Long after he served as secretary of defense, Robert McNamara carried the memory of Vietnam around like a cross, simultaneously punishing and redeeming himself through his statements on the war. Yet the limits of his reexamination help explain why America is now enduring a blend of the authoritarianism and imperialism that it once deployed abroad: McNamara—like the country he served, under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson—could acknowledge mistakes in Vietnam, but he never questioned the American exceptionalism that put us there in the first place.

“We were wrong, terribly wrong,” McNamara wrote in his memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995). It was a refrain that he delivered many times in writings, interviews, lectures, and, most intensely, Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War (2003). As a young think tank staffer in Washington, I remember being engrossed by the film, in which McNamara recalls the clinical brutality of World War II firebombing, the glories of the Kennedy administration, and the cascading errors that led to catastrophe in Vietnam, over a pulsing and anxiety-inducing score.

The McNamara I saw in Morris’s film was fascinating and strange. He spoke with certitude even as he discussed his enormous errors in judgment. He was vulnerable in his nostalgia for the very government service that ended so badly. He peppered his memories with digestible lessons—the United States should never apply its economic, political, or military power unilaterally—that were being ignored at that very moment by the George W. Bush administration. He looked like a ghost from the twentieth century, his once-black slicked-back hair reduced to wisps of gray, offering himself up as a cautionary tale about the excesses of American power as we were repeating history in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Alas, his self-flagellation and search for meaning in a war that he had done so much to escalate stopped short of a full reckoning. Sure, he could catalog mistakes. The US government had failed to understand that Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese were more nationalists than they were communists. It constructed a “domino theory” in which all of Asia would fall into the arms of the Soviets if the US left Vietnam. It intensified the war—by bombing villages, deploying ground troops, and even using chemical weapons—without a strategy to end it. It consistently misled the American public in ways that shattered the trust on which democratic legitimacy depends.

What McNamara could not seem to challenge was why the United States was involved in Vietnam in the first place. What led men like him into rooms where they made decisions regarding a country they knew nothing about? How could American officials so devalue the lives of the Vietnamese relative to our own, killing more than three million Vietnamese people before our chaotic exit? What innate confidence in our own special character leads the US government to try to control a world that does not want to submit to our will and does not believe in our supremacy?

We are now entering another spasm of aggression cast as necessity, as an American president has illegally deposed Venezuela’s socialist leader, declared that he is running the country on behalf of oil companies, and threatened Greenland, Iran, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Panama, and Canada. None of this has any grounding in law, and there is no clear plan for how the US intends to control Venezuela or its other prospective conquests. To Donald Trump, the lessons of history are immaterial to his lust for personal aggrandizement and hemispheric domination. Unlike with Vietnam, there is no pretense that US actions are in the service of any values: we are now fully in a world based on the principle that might makes right.

The Fog of War ends with a shot of McNamara driving through the rainy streets of downtown Washington. We hear the voice of Errol Morris asking him why he didn’t speak out against the war sooner. He refuses to answer. “A lot of people misunderstand the war,” he says, “misunderstand me.” Morris asks McNamara whether he feels responsible for the war. Again McNamara obfuscates. “I don’t want to add anything to Vietnam,” he says. “It is so complex that anything I say will require additions and qualifications.” Finally Morris asks the last question of the film: “Is it the feeling that you’re damned if you do and if you don’t, no matter what you say?” McNamara responds: “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. And I would rather be damned if I don’t.”

There is nothing complex about the Vietnam War: it was wrong for the United States to be there in the first place. McNamara hid behind a story about complexity to avoid this full reckoning, which let his successors off the hook. By the time I saw the film, the US political and national security establishment had internalized the idea that Americans were suffering from “Vietnam syndrome”—an aversion to fighting wars overseas because of the outcome in Vietnam. This was seen by elites as an irrational response to trauma: the mistakes were made in the way power was used, not in its use in the first place.

As with Vietnam, America’s presence in the countries targeted by the “war on terror” lasted decades and went beyond combating al-Qaeda. Our military involvement in Afghanistan began with the arming of the Mujahideen—which later morphed into the Taliban and al-Qaeda—in the 1980s. Our involvement in Iraq began with the Gulf War—a causal event in Osama bin Laden’s decision to attack America. Even our attempt to control Venezuela has roots that reach all the way back to the Cuban Revolution, which confounded policymakers like McNamara.

