The Education of Robert S. McNamara: Secretary of Defense, 1961–1968

Robert S. McNamara published an extraordinary book in 1995, a quarter of a century after his departure from the Johnson administration as secretary of defense. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam was clearly a painful exercise in retrospection. Few executives like reviewing the past and pointing to errors of judgment, individual and collective, that determined bad policy and faulty implementation. Fewer still are engaged in measuring failure in terms of human lives lost and in terms of suffering. But McNamara had a noble purpose: to learn from experience and, possibly, to prevent the recurrence of tragedy in human affairs. He might have been excessively optimistic about what his treatise would accomplish. He was probably surprised, and undoubtedly saddened, that his book received the scorn and criticism it encountered from reviewers and editorial writers.