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The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War. Paul Hendrickson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. 427 pp.
Robert McNamara was president of Ford Motor Company, president of the World Bank and Secretary of Defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He was completely confident in the technological and military capacity of the United States. But it took him 30 years to admit that "we were wrong, terribly wrong" in the decisions made about Vietnam. If the numbers worked, McNamara believed, all else followed.
The Living and the Dead is painstakingly researched and often at odds with McNamara's own version of events. It examines his life in California, his career at Ford Motor Company and his Vietnamera decisions. It is those decisions and how they intertwined with five disparate individuals that makes this one of the most unusual and compelling texts about the war in Vietnam.
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