For Americans in their 40s or 50s, the name of Robert S. McNamara still provokes a strong emotional reaction. Even more than President Johnson, McNamara was viewed by many as the architect of the war in Vietnam. Accordingly, his book on the Vietnam decision-making process and his role in it, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, is a work of great importance, representing in effect his apology for a policy that he now regards as disastrously ill-thought-out. The remainder of this report will survey the book chapter by chapter, followed by a general conclusion.
Chapter 1: This chapter summarizes McNamara's career up to the point at which he became Secretary of Defense in the administration of John F. Kennedy. McNamara deals only briefly (pp. 10-13) with his career as an executive at Ford Motor, where he eventually became president of the company. Such brief treatment gives short shrift, perhaps, to what ought to be a fundamental issue in this book: McNamara's own mind-set, his strengths and weaknesses, and the way in which these things reflected the times.
The 1950s were a golden age of corporate managerialism and the so-called Organization Man. The brash days of "captains of industry" like Henry Ford himself were far in the past, while the age of the new captains of industry, like Bill Gates, were equally far in the future. McNamara and his colleagues would try to manage the Vietnam War as though it were a corporation, and that outlook was perhaps largely responsible for the disaster that followed.
Chapter 2: This chapter with the course of American involvement in Vietnam during the Kennedy Administration, until the policy started to unravel (not long before Kennedy himself was assassinated in Dallas). According to McNamara, "throughout the Kennedy years we operated on two premises that ultimately proved contradictory. One was that the fall of South Vietnam to Communism would threaten the security...