Reprinted from The Realist Review:
Recently, the New York Times relayed Tucker Carlson’s view that, “The most depressing thing about the United States in 2025 is that we’re led not just by bad people, but by unimpressive, dumb, totally noncreative people.” This is unarguable – and the Times made no attempt to counter the point. Indeed, this judgement applies doubly to the team of grifters and double-digit IQ Machiavellians who staff upper echelons of the Trump administration.
Yet, a fascinating new book by the scholars (and brothers) William and Philip Taubman shows that even smart and impressive people can, if they lack vision, character and empathy, lead the country to disaster. One such leader was Robert S. McNamara, the architect of the war in Vietnam. In their penetrating new study, McNamara at War (W.W. Norton, 2025), the Taubmans examine how it was that a man who was so brilliant fell so short. The book presents itself as a character study – but it is more than that.
McNamara was in some respects typical of the sort of people Washington attracts (or used to): the overachieving and earnest striver who believes that there are quantifiable solutions to every problem. McNamara was also typical in that he was easily corrupted. The happily married Ford Motor Company executive quickly adopted the mores of what Seymour Hersh memorably called ‘the Dark Side of Camelot.’ As someone who has studied the period, I admit to being surprised by the hard-to-miss implications of the exchange of mash notes between McNamara and Jacquline Kennedy. She loved him, but so did Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson—indeed, such was the esteem with which McNamara was held in the early Sixties that both presidents considered putting him on the ticket in 1964.
As the Taubmans make clear, McNamara’s problem was ultimately a problem of character – the absence of it. McNamara could never find it within himself to do that which Undersecretary of State George Ball did (and later, whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg and NSC staffers like William Watts, Roger Morris and Anthony Lake did) and speak truth to power. Ball repeatedly spoke up, telling Kennedy as early as 1961 that before we knew it, the US would have, “300,000 men in the rice paddies of the jungles of Vietnam and never be able to find them.”
What makes McNamara’s case even more appalling is that—unlike his colleagues, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy – he knew as early as 1965 that the war was a lost cause. McNamara expressed his doubts to his friends but, rather like Colin Powell during Iraq II, convinced himself that his role was to play the good soldier. In the process, McNamara repeatedly lied, to the American people, to Johnson, and to himself. By 1967, he privately admitted that the Pentagon’s “body counts” or casualty estimates suffered by the VietCong and North Vietnamese were nonsense. “If the reports of enemy casualties are correct, we would have destroyed the North Vietnamese army two times over,” he told a military aide. Those who take at face value media reports that Russia has suffered in excess of a million casualties in Ukraine might do well to keep this in mind. The truth is likely far different.
The experience of serving under the demanding, unhinged Johnson (the Taubmans point out that LBJ was likely bi-polar) ultimately took its toll. Johnson later told the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin that by the end (Johnson finally let go of McNamara and moved him to the World Bank in February 1968) McNamara “felt like he was a murderer… he was just short of cracking.” But, as Johnson told Kearns Goodwin, “I never felt like a murderer, that’s the difference.”
There are, naturally, policy lessons from the Vietnam era that have yet to be absorbed by the bipartisan claque of bureaucrats who actually run Washington. A number of these lessons McNamara tried to explicate in his final decades, perhaps as an act of atonement. The Taubmans summarized a number of these hard-earned lessons for US policymakers, which include:
- Don’t engage in mirror-imaging the enemy, assuming it operates in ways similar to America;
- Do not fail to understand the power of nationalism as a force driving nations to free themselves from external interference in their affairs;
- Be familiar with the history, culture, and politics of the people you are supporting or attacking and their leaders;
- Recognize the limits of modern military technology;
- Explain your intentions to Congress and the American people and level with them about the advantages and disadvantages of large-scale military actions you plan to take;
- Understand that in international affairs there may be problems for which there are no wise solutions.
Yet, as the Taubmans note, the “greatest irony of Robert McNamara’s life is that the wise lessons he painfully distilled from his mismanagement of the Vietnam War late in his life went largely unnoticed and unattended by many of the American leaders who succeeded him.”
In the end, perhaps the best that can be said of McNamara is that his conscience tormented him: What are the odds that Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth (or Joe Biden or Antony Blinken or Jake Sullivan) have ever lost a wink of sleep over the innocents they’ve killed?
James W. Carden is the editor of The Realist Review. He is a columnist and former adviser to the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the U.S. Department of State. His articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Nation, The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, The Spectator, UnHerd, The National Interest, Quartz, The Los Angeles Times, and American Affairs.
