First off, this book by former Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara will be polarizing. Whether US should have been involved in the first place, whether the communist threat to world peace was real, and whether the war was ‘winnable’ but just pursued wrongly by its leaders, its still a controversal topic. Being the ‘architect’ of the American response to Vietnam’s kicking out French colonial power after WW2, McNamara was directly involved in the policies, the key players, and how the war was pursued. Having kept silent all these years until this book was written, what he has done here is one big Mea Culpa. The book is perhaps one man’s attempt to make peace with mistakes of his past. Given that perspective, you will either admire his honestly or find it incredulous that he did not draw those conclusions during the war. At the end, I don’t think he really brings much new to the American Vietnam experience. However, as a document to the one person that was intimately involved in that conflict, its worth reading if you have an interest of this era, but ultimately its not going to give you a new perspective on the war.
