The VVA Veteran, a publication of Vietnam Veterans of America

Vietnam Veterans of America

November/December 2025

The Taubmans put Bob on the Couch in 'McNamara at War'

BY MARC LEEPSON

When I learned that the journalist Philip Taubman and his brother, historian and biographer William Taubman, had written McNamara at War: A New History (Norton, 512 pp. $39.99), one question immediately came to mind: What could be new in a book about Robert S. McNamara and the Vietnam War?

I would guess that the 1963-68 Secretary of Defense would stand alongside Presidents Johnson and Nixon as having more words written about his role in shaping Vietnam War policy than any other American Vietnam War government official. That includes two very good biographies of McNamara by top-flight journalist/authors Deborah Shapley (Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara, 1993), and Paul Hendrickson (The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War, 1997).

And that is not to mention McNamara’s son Craig’s revelatory Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today (2022), which details what life was like for him growing up and coming of age while his father ran the Pentagon and the war. That excellent memoir contains a great number of previously unreported details about McNamara senior’s family life and his hubris, lies, and obfuscations about the Vietnam War.

Then there’s U.S. Naval Academy history professor and author Brian VanDeMark’s exhaustive Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent into Vietnam (2018). VanDeMark, as I wrote in these pages, all but tells his long (640-page), complex story through SecDef McNamara’s eyes. It’s no coincidence that VanDeMark co-wrote another significant work on McNamara and the war: his much-ballyhooed, self-serving 1995 memoir, In Retrospect.

William and Philip Taubman made wide use of these and many other McNamara secondary sources in their deeply researched book. The good news is that they also turned up reams of hitherto unreleased primary source materials to build on the work of Shapley, Hendrickson, VanDeMark, and others.

That includes letters McNamara’s mother wrote to him throughout his life; letters he exchanged with his wife; his extensive correspondence with Jackie Kennedy; and the “secret diary” of John McNaughton, McNamara’s “closest Pentagon aide,” as the Taubmans put it. That’s in addition to scores of interviews the co-authors conducted from 2017-24 with historians, journalists, and McNamara friends, family members, and colleagues.

The result is a first-rate “political and psychological portrait” that tells the Bob McNamara story from cradle to grave. In doing so, the authors frequently shift forward and backward in time to interpret how he navigated his life events—growing up, in college and grad school, during World War II, as president of Ford Motor Company, in the Pentagon, and after—through the lens of how those experiences shaped McNamara’s psyche as he failed spectacularly in running the Vietnam War.

In 1960, when McNamara took the reins at the Pentagon, the Taubmans point out, “he had met and mastered nearly every major challenge in his life—from first grade through the Ford Motor Company.” But the Vietnam War, “of which he became the main American manager, mastered him, with devastating consequences” for “his country and the world,” and for “himself and his family.”

The authors’ conclusion, which they back up with oceans of examples, is that McNamara’s “internal contradictions, suppressed emotions, periods of melancholy, zealous loyalty to the presidents he served, and a profound inability to understand and overcome his weaknesses”—his “disabling personality traits”—lead to the arrogant, “baldly deceptive” way he ran the war.

If you want the details of how Robert S. McNamara’s psychic makeup aided and abetted his “terrible and costly failure of leadership” during the beginnings and height of the Vietnam War, the Taubman Brothers spell it all out very well in McNamara at War—“at war,” that is, in Vietnam and within himself.

Long-Delayed MOH

The heart of retired U.S. Army Col. Paris Davis’s new memoir, Every Weapon I Had: A Vietnam Vet’s Long Road to the Medal of Honor (St. Martin’s, 320 pp. $30, hardcover; $14.99, e-book) is the former Green Beret’s riveting, three-chapter-long evocation of the events that led to him (belatedly) receiving the U.S. military’s highest award for valor. That pivotal event took place on June 17, 1965, as Davis led his 5th Special Forces Group Detachment A-321 team and a South Vietnamese Regional Force Company in an attack on a VC camp near Bong Son.

The Americans and South Vietnamese prevailed in that fight, but ran into a huge NVA force on their way back to their base camp. What followed was 12 hours of intense fighting, some of it involving hand-to-hand combat. Despite being shot twice, Davis refused medical help and stayed in the fray till the end, fighting skillfully and courageously.

