries of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond.
McNamara said, years after he had left the Pentagon:
I believed in a sense, Eisenhower’s statement in 1954 of the ‘dominoes’ and in 1961 to President Kennedy and me that if we lost Laos and Vietnam, we’d lose all of Southeast Asia. If we lost all of Southeast Asia, we were very likely to lose all of Asia, including India. If we did that, the power of the communists against Western Europe and against this nation would increase.
Three consecutive American presidents believed, that is, that defeat in Vietnam had the potential to inflict a catastrophic setback on the United States in the struggle with the Soviet Union and global communism in which it was engaged.
Although McNamara, and especially Johnson, came to have little confidence that the United States could prevail in Vietnam, they were also convinced, given what they believed about geopolitics, that it could not afford to lose. They thus confronted a painful, insoluble dilemma. As Johnson put it, “I can’t get out, I can’t finish [the war] with what I have got, so what the hell can I do?”
In the end, America lost the war but did not suffer the consequences that its leaders had feared. Johnson had worried about a powerful domestic backlash against those responsible for conducting the war; but when South Vietnam fell to the communists in April 1975, the American public accepted that outcome, albeit not happily. Vietnam’s neighbors Cambodia and Laos did come under communist control, but the falling dominoes stopped there. The loss of South Vietnam did not fatally undercut the global standing of the United States. The fact that the dire predicted consequences of failure in Vietnam did not materialize is an important reason that the war itself has come to be seen a misbegotten misadventure; and that, in turn, has triggered retrospective inquiries, such as those of Osnos and the Taubmans, into the decisions that embroiled the United States there and the assessment of the officials who made them.
In evaluating the war and the men responsible for it, it is important to bear in mind that while history is written backwards, it is lived forward; and those who are involved in the making of history always have to proceed while enshrouded in uncertainty. In retrospect, it seems difficult to dispute that McNamara and the presidents he served made the wrong decisions; but it is also difficult to conclude that they should have known – that is, that almost anybody else in their positions would have known – that they were making a terrible mistake. The relative placidity with which the American public accepted failure in Southeast Asia came after fifteen years of active, costly engagement there, and more than 55,000 American deaths. (By the estimate of the Vietnamese government, more than three million Vietnamese lost their lives.)
After all that time, Americans wanted finally to be done with Vietnam, but that had not been their dominant attitude in 1961 or 1965. As for what turned out to be the entirely manageable consequences for the United States of the loss of South Vietnam, this was due in no small part to the rapprochement with China that the Nixon administration engineered, which took place in 1972, well after McNamara had left office. Which had the greater responsibility for Vietnam: the particular characteristics of the people who sent American troops there or the ideas to which they and many others subscribed? The question can never be finally settled. Moreover, while a consensus has formed that the United States could never have prevailed on the battlefield, this has received a vigorous challenge in two volumes – with a third to come – by the Hillsdale College military historian Mark Moyer. So the controversy surrounding America’s Vietnam War, to which LBJ and McNamara and McNamara at War are notable contributions, will surely continue.
