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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Philip Taubman is affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. His newest book, McNamara At War: A New History (co-authored with his brother William Taubman), was published by W.W. Norton & Company on September 23rd, 2025. Before joining CISAC in 2008, Mr. Taubman worked at the New York Times as a reporter and editor for nearly 30 years, specializing in national security issues, including United States diplomacy, and intelligence and defense policy and operations. At the Times, Taubman served as a Washington correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, deputy editorial page editor, Washington bureau chief and associate editor.
William Taubman is the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College. His book, McNamara at War: A New History, coauthored with Philip Taubman, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Co. in September 2025. He is the author of the Gorbachev: His Life and Times (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography in 2004. Also the author of Stalin’s American Policy: From Entente to Détente to Cold War, and co-author with his wife, retired Amherst College professor of Russian Jane Taubman, of Moscow Spring, William Taubman was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 2009 and chaired the Academic Advisory Committee of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. He has received the Karel Kramar Medal of the Czech Republic and the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation.