One morning in November 1966, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara arrived at Harvard University for what he imagined would be a day of spirited but harmonious dialogue with students and a group of professors. Voluble discontent with the Vietnam War had been growing on college campuses over the previous months, and McNamara, a principal architect of the “Americanization” of the struggle in 1965, which saw the introduction of large-scale U.S. forces, was often the target of student protests. Still, he traveled to Harvard without a security detail.

As he stepped out of Quincy House after eating lunch with undergraduates, a mob of students surrounded McNamara, blocking his exit. As the crowd grew to several hundred, he managed to get to his car. He stepped onto the hood; someone handed him a microphone, and he agreed to answer questions. But he was overwhelmed by the jeering chorus of students. His temper rising, the defense secretary declared: “I spent four of the happiest years at the Berkeley campus doing some of the same things you are doing here. But there was one important difference: I was both tougher and more courteous. . . . I was tougher then, and I’m tougher now.” Protesters called him a “fascist” and a “murderer.”

Despite his defiant posture, McNamara was privately troubled by the state of the war, as he made clear in a closed-door session with professors later that day. “I don’t know of a single square mile of Vietnam that has been pacified,” he told them. “Many military men disagree with me on this, but no one has yet identified that square mile. When they try, I tell them that I’m going to get in a jeep—without a battalion escort—and ride through that area. Though some of them might like to see me try, none of them will let me. They wouldn’t ride through the area unescorted either.”

In the months thereafter, McNamara’s gloom deepened. His analysis of the situation convinced him that North Vietnam, a mostly rural society, could not be pummeled into submission by an air campaign. The ever-rising body counts, including mounting civilian deaths, distressed him. By the start of 1967, he felt sure that the enemy’s morale had not broken and that political stability remained far out of reach for the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam. Meanwhile, the war was undermining the United States’ domestic and international credibility, as allies and adversaries alike questioned Washington’s judgment.

“There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go,” McNamara wrote to President Lyndon Johnson in May 1967. “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”

Even then, McNamara kept the faith publicly, voicing confidence that victory could be achieved. But his days in the administration were numbered. In November, Johnson, fed up with McNamara’s disenchantment and his pleadings for a policy shift toward negotiations, announced that the defense secretary would depart the administration to lead the World Bank—in effect, firing him. By late February 1968, McNamara was gone. He was soon replaced by the Democratic Party insider Clark Clifford, who in short order reached the same grim perspective on the war’s prospects.

The drama of the Harvard visit and the developments in the months thereafter are deftly recounted in McNamara at War, Philip and William Taubman’s judicious and mostly convincing account of what is often called—understandably, if not altogether correctly—“McNamara’s War.” In the vast and growing literature on the war, in-depth studies of McNamara’s role in shaping the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam are surprisingly few despite McNamara’s dominance in the cabinet under Johnson and President John F. Kennedy and his seven-year tenure at the Pentagon. (He remains the nation’s longest-serving secretary of defense.) For years, historians have wondered when a big book on McNamara and Vietnam would arrive. Now it has.

It’s an extraordinary story in some ways—and in some ways deeply familiar. Other senior U.S. officials before McNamara and after him have felt pressure to stay on board, to keep quiet, to swallow their doubts in the hope that things will get better or that they can at least keep them from getting worse. To quit, meanwhile, would be to open themselves to charges of disloyalty or weakness or both. They could lose both their case and their honor. So they carry on, often to their later regret, not to mention the detriment of the country. If McNamara’s experience offers a core lesson, it is one that is simple to grasp but has too often gone unheeded: if more high-level officials were prepared to resign for their convictions, citizens would be assured that those who remain truly believe in what they’re doing.

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