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A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism
"Meticulous in detail, epic in scope, psychologically sophisticated and spiritually rich, it ranks with The Best and the Brightest and All the President's Men."
--San Francisco Chronicle
More than the two presidents he served or the 58,000 soldiers who died for his policies, Robert McNamara was the official face of Vietnam, the technocrat with steel-rimmed glasses and an ironclad faith in numbers who kept insisting that the war was winnable long after he had ceased to believe it was. This brilliantly insightful, morally devastating book tells us why he believed, how he lost faith, and what his deceptions cost five of the war's witnesses and McNamara himself.
In The Living and the Dead, Paul Hendrickson juxtaposes McNamara's story with those of a wounded Marine, an Army nurse, a Vietnamese refugee, a Quaker who burned himself to death to protest the war, and an enraged artist who tried to kill the man he saw as the war's architect. The result is a book whose exhaustive research and imaginative power turn history into an act of reckoning, damning and profoundly sympathetic, impossible to put down and impossible to forget.
"A masterpiece. . . . [Hendrickson] has a gift with language that most writers can only dream about. "
--Philadelphia Inquirer
"Approaches Shakespearian tragedy."
--The New York Times Book Review
- Sales Rank: #1069750 in Books
- Published on: 1997-10-28
- Released on: 1997-10-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.00" w x 5.20" l, .93 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 448 pages
Amazon.com Review
Robert McNamara's career was a straight shot to the top, starting with a brilliant academic career and a stint as a statistical control officer during World War II. His next success was realized at Ford Motors, where he rocketed to the position of president. Finally, the ideal model of the "humane technocrat" was tapped as Kennedy's Secretary of Defense. Then came the Vietnam War, for which McNamara is still remembered by many as a soulless bureaucrat who measured the war in strictly numerical terms and--even worse--pursued U.S. involvement long after he knew it was wrong. In The Living and the Dead, Washington Post writer Paul Hendrickson searches for McNamara's soul amidst five wrenching portraits of those whose lives were destroyed by the presence of the United States in Vietnam.
From Publishers Weekly
In 1983, Washington Post reporter Hendrickson (Looking for the Light) saw Robert S. McNamara on TV and was moved to write a series of articles about the man who served as secretary of defense during the Vietnam War. Those pieces became the springboard for this exhaustively researched, probing, important contribution to the annals of American history. Using McNamara as his central, overshadowing subject, Hendrickson interweaves the stories of five others caught up in the whirlwind of the times: an artist who tried to kill McNamara by flinging him off a ferry in 1972; a Marine who fought in the war; a Quaker who immolated himself in protest against the war; a nurse who served in Vietnam; and a Saigon native who suffered horribly at the hands of the Communists. With breathtaking dexterity, Hendrickson juxtaposes insights on McNamara, whose life he describes as "a kind of postwar technocratic hubristic fable," against episodes in the lives of those over whom McNamara wielded a distant yet very real power. Hendrickson finds that McNamara "owned a significant conscience, which he struggled against and was continually willing to compromise"?above all, perhaps, in helping to escalate a war that he believed could not be won militarily. Hendrickson, who once studied for the priesthood, writes in a voice that is moral yet not preachy, and he is careful to identify his own mixed feelings about McNamara. Even the extensive endnotes?which include Hendrickson's recollection of slipping a note under the door to McNamara's hotel room, "where I thought I could hear him breathing just on the other side"?are extraordinarily informative. Passionate, incisive, expertly wrought, this is a narrative that will sweep readers along in its search for truth, a classic that will be pored over for years to come. Photos not seen by PW. 100,000 first printing; first serial to the Washington Post; simultaneous Random House Audiobook; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Robert McNamara is a newly polished link in the legendary chain of Vietnam War personalities and events. As Secretary of Defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara was the architect of the war's strategy and logistics during its crucial periods of escalation. He created a furor recently with the publication of his memoirs (In Retrospect, LJ 4/15/95), in which he admits the war was a terrible mistake. The Living and the Dead takes McNamara from his early years as a Ford Motor Company numbers wizard to his early, cold optimism about the war. The recording then portrays his growing dismay and ultimate break with Johnson's war policy, a disagreement that led to his leaving the cabinet. Lastly, the author chronicles McNamara's years after the Defense Department as president of the World Bank, during which he was exasperatingly silent about a war he helped create and against which he bore increasingly strong reservations. The author's research is impressive, but his conclusions are obvious, his psychoanalysis of McNamara is shallow, and his prose is gimmicky and difficult to follow. Five thumbnail biographies of individuals whose lives touched McNamara's never quite integrate with the main text, and the result can be more confusing than enlightening. But this portion of American history is so vital and fascinating that large public libraries may want to invest in a copy of this program, despite its flaws. The author reads this abridgment with enthusiasm, although a professional narration might have been preferred.?John Owen, Advanced Micro Devices Technical Lib., Sunnyvale, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A fair shake for McNamara
By Not A Real Name
If you're familiar with Robert McNamara, you probably know that many people have some very strong feelings about the man. This includes many of the other authors who have written about the former secretary of defense. Hendrickson has managed to restore an aspect of humanity to the former secretary, and do so without making apologies for him. This is not an easy trick If you're familiar with the usual indictments against McNamara (He's a liar, he knew the war was unwinable but kept it going for years, he's an evil robot of a man that enjoys dropping bombs on villages, etc...) this book should be of help to you in making sense of a complicated man, and might even help you to understand him to some degree.
