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

Paul Hendrickson (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 28, 1997

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism

"Meticulous in detail, epic in scope, psychologically sophisticated and spiritually rich, it ranks with The Best and the Brightest and All the President's Men."
--San Francisco Chronicle

More than the two presidents he served or the 58,000 soldiers who died for his policies, Robert McNamara was the official face of Vietnam, the technocrat with steel-rimmed glasses and an ironclad faith in numbers who kept insisting that the war was winnable long after he had ceased to believe it was. This brilliantly insightful, morally devastating book tells us why he believed, how he lost faith, and what his deceptions cost five of the war's witnesses and McNamara himself.

In The Living and the Dead, Paul Hendrickson juxtaposes McNamara's story with those of a wounded Marine, an Army nurse, a Vietnamese refugee, a Quaker who burned himself to death to protest the war, and an enraged artist who tried to kill the man he saw as the war's architect. The result is a book whose exhaustive research and imaginative power turn history into an act of reckoning, damning and profoundly sympathetic, impossible to put down and impossible to forget.

"A masterpiece. . . . [Hendrickson] has a gift with language that most writers can only dream about. "
--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Approaches Shakespearian tragedy."
--The New York Times Book Review

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This book is another worthy step in the 1000- mile trek of trying to figure out what the Vietnam War meant in human terms. (The richest vein struck in this effort thus far still has to be Gloria Emerson's Winners and Losers.) Hendrickson spent most of a decade putting together the story of the war in the lives of Robert McNamara and five less fancy participants in it--a combat Marine who once was on the cover of Life, an Army nurse, the scion of an upper-crust Vietnamese family, a Quaker who set fire to himself outside McNamara's Pentagon office window in 1965, and an artist who, in 1972, tried to throw McNamara over the side of the Martha's Vineyard ferry. Hendrickson's efforts to generate a sense of his characters interacting on a cosmic stage too often flirt with bathos, but his way with the characters themselves is undeniably powerful. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In 1983, Washington Post reporter Hendrickson (Looking for the Light) saw Robert S. McNamara on TV and was moved to write a series of articles about the man who served as secretary of defense during the Vietnam War. Those pieces became the springboard for this exhaustively researched, probing, important contribution to the annals of American history. Using McNamara as his central, overshadowing subject, Hendrickson interweaves the stories of five others caught up in the whirlwind of the times: an artist who tried to kill McNamara by flinging him off a ferry in 1972; a Marine who fought in the war; a Quaker who immolated himself in protest against the war; a nurse who served in Vietnam; and a Saigon native who suffered horribly at the hands of the Communists. With breathtaking dexterity, Hendrickson juxtaposes insights on McNamara, whose life he describes as "a kind of postwar technocratic hubristic fable," against episodes in the lives of those over whom McNamara wielded a distant yet very real power. Hendrickson finds that McNamara "owned a significant conscience, which he struggled against and was continually willing to compromise"?above all, perhaps, in helping to escalate a war that he believed could not be won militarily. Hendrickson, who once studied for the priesthood, writes in a voice that is moral yet not preachy, and he is careful to identify his own mixed feelings about McNamara. Even the extensive endnotes?which include Hendrickson's recollection of slipping a note under the door to McNamara's hotel room, "where I thought I could hear him breathing just on the other side"?are extraordinarily informative. Passionate, incisive, expertly wrought, this is a narrative that will sweep readers along in its search for truth, a classic that will be pored over for years to come. Photos not seen by PW. 100,000 first printing; first serial to the Washington Post; simultaneous Random House Audiobook; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October 28, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067978117X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679781172
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #905,389 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars McNamara's Calling November 30, 1999

By Ken Lauter

Format:Hardcover

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 self (which was clearly present in the private man) in favor of his "animus," the male self which dominated the public official-- cold, numerical, abstract. What was once said of poet John Crow Ransom may be true of Hendrickson as well: "he had a fury against abstraction" -- or at least a fury against those who hide behind abstractions to evade the consequences of their own actions (which in McNamara's case included many pointless deaths, countless lives deformed, and a nation driven into a paralyzing cynicism).

