What happens when the architect of a war knows—deep down—that it cannot be won?

In this episode of In Conversation with Frank Schaeffer, I speak with William Taubman and Philip Taubman about their new book, McNamara at War: A New History, which is our December “It Has to Be Read” selection.

William Taubman is a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian. Philip Taubman is a longtime journalist and former New York Times Washington bureau chief and associate editor. Together, they’ve gone back through diaries, letters, declassified documents, and interviews that were never fully used before. What they found is a more complicated and more troubling picture of Robert McNamara than we’ve had until now.

McNamara helped escalate the Vietnam War even as he came to believe it could not be won. Our conversation looks closely at how that happened, why he stayed silent for so long, and what that silence cost us all.

For me, this isn’t abstract. I lived through the Vietnam era, and years later my own son served as a U.S. Marine in Afghanistan and Iraq. As we watch Donald Trump blowing up and seizing boats in a march toward conflict with Venezuela, it’s hard not to notice how often the same patterns repeat themselves.

McNamara at War is our December “It Has to Be Read” because it doesn’t just explain a war we lost.

It forces us to reckon with why we keep losing them.

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In Conversation… with Frank Schaeffer is a production of the George Bailey Morality in Public Life Fellowship. It is hosted by Frank Schaeffer, author of The Gospel of Zip.

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