The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War

I was moved to read this book when I saw the author on C-SPAN's "Booknotes" program a few years ago. I immediately bought the book on the basis of this interview and I wasn't disappointed. As one other reviewer here has stated - Who can forget the incident on the Martha's Vineyard ferry? The opening of the book is like that of a thriller; it entices you and pulls you into the story immediately. And what a thriller! This was a defining period of my life. The Vietnam War and its affect on the young people of the United States, of whom I was one, has seldom been written about so personally and with such fervor. Hendrikson brilliantly revives the feelings of those of us here at home about the unwinnable war and the waste of lives - both of our own people and (in even larger numbers) the Vietnamese. I remember the self-immolation of the Quaker man at the Pentagon. This horrific event was described by the press at the time as the act of a madman. But it was one of the purest acts of contrition on behalf of humanity in my young experience and is rendered in this book with compassion and and enlightenment. For those who are too young to remember the Vietnam War, the demonstrations and other efforts against it, and the personal cost for ALL - both those in the killing fields and those here at home - I say to you: READ THIS BOOK.

I read the hardback version of this book several years ago when it first came out. I've probably read about 20 books on the Vietnam war, including the Pentagon Papers. I'm well steeped in the literature - and this is one of the best books on the war. I only read it once a few years ago and some of the passages and scenes in the book are still in my mind. Who can forget the Veteran who saw McNamara on the boat near Martha's Vineyard? Or McNamara's breakdown at his go away dinner. Or his realization that the war was unwinnable after the first major engaement of combat troops?

This book offers a great perspective on how Robert McNamara's decisions affected the lives of five ordinary people who consequently find themselves in unordinary situations. I think these stories, in conjunction with other historical texts, masterfully articulate some of the features of the clouded tapestry that we call Vietnam.

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

A complex, meticulously researched subject is combined with an unusual and disarming writing style, which is informal and first-person. Woven throughout, in an amazingly relevant way, are the stories of the lives of five people profoundly affected by the war.The details of McNamara's disillusionment with the war are fascinating reading, and serve to indict -- and convict -- McNamara on what many think is his greatest crime: he didn't speak out against the war after he was removed from office. Hendrickson suggests, compellingly, that if McNamara had campaigned against the war after leaving office, using all his intelligence and persuasiveness, that today there may have been a "McNamara Prize," similar in stature to the Nobel Peace Prize.