Among other things, he rescued three wounded Green Berets and brought them to safety. The final rescue effort, under fire, he ran across an empty field, then dragged a seriously wounded sergeant “inch-by-inch, foot by foot,” out of harm’s way. “I kept tugging him up [a hill],” Davis writes, “ignoring my raging thirst, the stiffness of my blood-encased legs, the pain of my shredded fingers.”

Davis “constantly exposed himself to hostile small arms fire to rally the inexperienced and disorganized company,” his MOH citation notes. “Despite two painful wounds … remained with the troops, fought bravely, and provided pivotal leadership and inspiration to the Regional Force Company.”

Davis also recounts the racism he was subjected to growing up, as well as after he joined the Army in 1959 following his graduation from Southern University. “Racism,” he writes, “didn’t define my Army career, but it was always present.”

Davis makes a good case that racial discrimination was the reason he did not receive the Medal of Honor until March 3, 2023. That happened even though his commanding officer officially recommended the MOH right after the battle. And everyone who saw him in action that day agreed that his actions merited the military’s highest award for courage under fire.

Receiving it in the White House from President Joe Biden 58 years after the fact, Davis says, “shows that this Black man fought as hard and with as much heart as every other soldier in Vietnam. And that truth will never move.”

Tales from the Cockpit
by Chuck Howard

REVIEW BY HENRY ZEYBEL

In 1965, at seventeen, Chuck Howard earned his FAA private pilot’s license, which established the agenda for his lifelong career. In Tales from the Cockpit: Memoir of a 20,000-Hour “Seat-of-the-Pants Pilot” (342 pp. $54.99, hardcover; $24.99, paper; $7.99, Kindle), Howard writes about that career, flying—in mostly helicopters—as a civilian and as a soldier.

A disclaimer alerts the reader to be wary of the book’s contents. Howard, a life member of Vietnam Veterans of America, promises graphic violence, gore, salty language, explicit sexual content, and humor. He then says, “Do not attempt any of the [aerial] acrobatics or antics described throughout this memoir.”

The slam-bang begins when he and a high school classmate get solo flying certificates. They practice by renting Cessna 150s and executing maneuvers that defy sanity, gravity, and all regulations. He is still amazed that they survived. After reading, I am, too.

Howard left his hometown of Allegheny to join the Army and enter aviation training, which a recruiter promised him because he had a pilot license. But because of the losses of helicopter pilots in Vietnam, the Army sent his entire class to helicopter fight school. He then had maintenance and test pilot training before going to Vietnam to fly UH-1 Hueys.

At Vinh Long in IV Corps with the 175th Assault Helicopter Company, Chuck Howard faced mortar and rocket attacks, Agent Orange, loneliness, and the death of close friends. His extra training, however, made him a jack of all trades. For nine months, he primarily performed test-pilot duties to ensure that damaged helicopters had been repaired correctly. During the final three months of his tour, he voluntarily flew daily gunship missions.

Howard’s progression during his time in the Army was not at all typical. He recounts his time in Vietnam mostly by describing how he found exceptions to rules, and he explains how he exploited those exceptions and what he did afterwards with a clarity that non-flyers can easily understand. Those parts of the book serve, in part, as a helpful primer on the aerodynamics and idiosyncrasies of rotary and fixed wing aircraft.

Although Howard writes about his emotions as a young soldier in the book’s first half, the second half is dominated by the logic and facts that characterize his continued work in his trade. Howard worked with helicopters for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey from 1984-2009. He provides background information on aircraft development in which he participated, including a new helicopter gunship and the V-22 Osprey. His analyses of accidents that he encountered during his time at the Port Authority also plumb unexpected depths that fascinated me.

With the exception of being shot at, Port Authority missions often were as complex and dangerous as flying in combat in the Vietnam War. Readers well versed in the war might not find much new in Howard’s overseas adventures, but his recollections of his other flying hours should solidly capture their attention—as they did mine. Chuck Howard is truly one-of-a-kind.

2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010

2013 & 2014 APEX® Award Winner