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Summary: The best study yet written of McNamara.
Review: 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.
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Summary: McNamara's Calling
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Start
Review: 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.
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Summary: Great literary style. Hendrickson did a fine job!
Review: Being one of the few books that I have read on the Vietnam war, I must commend Hendrickson for taking his time to research and exhaust all possible avenues before putting it into print. I have not read McNamara's book In Retrospect, but it is ordered. I need to read his story and see if that confused individual lives in this book. We may never have the entire truth as to why an event like this had taken place. But if reporters could be wonderful like Hendrickson, and can investigate the issues, maybe with some good fortune we can learn a valuable lesson.
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Summary: Wrong, wrong, wrong
Review: Bothe McNamara and Hendrickson were wrong about the war then and wrong about it now. It was eminently winnable. Hendrickson's one-sided propagandistic account is biased, dull and hysterical in tone. His prose is dense and obscures rather than elucidates the subject. And Norman Morrison deserved to burn -- it's just a good thing that chance at the last moment took his daughter Emily our of harm's way. Ultra liberal pap. Pass, and buy Ron Spector's After Tet instead
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Summary: Superb presentation oF NAM deserving wider audience
Review: Digging through government documents, holding face to face interviews with individuals presented in the text, and writing from the emotional side of history Paul Hendrickson gives readers a graphic verbal "video" of the wreckage at home and abroad brought about by Mr McNamara's use of economic quantification procedures "to win the war." Hendrickson's five choices were from por and con sides of the conflict and sensitively presented as real life individuals and families. All of them suffered from the war as did thousands of civilian families unnamed and unknown save to themselves by the decisions documented in this gripping writing. Upon completion of the volume a reader will likely have a more human picture of McNamara but remain bewildered that the leader of The Best And The Brightest was too craven to speak of his certainty that the war could not be won until 30 years too late to save lives, property, careers, reputations and national unity. Required reading for students, history buffs.
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Summary: I believe this book is brilliant.
Review: Don't pay attention to the two negative comments; read this book. The writing is masterful, the execution breathtaking. We need ways of telling our children about this period, and too few books get it right. Bryan's FRIENDLY FIRE, about a family I knew in Iowa who lost a son, is a fine piece also. But Hendrickson's portrayals, and the way he weaves them in and out of McNamara's "story" is breathtaking. At no time did I think he was merely doing a number on him. This book will last. It's real history.
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Summary: Descent into Obsession
Review: For those too young to remember the Vietnam conflict, author Hendrickson has provided a valuable service. This finely etched book details the bizarrely detached way that one of the war's founders approached his bloody work; he viewed it as a math problem. And Hendrickson goes farther, illustrating the tragic ways McNamara's death-dealing equations affected specific human lives. It is precisely that detachment -- a certain soulless vacancy which corrupted America's conduct of the war and prevented us from either winning or leaving -- that threatened to drive America mad. I have read no better book on the American obsession that was the Vietnam War. In 1963, nobody knew where Vietnam was. Now, more than 25 years after we left, many of us cannot forget. I cried more than once when I read this book the first time -- for those whose stories are told here, for the men I knew who died without ever having experienced the love of wives or children, for my country and for myself. I have read it twice since. It has, I am sorry to say, lost no degree of impact.
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Summary: Who edits, who censors?
Review: Hendrickson's unusual book succeeds on many levels. Its a fascinating biography and portrayal of the flawed Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. It also portrays five other figures from the war; the Quaker who immolated himself outside McNamara's window, an Army nurse and an Army private, a Vietnamese family, and the man who tried to throw McNamara off a boat near Martha's Vineyard. While each of these portrayals has some merit and interest, the author's attempt to make cosmic connections between them only seems to trivialize each of them in the broader picture. The book is at its best when it focuses strictly on McNamara and his"crime of silence" in not speaking more forcefully against the war while in office and after he left office. The author leaves little doubt that McNamara told outright lies to Congress and the public. While I am sympathetic to the fact that any public figure and especially Executive Branch bureaucrats must often defend views or policies that are counter to their own, McNamara clearly tried to play both sides of the fence, i.e. be for or against the war, depending on the situation or who was listening. He may have been a brilliant number cruncher, but he never got the meanings of the numbers themselves or saw the bigger picture until it was too late. Even if he did, and he may have, he did litle about it until his own book was published, a book that comes across according to the author (and this reviewer) as a short apology and then a massive rationalization. All in all its a fascinating and well-written book, but much of its biographical focus on others besides McNamara borders on the trivial. I can understand and appreciate the authors wish to document how the war and McNamara affected some people, but if that is what you are looking for I suggest you read one of the fine oral histories written by Vietnam vets. For this reason the book is not a significant contribution to the literature on the war and its aftermath, though its worth reading for its focus on McNamara.
Rating: 
Summary: Unusual book on McNamara and lesser known war victims
Review: Hendrickson's unusual book succeeds on many levels. Its a fascinating biography and portrayal of the flawed Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. It also portrays five other figures from the war; the Quaker who immolated himself outside McNamara's window, an Army nurse and an Army private, a Vietnamese family, and the man who tried to throw McNamara off a boat near Martha's Vineyard. While each of these portrayals has some merit and interest, the author's attempt to make cosmic connections between them only seems to trivialize each of them in the broader picture. The book is at its best when it focuses strictly on McNamara and his"crime of silence" in not speaking more forcefully against the war while in office and after he left office. The author leaves little doubt that McNamara told outright lies to Congress and the public. While I am sympathetic to the fact that any public figure and especially Executive Branch bureaucrats must often defend views or policies that are counter to their own, McNamara clearly tried to play both sides of the fence, i.e. be for or against the war, depending on the situation or who was listening. He may have been a brilliant number cruncher, but he never got the meanings of the numbers themselves or saw the bigger picture until it was too late. Even if he did, and he may have, he did litle about it until his own book was published, a book that comes across according to the author (and this reviewer) as a short apology and then a massive rationalization. All in all its a fascinating and well-written book, but much of its biographical focus on others besides McNamara borders on the trivial. I can understand and appreciate the authors wish to document how the war and McNamara affected some people, but if that is what you are looking for I suggest you read one of the fine oral histories written by Vietnam vets. For this reason the book is not a significant contribution to the literature on the war and its aftermath, though its worth reading for its focus on McNamara.
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