427 pages | 9th September, 1996 | Non-fiction | History; Politics
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
HELEN BERNSTEIN AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM FINALIST
More than the two presidents he served or the 58,000 soldiers who died for his policies, Robert McNamara was the official face of Vietnam, the technocrat with steel-rimmed glasses and an ironclad faith in numbers who kept insisting that the war was winnable long after he had ceased to believe it was. This brilliantly insightful, morally devastating book tells us why he believed, how he lost faith, and what his deceptions cost five of the war’s witnesses and McNamara himself.
In The Living and the Dead, Paul Hendrickson juxtaposes McNamara’s story with those of a wounded Marine, an Army nurse, a Vietnamese refugee, a Quaker who burned himself to death to protest the war, and an enraged artist who tried to kill the man he saw as the war’s architect. The result is a book whose exhaustive research and imaginative power turn history into an act of reckoning, damning and profoundly sympathetic, impossible to put down and impossible to forget.
"Meticulous in detail, epic in scope, psychologically sophisticated and spiritually rich, it ranks with The Best and the Brightest and All the President’s Men."
San Francisco Chronicle
"A masterpiece. . . . [Hendrickson] has a gift with language that most writers can only dream about."
Philadelphia Inquirer
"Approaches Shakespearian tragedy."
The New York Times Book Review
Paul Hendrickson is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner in 2003 for his book Sons of Mississippi. The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. Hemingway’s Boat was a New York Times best seller and also a best seller in the UK. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Since 1998, he has been on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that, he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. He lives with his wife, Cecilia, a retired nurse, outside Philadelphia and in Washington, DC.
US: Knopf