This book does not demonize McNamara, however. Rather, it shows him as fallible, inadequate to the task before him, and suffering from his own awareness of this fact. The book's most haunting intimation may be that McNamara did not so much fail in his calling, but worse: he did not have one. He lacked any sense of the need for sacred vision even within his decidedly secular empire. As an ex-seminarian so devoted to the idea of what a calling ought to mean that he would leave his own rather than demean it with half-hearted participation, Paul Hendrickson was maybe the perfect man to discover Robert McNamara's fatal flaw-- one that surely to some degree afflicts American culture at large. Read more ›

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Start December 31, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

As a Viet Nam vet against the war (before, during and after), I applaud the book. However, I think Mr. Hendrickson is really pretty soft on the SOB. He is too smoothly civilized in carefully, cautiously, respectfully, slowly working up to calling the old man a liar, which in my mind has not been a question for well over thirty years.

To hell with poor schizoid Mr. McNamara and his sad, touching, tragic inability to relate to other human beings- Vietnamese, Americans, his own family... It's a good thing I wasn't along on the ferry that night on Vineyard Sound, because back then I was more than ready to kick Mr. McNamara's teeth in, before ripping his fingers loose from the railing and pitching him into that cold, dark water.

The book hints at the levels of anger and frustration that McNamara personally inspired, over and over again. (The demonstrations, car bouncings, arson at his snazzy new house at Snowmass, etc.)

I think the Morrison connection is relied on too heavily- Hendrickson confirms that Morrison didn't have anything in particular against McNamara, and didn't even know where the SecDef's window was when he burned himself at the Pentagon...

The book does not give voice to the valid view that the super-technocrat was in fact a cold blooded, knowing and unapologetic mass murderer. If his conscience ever bothered him much, it didn't cause him to do anything other than whine a bit, of which the nauseating "In Retrospect" is only the latest example. Even if his wife and kids did get ulcers.

The definitive objective book on the man that, more than almost anyone else, got us neck deep into the idiocy of the Viet war, has yet to be written.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A fair shake for McNamara August 13, 2002

By Not A Real Name

Format:Hardcover

If you're familiar with Robert McNamara, you probably know that many people have some very strong feelings about the man. This includes many of the other authors who have written about the former secretary of defense. Hendrickson has managed to restore an aspect of humanity to the former secretary, and do so without making apologies for him. This is not an easy trick If you're familiar with the usual indictments against McNamara (He's a liar, he knew the war was unwinable but kept it going for years, he's an evil robot of a man that enjoys dropping bombs on villages, etc...) this book should be of help to you in making sense of a complicated man, and might even help you to understand him to some degree.

Along with his narrative of the trials and tribulations of Robert Strange McNamara, Hendrickson tells the tales of a handful of divergent figures involved in a variety of ways with the American War in Vietnam. If you're particularly interested in this war, you'll probably recognize the tale of a conscientious objector that gave the last full measure of devotion outside McNamara's Pentagon window. The other individuals are most likely strangers to pretty much anyone, but their stories serve to enliven the narrative, and are interesting in and of themselves.

Like the author, I'm not apologizing for McNamara. However, I think the man has been burned in effigy long enough, and if you still insist on hating him, you ought to at least try to understand the position he was in. 9 out of 10 McNamara haters do not. I'm not saying that McNamara did the right thing, or making any form of value judgement on the war, but I do believe that he takes an inordinate amount of the blame for the disaster in Indochina, and it's about time someone presented a reasonably fair picture of Mr. McNamara....

Hendrickson gives you both sides to the McNamara coin. He calls him on a number of apparent(and a few obvious) lies, yet he also plays devil's advocate rather well. His discussion of whether or not McNamara should have resigned when he lost faith is an excellent example of fairness in journalism. He doesn't judge him on this, but he presents the alternatives, as they must have appeared to McNamara in the mid 60s, and lets the reader decide. After you know where McNamara came from, and try to imagine what his experiences prior to becoming SecDef had taught him, you are free to throw stones. I have a strong feeling you might still be inclined to. However, I think you might be a bit less inclined to fault him for certain things, and a bit more knowledgeable about a certain war in Southeast Asia for having read this book. Read more ›