LBJ AND MCNAMARA

Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs Books and a former Washington Post correspondent, offers a personality-focused analysis of the relationship between U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and President Lyndon Johnson.

This book dives into America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia, focusing specifically on how the personal qualities of McNamara and Johnson contributed to their mismanagement of the Vietnam War. Osnos opens with McNamara’s background and his role in the Kennedy administration, then looks at Johnson’s sudden ascension to the presidency in 1963. The book follows the two men’s decision-making processes over the following year, showing how they began to diverge—both personally and professionally—and then examining how the war’s progress affected their sense of self and historical legacies. He concludes that there was little chance that the United States could have extricated itself from the conflict and avoided the loss of tens of thousands of lives, due to the two men’s conceptions of the presidency, their relative strengths and weaknesses as political actors, and fraught relationship with each other. Although there’s no shortage of books on the Vietnam War, this one offers a distinct approach, which benefits from Osnos’ unique insights into one of the principals: For more than a decade, he served as McNamara’s book editor, including the secretary’s memoirs. Osnos recorded extensive editorial interviews with him, and this book draws heavily on their transcripts, delving deeply into McNamara’s thinking and highlighting areas in which he was more candid or introspective than he was in public statements. Without similar insider access to Johnson, Osnos still does a solid job of assessing the former president using existing research, particularly Robert A. Caro’s biographies. Along the way, the author strongly and clearly identifies the stakes and implications of his subjects’ choices: “Nothing in LBJ’s character, especially after the humiliation of the years as vice president, could possibly be more important to him than restoring his self-confidence as a politician and as a man with power and the capacity to use it.”

An insightful and informative look at a familiar piece of history.