The Book of Paul

...His father, a buyer for a California shoe manufacturer, “seems to have been fair, moral, strict, proud, proper, accomplished, fussy, brainy, crotchety, and almost totally lacking in humor...

...For example, Hendrickson recites in solemn detail the exact route, street after street, turn after turn, by which McNamara drove “in a black Ford roadster with green wire wheels” from his Oakland home to classes at the University of California at Berkeley in 1933...

...The author sedulously reports on the McNamara years as majordomo at the Ford Motor Co...

...I didn’t join up, I did the opposite...

...the widow of a Quaker who immolated himself outside McNamara’s Pentagon window...

...an Army nurse...

...By then it was the darker half of the sixties...

...An alternative title for Hendrickson’s book might be The Book of Paul...

...The son who issued from this “almost comically contradictory union,” was “this brilliant, brittle, overengineered son who became, well, a machine, at least by daylight...

...But most especially he was cultivated, even dandified . . .” McNamara’s mother, however, seems without complexity: A “stay-at-home” and “notoverlyintelligent,” she was a “breathtaking driver and crusher,” Hendrickson writes...

...The soul of The Book of Paul is to be found in its epilogue: When, over the years, Hendrickson writes, he’d see McNamara in downtown Washington “it was always a bit unnerving, disconcerting...

...Hendrickson tells the story of visiting with Captain Tran, the Vietnamese refugee whose story ends the book, and his family in 1995, just as McNamara is out flogging his book...

...Leftists had been excoriating him for decades, despite McNamara’s efforts at expiation through his management of the World Bank...

...Think of her as the mannish force of nature, with the feminine class” who dominated the modest house...

...Hendrickson’s purpose is to “decode” the man who “embodied an era...

...Or so some of his sources tell Hendrickson...

...Somehow, Hendrickson seems to have overlooked Hanoi’s Easter Offensive in 1972, in which South Vietnamese forces —with U.S...

...Damn, there he is, ghost of Washington, my own...

...and a former Vietnamese captain and members of his family who made it to the United States...

...Much of the narrative is devoted to Hendrickson’s recitation of how he laboriously tracked down and excavated the lives of the five supplementary characters— prewar, postwar, and present...

...These are sections of often affecting reportage, though Hendrickson casts a good portion of these personal histories in a Vietnam “victimhood” matrix...

...I don’t think any of us sitting at that table really thought the splintered and ineffectual and often corrupt ARVN forces could have stood up to the people on the other side,” Hendrickson writes, after the U.S...

...Capably executed, the Style-section technique can be compelling...

...The Book of Paul By Woody West Like a pop-up target at a carnival shooting gallery, Robert S. McNamara has sharpened the literary marksmanship of writers and critics of the Vietnam war since the 1960s...

...There’s the rigidly ambitious and mendacious McNamara, for whom power trumps sensibility and whose contradictions of character bring him to the edge of a breakdown in the mid-1960s...

...But a curious part of this book is that, for Hendrickson, the Vietnam war ended the day McNamara resigned on Nov...

...But still, Hendrickson assures us there had to have been “10,000 other known and unknown and partially revealed and microscopically small contributory factors and events . . . that helped create the inordinately complex being Robert S. McNamara became...

...Again, maybe...

...The omission of what happened after McNamara left office is not minor...

...Then he adds a pinch of the attack of polio just after World War II that may have (or may not have) further concentrated both his rigidity and his ambition...

...had pledged if the North Vietnamese violated the terms of the Paris agreement—and which pledge, to our lasting shame, we lacked the courage and will to live up to...

...Hendrickson stirs in McNamara’s zealous embrace of the new systems analysis while at Harvard business school and the success in applying the technique during World War II that helped bring his simmering ambition to boil...

...Thus the central flaw of psychojournalism: Your subject may have acted as he did for this underlying reason...

...The years from 1967 to the U.S...

...others reject the diagnosis...

...This revelation somehow convinced McNamara that Hendrickson was an “adversary,” Hendrickson writes in an innocent tone, and made McNamara reticent in responding to the reporter’s constant calls and letters...

