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William Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College. His book, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of McNamara at War: A New History and Gorbachev: His Life and Times. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Philip Taubman, a former New York Times Washington Bureau Chief, is affiliated with Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is the author of In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz
An exhaustive account of a fascinating man whose high intelligence was matched by his personal complexity. It shows that his intellectual arrogance helped make him unwilling to account publicly for the extent of his mistakes about the Vietnam war - while his personal decency made him privately suffer for the vast costs of his and his colleagues' failures there as they prolonged and widened the war.--Anthony Lake, United States National Security Advisor, 1993-1997 Excellent and probing about one of the central figures of the Vietnam War.--Bob Woodward, author of War Major achievement of research and writing.--Peter Osnos The Taubman brothers have given us the deepest probe into the formative years of Robert McNamara, seeking an answer to the following question: how could such a brilliant man lead the United States into an unnecessary and unwinnable war in Vietnam, and then become the designated face of that failure?--Joseph J. Ellis, author of The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783 In McNamara at War two brothers, a top-flight biographer and a top-flight journalist, have joined forces to create a character study of Robert McNamara, one of the most complicated figures in modern American history. The resulting work is an evidence-based meditation on McNamara's agonizing relationship to himself, his family, and the nation and on the power of the government to create mass destruction, with seemingly less power, or inclination, to stop it. Confident, thorough, compassionate and yet clear-eyed this masterful work should be required reading for those who lived through the daily televised body counts and for anyone who hopes not to ever again. --Madeleine Blais, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle At last, we have the man in full. McNamara at War illuminates the high-octane ambition and ability that propelled Robert McNamara to the pinnacles of power in both the private and political realms. With penetrating insight and capacious sensitivity, the authors give us nothing less than McNamara Agonistes: a vivid portrait of this uncommonly brilliant and uncommonly complex soul tormented by trials of intelligence, will, morality, and loyalty. A compelling, memorable read. It reveals much about the waging of the Vietnam War as well as the often-baffling labyrinths of human nature.--David Kennedy, author of Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945
