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...