...I finished college, obtained a deferment for grad studies, got summoned for an Army physical, was saved by some old bowel and asthmatic histories, implored a liberal doctor to sign some papers . . .” Then Hendrickson tells us he “passed out leaflets for Gene McCarthy, thought of myself as an intelligent and humane liberal...

...Maybe...

...There’s also some equivocation, and Hendrickson writes that even at the end of a dozen years he remains somewhat ambivalent about McNamara...

...And the book is written with a sticky earnestness...

...It can also be glib and pretentious...

...and in Washington, and is persuasive—if anyone still is not convinced—that McNamara was a disaster at Vietnam policy-making...

...And with publication last year of his sort-of apologia, In Retrospect, McNamara took as many hits from those on the left as on the right for his conduct as defense secretary to Kennedy and Johnson...

...air and naval-gun support— mauled and stopped the Soviet-supplied armor and artillery of North Vietnam’s army...

...Detail is used as if it were wallpaper, presumably to convince the reader that if the author knows that McNamara breakfasted on orange juice and raw egg, he must really know his man...

...bullying" that had been so harmful to the South Vietnamese’s sense of their own worth...

...The Living and the Dead is an often fitful amalgam of psycho-journalism (the none-too-reputable cousin of psycho-history, itself not all that respectable anymore) and “Stylesection” reportage, a form of personal journalism the Washington Post validated for a generation of young writers...

...On it goes, Hendrickson piling fact upon fact, conjecture upon speculation upon deduction to distill the soul of Robert S. McNamara...

...But it is a sixth person who really dominates this book—the author himself, who left a seminary in 1965 in a critical year of the Vietnam War, went to college and this and that, and became eventually a writer for the Washington Post...

...I was in my mid-twenties and figured I had the Vietnam thing beat...

...Hendrickson seems to have made an avocation of McNamara, beginning with three extensive pieces he wrote for the Post in 1984...

...But that is not germane to The Book of Paul—though it certainly was to the Living and the Dead of this country and Vietnam...

...The author tells us he spent a dozen years on The Living and The Dead...

...Within three months I was gone from Alabama and religious life, though I wouldn’t want to suggest that a photograph brought me out, not exactly...

...Emphasis added.] The book’s me-ness is so unrelenting that it can overwhelm its principal and the other five individuals whose lives ostensibly were inextricably linked by “synchronicity” with McNamara’s...

...last year the Right finally got in on the action, lambasting him not as a despoiler of Vietnam but as the partial assassin of 58,000 young Americans lost there...

...a former Marine...

...Then it was...

...What rattled Hendrickson particularly was a picture of a young Marine hiding his face in mental and physical exhaustion after the bloody ordeal...

...The method can become a soup, requiring more and more ingredients in the hope of attaining a distinct flavor...

...McNamara’s family, for example...

...If you lived in a college town, it was something to be proud of...

...withdrawal of combat forces in 1972 are remarked only for the additional casualties that should have been avoided—if, that is, McNamara had found the courage to assert in public as he increasingly did inside the administration that the war was militarily unwinnable—and had resigned...

...There’s the charming and sensitive McNamara, trying to burst out of his parochial chrysalis, seduced by the glamor of the Kennedys (practicing the “Twist” in front of his bedroom mirror...

...The last sentence hints at an expiatory subtheme in his exploration of those years, though it is subdued...

...It was in one of those articles that Hendrickson publicly disclosed the recently widowed McNamara’s affair with Joan Braden, the wife of a Washington columnist and the mother of eight...

...As justification for his authorial presence, Hendrickson recalls that in 1965 while still in seminary, he saw a copy of Life magazine featuring photos of a Marine helicopter squadron battered by the Viet Cong...

...But it may have been for that reason, or for any number and permutations of others...

...But that ambivalence is buried in Hendrickson’s insistence on McNamara’s supposed dual nature—yin and yang, anima and animus...

...The book is not so much about McNamara as it is about those “five lives” mentioned in the subtitle: an artist who, in supposed despond, tried to throw McNamara off the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard one dark night...

...29, 1967...

...Within three years, of course, a renewed North Vietnamese offensive crushed the ARVN forces— fighting now without the materiel and air support the U.S...

...Now, Paul Hendrickson loads his shotgun in The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (Knopf, 432 pages, $30...