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William Taubman in conversation with Jim Brooke

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From W.W. Norton: W

A revelatory portrait of Robert S. McNamara, informed by newly discovered diaries, letters, and interviews with those closest to him.

Robert S. McNamara was widely considered to be one of the most brilliant men of his generation. He was an invaluable ally of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson as U.S. Secretary of Defense, and he had a deeply moving relationship with Jackie Kennedy. But to the country, McNamara was the leading advocate for American escalation in Vietnam. He strongly advised Johnson to deploy hundreds of thousands of American ground troops, just weeks before concluding that the war was unwinnable, and for the next two and a half years, McNamara failed to urge Johnson to cut his losses and withdraw.

McNamara at War examines McNamara’s life of intense personal contradictions, following his childhood, his career as a young faculty member at Harvard Business School, and his World War II service, to his leadership of the Ford Motor Company and the World Bank. Philip and William Taubman had access to materials previously unavailable to McNamara biographers, including Jacqueline Kennedy’s warm letters to McNamara during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and beyond; family correspondence dating back to McNamara’s service in World War II; and a secret diary maintained by McNamara’s top Vietnam policy aide. What emerges is the comprehensive story of the infamous former leader of the Pentagon: riven by melancholy, guilt, zealous loyalty, and a profound inability to admit his flawed thinking about Vietnam before it was too late. McNamara at War is a portrait of a man at war with himself—with a grave influence on the history of the United States and the world.

 

 

illiam Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College. His book, McNamara at War: A New History, coauthored with Philip Taubman, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in September 2025.  He is the author of the Gorbachev: His Life and Times (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography in 2004. Also the author of Stalin’s American Policy: From Entente to Détente to Cold War, and co-author with his wife, retired Amherst College professor of Russian Jane Taubman, of Moscow Spring, William Taubman was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 2009 and chaired the Academic Advisory Committee of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. He has received the Karel Kramar Medal of the Czech Republic and the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation.

Jim Brooke is a Berkshire native and spent his career as a foreign correspondent. He reported for the New York Times for 24 years;  based in West Africa, Brazil, Denver and Tokyo. In 2006, he moved to Moscow, where he was successively Bloomberg bureau chief and then Voice of America bureau chief.  Brooke published the Ukraine Business News for 6 years while living in Kyiv.