While the invasions of the “war on terror” overcame Vietnam syndrome, they met the same fate as the Vietnam War. The Iraq War devolved into a series of insurgencies. The war in Afghanistan ended with a chaotic American withdrawal from Kabul. Another generation of American troops came home, this time to communities hollowed out by deindustrialization and rampant inequality. We were left with a vast apparatus of “homeland security” and antiterrorism authorities that further empowered the office of the presidency. Americans again lost confidence in their elites, who have still failed to fully reckon with their own mistakes. The xenophobic propaganda about a terrorist “Other” abroad was repurposed against enemies within and “narcoterrorists” abroad.

Trump has inherited these forces. He has dispensed with America’s positive global contributions—from USAID to support for allies and institutions—while doubling down on pugilism. After running on pledges to end forever wars, he has expanded them into the Western Hemisphere and brought them home. The troops of the newly minted Department of War are now in the streets of American cities. A massive militarized ICE has murdered Americans and terrorized communities with impunity. Post–September 11 legal authorities are used for everything from imposing tariffs to deporting Black and brown people. The dishonesty embedded in aspects of American foreign policy is now a central feature of American governance: the president and his agents can brand Renee Good and Alex Pretti as domestic terrorists. McNamara, with his twentieth-century certitude about American exceptionalism, has become a different kind of cautionary tale in 2026.

It is thus an opportune time for the new biography McNamara at War by Philip and William Taubman. The two brothers—one a veteran New York Times reporter, the other a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer—draw on unprecedented access to McNamara’s papers to revisit familiar questions:

Why did he fight so hard to escalate a war that he soon realized was beyond winning? Why did he decide the war was unwinnable? Why didn’t he fight to end it? Why did he refuse for so long to criticize it?

This meticulously researched and finely rendered account of McNamara’s life suggests that these are not particularly difficult questions to answer.

The Taubmans portray a child of post–World War I America whose father had deep insecurities and whose mother infantilized him—an upbringing that produced a man driven to belong to something bigger than himself while seeking approval from figures of authority. He found a home at Harvard Business School, where he excelled at control accounting, the marshaling of logic and statistics to achieve more efficient outcomes. There were, however, early signs that mastering patterns on paper did not translate into intuition about the unruly world. When McNamara traveled to Nazi Germany in 1939, he saw Adolf Hitler speak, but he “did not,” he later said with embarrassment, “recognize the imminence of war.”

During World War II he became a leading adviser to General Curtis LeMay in designing the firebombing of Japan. He approached it as an accounting challenge and calculated that more destruction could be wrought if planes flew at a lower altitude, enabling them to hit more targets while also facing a greater risk of being shot down. More Americans and Japanese died as a result; the firebombing killed 100,000 people in Tokyo and brought mass destruction to more than sixty other Japanese cities. In The Fog of War McNamara acknowledges that he committed war crimes. “But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”he asks. The question is left unanswered.

After World War II McNamara left government service and rose through the ranks of the Ford Motor Company. There he developed the sharp-elbowed management style that later characterized his leadership at the Pentagon. “Even when you knew he was wrong,” one subordinate recalled, “he would plow you under.” McNamara fought to install seat belts and sun visors in Ford cars long before they were the norm, relying on data and experimentation to make his case. Control accounting could save lives just as it could take them away.

After winning the 1960 election, Kennedy chose McNamara as his secretary of defense on the recommendation of John Kenneth Galbraith and former defense secretary Robert Lovett, exemplars of the kind of successful men who since World War II have greased the revolving doors of the American national security state. McNamara joined a team whose combination of academic credentials, ambition, and expertise reflected the ascent of the American superpower—white men steeped in the country’s finest universities, law firms, and corporations. Meanwhile, the diplomats with experience in Asia who had been purged in the McCarthyite 1950s, after the United States “lost China,” were not brought back in from the cold.

McNamara became the most influential member of Kennedy’s cabinet. He knew how to brief the president, work the bureaucracy, and control the flow of information. He joined Robert Kennedy as a voice of caution during the Cuban missile crisis, against the hawkish counsel of generals and Vice President Johnson. This reinforced McNamara’s belief in his own instincts, as perhaps he gave himself a bit too much credit for recognizing the madness of fighting a nuclear war over Cuba.

The Taubmans are particularly effective at showing how McNamara was seduced by the glamour of the Kennedys. After initially forswearing the Washington social scene, he soon became one of its most enthusiastic participants, even mimicking his boss’s womanizing. Most notably, this included what was at least a flirtation with Jackie Kennedy, with whom he dined and exchanged books, records, and suggestive letters (a pattern that escalated after her husband’s assassination).

