THE MAN WE LOVE TO HATE

By R.Z. Sheppard

Robert S. McNamara's blinkered 1995 memoir, In Retrospect, did little to change its author's image as an American Faust who sold his soul to a demon technocracy. The former Secretary of Defense is not likely to have a good 1996 either.

Paul Hendrickson's The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (Knopf; 427 pages; $30) portrays the chief operating officer of the Vietnam buildup as a "tragically split man." Central to this view are McNamara's unsatisfactory answers to questions that have dogged him since he left the Pentagon on Feb. 19, 1968: Why did he choose to remain in office more than two years after he was telling colleagues the war was futile? And why did he continue to rationalize publicly a conflict he privately did not believe in?

Hendrickson's churning account begins with an anonymous man's attempt to throw McNamara overboard during a ferry ride to Martha's Vineyard in 1972. Many of Hendrickson's scenes and anecdotes first appeared in the Washington Post in the mid-'80s. Here the journalist looks further into McNamara's brilliant careers at the Harvard Business School and the Ford Motor Co. The record reveals a top-of-the-line number cruncher steeped in the values of corporate loyalty. But as Secretary of Defense, his mistakes cost lives, not shareholder dividends. And yet his responsibilities required a level of abstraction and analysis that seems to have put him on another planet. Hendrickson emphasizes this distance by frequently interrupting his biography with stories of ordinary men and women profoundly affected by the war: a helicopter crewman; a Quaker who immolated himself on the Pentagon grounds; a former South Vietnamese army officer now living in California.

There are more pained voices than the book's subtitle suggests. A former Army nurse recalls wounded soldiers in a field hospital: "When they woke up, they thought they'd died. They'd say...'Where am I? Am I in heaven? Are you my mother?' See, they'd be starting to smell my perfume. It was either White Shoulders or Shalimar." At such moments The Living and the Dead can be as cleansing as a good cry in front of the Vietnam War Memorial. But too often Hendrickson inserts himself awkwardly into his design. The result is a form of not-so-new New Journalism full of breathless speculating in a kind of past-presumptive tense ("He must have been absorbing bundles of sensations, not all of them ordered or rational").

Attempts to overdramatize McNamara and his times are unnecessary. Shattering events speak for themselves, as the witness literature of the 20th century reminds us again and again. But even though The Living and the Dead fails to levitate McNamara and his Pentagon, it touches a heavy truth: Americans did not have to die in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the war, and today the region is overrun by venture capitalists.

--By R.Z. Sheppard