Along with his narrative of the trials and tribulations of Robert Strange McNamara, Hendrickson tells the tales of a handful of divergent figures involved in a variety of ways with the American War in Vietnam. If you're particularly interested in this war, you'll probably recognize the tale of a conscientious objector that gave the last full measure of devotion outside McNamara's Pentagon window. The other individuals are most likely strangers to pretty much anyone, but their stories serve to enliven the narrative, and are interesting in and of themselves.
Like the author, I'm not apologizing for McNamara. However, I think the man has been burned in effigy long enough, and if you still insist on hating him, you ought to at least try to understand the position he was in. 9 out of 10 McNamara haters do not. I'm not saying that McNamara did the right thing, or making any form of value judgement on the war, but I do believe that he takes an inordinate amount of the blame for the disaster in Indochina, and it's about time someone presented a reasonably fair picture of Mr. McNamara.
Hendrickson gives you both sides to the McNamara coin. He calls him on a number of apparent(and a few obvious) lies, yet he also plays devil's advocate rather well. His discussion of whether or not McNamara should have resigned when he lost faith is an excellent example of fairness in journalism. He doesn't judge him on this, but he presents the alternatives, as they must have appeared to McNamara in the mid 60s, and lets the reader decide. After you know where McNamara came from, and try to imagine what his experiences prior to becoming SecDef had taught him, you are free to throw stones. I have a strong feeling you might still be inclined to. However, I think you might be a bit less inclined to fault him for certain things, and a bit more knowledgeable about a certain war in Southeast Asia for having read this book.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Scathing Indictment Of McNamara for Cowardice!
By Barron Laycock
This book falls squarely into the category of a wonderfully developed "best of class", for it faces the issue of Robert McNamara complicity and lasting culpability for the debacle and aftermath associated with Vietnam. Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, it is only fair to mention my own antipathy for McNamara, and my own belief he (as well as Henry Kissinger and a number of notable others) should have been indicted for crimes against humanity in association with the war in Vietnam. Nonetheless, this book is truly amazing at a number of levels, but most certainly because it puts the lie to the lingering neo-conservative notion that Vietnam was a necessary and winnable war that the nattering nabobs of negativity (read liberals here) and anti-war protestors inadvertently lost for America. Of course, such nonsense has more to do with wishful thinking then it does the reality of the times, as author Paul Hendrickson quickly illustrates.
This is a fascinating character study, one that poses McNamara as an isolated, antisocial figure more at home with the comfortable fictions of number crunching than with the quicksilver facts of everyday reality. His rise from Harvard to the Air Force to Ford won him wide acclaim as a "no-nonsense can-do" kind of guy, and this reputation for being the best and the brightest resulted in him being named Secretary of Defense by Jack Kennedy in what was likely the most disastrous public appointments of the last half of the 20th century. He force-fit his own conceptual perceptions onto the way the Department of Defense assessed itself and its engagements, so that quantitative measures came to supplant local experience and field judgment in the conduct of day-to-day operations in Vietnam. Thus, the most venial sorts of bean-counting by way of number of sorties, bomb tonnage dropped, and enemy body counts became the "meaningful measures of merit" (an actual term, not one I am concocting) the "whiz-kids" at the Pentagon used to determine where they stood in terms of the ultimate victory.
Meanwhile, thousands of American boys, as well as countless Vietnamese of every age, sex and description were lost in so-called "collateral damage". Engaged in the circular reasoning only a true believer in quantitative reasoning could marshal, McNamara fought to maintain the perception the war was being won, even when his raging intellect knew otherwise. Yet even after he recognized the reality of the situation, this self-described man of conscience could not bring himself to do the right and honorable thing. Rather than tell the truth and expose the outrageous situation in Vietnam, he remained silent, allowing many more thousand of young Americans and Vietnamese to die. It is this failure of conscience for which he should have been prosecuted, for his willing complicity in the continuing bloodbath long after he knew the war could not be won and that our efforts there would result only in further loss of life.
The book is also singular in its counter position of McNamara's evolution throughout the sixties and early seventies with five others so dramatically linked with the progress of the war in Vietnam; four Americans and a young Vietnamese citizen, all of whom were fatefully affected by McNamara's moral cowardice and abject failure to act or speak out. Most poignant for me was the story of one former Vietnam veteran turned artist who actually went berserk on a ferry when he discovered McNamara to be a fellow passenger. Finally, the author deals quite convincingly with the self-serving arguments McNamara himself has used to deflect criticism from himself, showing how one-sided and inconsistent they are with the public record. This is a terrific book, and one that provocatively revisits the painful and mind-numbing consequences that the terrible events of the sixties had for so many ordinary Americans. I recommend this book, although I must caution that reading it is hardly for the squeamish or faint of heart. It cuts deep into the heart of darkness that was so central to our venture in Vietnam, and faithfully recalls the depths of heartache and tragedy that piteous, misadventured action caused.
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
McNamara's Calling
By Ken Lauter
Among the finest books ever written on the Vietnam War, Paul Hendrickson's The Living and the Dead should be required reading not only for all future Secretaries of Defense, but for anyone holding a position of sacred trust. Hendrickson has been a Washington Post reporter for many years, but to call this book journalism is like calling Mark McGuire a batter. This is work worthy of an Agee or a Mailer-- full of the fire and intimate shadings that only a novelist's eye and ear can supply.
A brief look at Hendrickson's two prior books helps bring this one into sharper focus. The first, Seminary: a Search, is an account of his seven years in a Catholic seminary and its enduring influence on him and his classmates, few of whom were ordained. Hendrickson left his calling-- and perhaps he resembles Melville, whom Hawthorne once characterized as neither believing nor being comfortable in his disbelief. Hendrickson's second book, Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marian Post-Walcott, is also about someone who left a "calling" only to regret it later. Marian was a gifted photographer for the Farm Services Administration, part of FDR's New Deal. Yet, after only two years of intense work (often under very difficult circumstances), she quit, married, and raised a family. Hendrickson pursues the implication of that decision-- one made all the more poignant by the fact that late in life her work enjoyed a something of a renaissance among art critics.
So the motiff of a calling and its abandonment informs both earlier books, and this is also true in less obvious ways of The Living and the Dead. This book brims with unforgettable "characters" who happen to be real people: a nurse, a Marine, a Quaker, a Vietnamese family, and finally the figure around whom all the other stories revolve: Robert Strange McNamara-- the brilliant, deceitful, self-divided mastermind of the war whose own life is explored here in great psychological and historical depth and seen finally as a kind of tragic American allegory.
Hendrickson makes us care deeply about all these people. More impressively, he convinces us that the war may have been in large part avoidable if only the Secretary of Defense had remained true to his calling. Precisely what that calling was-- or should have been-- is what the book aches to discover. McNamara should have been a moral exemplar, a great public servant whose immense intellectual gifts and god-like energy put him in a unique position to alter history for the better. Why he failed to do so is illuminated beautifully by the stories of the ordinary people who acted within their callings far more honorably and courageously than the man who shot to the top of corporate America like a meteor and then tried to "corporatize" the war in Indochina, only to leave the Pentagon in near-disgrace.
Hendrickson sees McNamara's failure as his suppression of his Jungian "anima," or female, compassionate self (which was clearly present in the private man) in favor of his "animus," the male self which dominated the public official-- cold, numerical, abstract. What was once said of poet John Crow Ransom may be true of Hendrickson as well: "he had a fury against abstraction" -- or at least a fury against those who hide behind abstractions to evade the consequences of their own actions (which in McNamara's case included many pointless deaths, countless lives deformed, and a nation driven into a paralyzing cynicism).
This book does not demonize McNamara, however. Rather, it shows him as fallible, inadequate to the task before him, and suffering from his own awareness of this fact. The book's most haunting intimation may be that McNamara did not so much fail in his calling, but worse: he did not have one. He lacked any sense of the need for sacred vision even within his decidedly secular empire. As an ex-seminarian so devoted to the idea of what a calling ought to mean that he would leave his own rather than demean it with half-hearted participation, Paul Hendrickson was maybe the perfect man to discover Robert McNamara's fatal flaw-- one that surely to some degree afflicts American culture at large.
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