The Kennedy team inherited an “advisory” mission for South Vietnam that had commenced under Dwight Eisenhower after the colonial French were routed by Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese forces in 1954. At first Kennedy saw Vietnam as a test for the United States, the reflexive view of an American national security establishment that often treats non-European countries as pawns in a game of geopolitical chess. “Now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible,” he told one journalist early in his presidency, “and Vietnam looks like the place.” But by the time of his death, Kennedy had grown wary—chastened by the scare of the Cuban missile crisis and the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, more confident in his own instincts, and inclined to seek an exit from Vietnam after his reelection campaign.

Johnson’s ascent to the presidency assured Americans that that would not be the case; he was less willing than Kennedy to see nuance in an Asian country going communist. He was also enthralled by McNamara—the handsome, well-educated, and confident subordinate who showed him a fealty that most elites did not. Jack Valenti recalled that when McNamara spoke in meetings, Johnson would look around the room with a face that seemed to say, “Isn’t he amazing? And he is mine.” McNamara could have left the administration after the 1964 election with his reputation intact, but he was ensnared by the attention of the president, by a belief in his capacity to solve hard problems, and above all by power itself.

The Taubmans recount in detail the consequential events of 1965. As a reelected Johnson plowed toward escalation in Vietnam, McNamara became his fiercest partner. He savaged dissent, including a memo from Under Secretary of State George Ball warning presciently about the futility of it all, which McNamara countered (in Ball’s account) with “a pyrotechnic display of facts and statistics to prove that I had overstated the difficulties we were now encountering.” In February the decision was made to commence bombing North Vietnam, and in July to send American ground troops. By the end of the year, McNamara knew the policy was doomed. Each escalation was matched by a determined response. Rather than breaking North Vietnamese will, indiscriminate bombing hardened it. The corrupt South Vietnamese government had no legitimacy. The US military had no answers other than demanding more resources.

Yet he stayed on for a jumble of reasons. He was credulous about those arguments of credibility: that Vietnam could be a domino that led all of Asia to fall under Soviet dominion. He saw himself as a brake on the hawkish generals who had intentions that could have led to war with the Chinese. Time and again he used his powerful mind to rationalize staying rather than taking a moral stance and leaving. Perhaps above all, he had a narrow conception of loyalty. “He thought his paramount duty as defense secretary was to serve the president loyally,” the Taubmans write, “contrary to the oath that he and all other cabinet members took that made clear that their primary obligation was to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Serving the president, of course, also preserved McNamara’s power and status. For more than two years, he was an accomplice in Johnson’s efforts to mislead the public about the actual cost of the war. In 1965 he declared that the United States had “stopped losing the war.” In 1966 he was “cautiously optimistic.” This master of control accounting told the skeptical journalist Neil Sheehan that “every quantitative measurement we have shows that we’re winning.”

By February 1968 McNamara was out, on the verge of a breakdown, not sure whether he’d resigned or been fired. “There weren’t any answers,” he later lamented. But there were answers all along. American officials had just refused to see them.

The starting point for America’s self-conception as a virtuous superpower that spreads values around the globe was Woodrow Wilson’s declaration that the United States was entering World War I because “the world must be made safe for democracy.” Indeed, one of McNamara’s final books was a plea for global cooperation titled Wilson’s Ghost (2001).

One man who initially believed in Wilson was Ho Chi Minh. As a young indigent worker, Ho was in Paris during the post–World War I peace talks that led to the Treaty of Versailles. Inspired by Wilson’s stated support for self-determination as a basis for peace, Ho sought an audience with the Americans to plead Vietnam’s case. He was rebuffed. Along with Africans and other Asians, Ho learned that Wilson’s self-determination applied only to white people—chiefly the Europeans freed from the defeated Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires.

After World War II, Ho tried again. Now a leader of the Vietnamese independence movement, he issued a declaration of independence that mirrored America’s. When Japan surrendered its short-lived empire in Southeast Asia, Ho repeatedly sought peace and partnership with the victorious Americans.

Ho defeated France’s effort, supported by President Harry Truman, to restore colonial rule in Southeast Asia. But still Americans convinced themselves of the justness of their efforts to buttress the fledgling South Vietnamese republic. In A Bright Shining Lie (1988), his essential book about the Vietnam War, Neil Sheehan pinpoints America’s “great capacity to rationalize arrangements that served its status quo interests,” even “beyond any apparent limits.” To me, the encapsulation of this capacity was delivered by Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, when he declared, “We enter Vietnam without the taint of colonialism.”

Suffice it to say, most Vietnamese saw it differently. And this, ultimately, was what McNamara could never grasp. He, like so many other Americans, could look at the world through the eyes of the European Russians who saw opportunity in Vietnam; he could not look at the world through the eyes of the Vietnamese.

“I believe today,” McNamara said in 1995, “that Ho Chi Minh was not a follower of Stalin and Khrushchev, which I thought he was at the time.” True, but this was a determination that could have been made by any examination of Ho’s life, his actions at the conclusion of both world wars, or his declaration of independence, or with any broad exposure to Vietnamese who weren’t—as the South Vietnamese government was—dependent on American resources for survival and personal enrichment. Ironically, it was this American blind spot that pushed the Vietnamese deeper into the communist orbit, absent any other options. For all the questions that McNamara asked later in his life, he couldn’t reckon with the notion that the United States had no business inserting itself into Vietnam in the first place—that we could not see either the perspective of the Vietnamese or our own racialized blindness.

One scene in the Taubmans’ book illuminates this limitation. In the 1990s McNamara traveled to Vietnam for a dialogue with his ex-counterparts in the North Vietnamese government. When the Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap challenged America’s version of the war’s origins, the cold war, or democracy, McNamara took offense. “Were we—was I, was Kennedy, was Johnson—a ‘neo-imperialist’ in the sense that you are using the word?” McNamara asked. “I would say, absolutely not!” To which Giap responded, “Excuse me, but we correctly understood you.”

One of the curious aspects of McNamara’s character is that he seemed to view Vietnam as a calamity that happened to him. To be sure, the war made his life difficult. His children came to oppose it. His wife developed severe ulcers from the stress. Robert Kennedy urged him to resign and take a stand against the war. Jackie Kennedy once pounded on his chest demanding that he do something to stop the slaughter. He was widely villainized by the antiwar public. A Quaker named Norman Morrison self-immolated outside McNamara’s Pentagon office; McNamara later called it “a personal tragedy for me.”

Henry Kissinger, for his part, was not tortured by second thoughts. He mocked McNamara, the Taubmans recount: “‘Boohoo, boohoo,’ Kissinger said, pretending to cry and rub his eyes. ‘He’s still beating his breast, right? Still feeling guilty?’” Kissinger was entirely comfortable with power and was thus lauded and handsomely rewarded by the ruling class until his death, in a way that McNamara wasn’t. Perhaps this was because Kissinger never really believed in a virtuous American exceptionalism in the first place.

But McNamara seemed to be constantly struggling to square his actions in Vietnam with his desire to believe in the goodness of his own, and America’s, intentions. After leaving the Pentagon, he led the World Bank for over a decade, as if he could balance out the lives taken in Vietnam with the lives saved through combating poverty with technocracy.

McNamara left the World Bank in 1981, but he never left Washington. Instead, he ambled daily from his Watergate apartment through the government buildings, lobbying offices, and think tanks that served as the central nervous system of post–September 11 American power. I used to see him occasionally at events, craning his neck, looking around the room for someone to talk to. By the time he died, I was a young White House speechwriter and deputy national security adviser for strategic communications attending meetings about Afghanistan, where the military was seeking more resources as we propped up the corrupt government installed during the Bush years.

In my eight years in the White House, the problem with the war in Afghanistan—as with the wars in Iraq and Vietnam—was not a failure to formulate the right strategy or apply the right amount of resources; it was a mistaken belief in our capacity to control events inside other countries, and in the legitimacy of our attempts to do so.

As someone who was more responsible for messaging than for military decisions, I now recognize the cynicism and self-deception involved in being a part of the US national security apparatus. Of course, I knew we were in Afghanistan to kill a relatively small number of al-Qaeda terrorists, nearly all of whom lived in Pakistan—a harsh reality that found real justification in the September 11 attacks. Yet I also believed that America’s intentions inside Afghanistan were good. Therefore, I believed in the metrics of progress that I dutifully recited: Afghan security forces trained, girls educated, elections held. It was a recitation of parts that never added up to a whole.

When I look back on that time, I am haunted above all by the fact that in those many meetings about Afghanistan, there were no Afghans in the room: Afghans who knew that the government officials and warlords supported by the US in Afghanistan were enriching themselves and trafficking in heroin, which fueled the opioid crisis ravaging American communities; Afghans whose families were killed by American bombs or terrorized by night raids in their villages; Afghans who hated the Taliban but also mistrusted an America that had once supported the Mujahideen, only to abandon the country after the Soviets were defeated; Afghans who could not afford to believe in the stories we told about democracy and a “rules-based international order,” because they lived in the real world.

For years after leaving government, I heard these stories from Afghan friends. Still, I clung to the belief that our intentions had been good even if the results told a different story. Then Kabul collapsed in one final spasm of violence and chaos in 2021, with an American president callously blaming Afghans for not fighting harder. The Afghan women we once lauded as heralding a new dawn are now living in a Taliban-imposed darkness, unable to attend school or go outside without a male relative. The Afghan men who served alongside the US military as interpreters are now being hunted down by ICE and deported. And I’ve come to understand that believing your intentions are good doesn’t make them so.

After Trump’s first election, many national security practitioners—myself included—felt a kind of comfort when he attacked us as deep state saboteurs. If anything, belief in American exceptionalism grew more fervent as the Democrats and Bush-era Republican outcasts banded together: now we were fighting for the same thing at home that we said we stood for abroad. We were the good guys, on the side of democracy.

Yet during the Joe Biden years, it became clear to me that this wasn’t quite right. The catchphrase for the Biden administration’s foreign policy, from the beginning, was “America is back.” This conveyed a willful blindness, because the US was seeking to restore a system of global hegemony that had lost legitimacy at home and abroad. Who exactly wanted that America back? Trump was crass in his will to power, but he represented a break from a class of elites who seemed to be the only people left who believed in an untainted story of American exceptionalism. That is how a Democratic presidential candidate like Kamala Harris ended up campaigning with Liz Cheney, the daughter of the man who did as much as anyone to deliver his party—and country—into the hands of Trump.

History is unlikely to see it as a coincidence that the Biden administration ended with a period of unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. From Biden on down, members of the administration seemed to believe that it was coherent policy for them to provide a blank check of military aid while saying they were working on a cease-fire; to mouth words of discontent with the killing of Palestinian civilians while vetoing UN resolutions designed to stop that killing; to lament Vladimir Putin’s war crimes against Ukrainian children while lambasting the International Criminal Court for seeking the prosecution of Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes against Palestinian children; to believe its intentions were good when its actions were not.

You cannot compartmentalize your values and stay true to them. You cannot pledge fealty to racial equality for Americans while supporting such inequality abroad. You cannot be that hypocritical without people around the world, including Americans, doubting your convictions.

Trump poses an exponentially greater danger to Americans and the world—not because he is a historical anomaly but rather because he reflects the worst impulses from the American past, now stripped of any investment in collective security, development, self-determination, or universal values. The veil of good intentions has been removed. The once selectively recognized guardrails of domestic and international law are being outright ignored. The sovereignty of NATO allies has been disregarded, in a fashion once reserved for the non-European world. The threat of imperial wars looms over this presidency, which lacks the discipline that prevented us from repeating the global conflicts that scarred the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, Americans endure the military patrols, masked militiamen, weaponized system of justice, and wildly dishonest claims about fighting terrorism and extremism that the US government once reserved for other countries. The story about exceptionalism has been affixed to one man, the leader. Perhaps it is no surprise that so many of the best and brightest at American law firms, universities, and corporations have fallen in line; thus far at least, they seem to care more about their own status and position than whatever stories they once told themselves about democracy.

All of this makes Robert McNamara’s story land differently today. The Vietnam War has often been cast as a body blow to liberalism because it derailed the momentum of the Great Society and the civil rights movement. More than that, though, it betrayed a fatal blind spot within American liberalism, a devaluation of human life itself: the belief that a cohort of enlightened people could manage an empire while casting themselves as democrats. McNamara could never truly see this, could not see the United States—see himself—from the outside in. He mistook strength for wisdom; he experienced power as legitimizing, even righteous.

Once you allow yourself to play by a set of rules that’s different from everyone else’s, the rules themselves are made brittle and ultimately break. That is the original sin of American exceptionalism, which should be a story of multiracial democracy within our borders rather than of boundless power beyond them. Now that abuse of power has come home. The voice of General Giap echoes: “We correctly understood you.”