The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War.

By the time Robert McNamara got around to beating his breast over Vietnam with the publication of his memoir (In Retrospect, Times Books) last year, he might well have forgotten what vilification felt like. During the months that followed, he may have wondered if he had ever truly known it before. The book was his first public discussion of Vietnam in nearly twenty years and, like most political memoirs, it revealed a good deal less than it was given credit for. McNamara's allowance that "we were wrong" in the prosecution of the war was almost certainly intended as something more than a statement of the obvious, and might even have amounted to an apology. It is hard to say. But it served nicely as a red flag to any who still had strong feelings on the subject, and it turned out that there were quite a few.

To Paul Hendrickson, over at the Washington Post, "what In Retrospect proved, probably beyond any publisher's cash-register dreams, was that Vietnam hadn't gone away, it was only hiding, seething under the surface." Hendrickson had written a series of articles about McNamara for the Post in 1984, shortly before the Westmoreland-CBS libel trial, and seems to have conceived the idea of a book around that time. Although McNamara had been cooperative at first, the interviews quickly ceased and the calls gradually took longer and longer to be returned and even the letters became unhelpful and curt after a while. Hendrickson managed without him and, after twelve years of interviews with more than five hundred sources, felt safe in going to print on his own. "Except," he says, "I would still like to talk to Robert McNamara."

From the very start, Hendrickson tries for a broad and dramatic approach. "His wife wasn't drinking milk with her Scotch in the hope that her stomach might hurt a little less - not then. A man bearing a child hadn't set himself on fire below his Pentagon window - not yet." The opening lines make it pretty clear what the author has in mind, and his attempt to locate McNamara somewhere between the realms of public and private life is at once arresting, crude, and vivid. "What is being glimpsed here is a soul that's been so consciously hemmed in and boundaried all day."

We know a good deal of this already, of course. McNamara the Whiz Kid, pulling numbers out of the air at press conferences, quoting body-counts off the top of his head: it was part of the mythology of Vietnam long before the war ended, and Hendrickson picks it up with ease. "I think of Robert McNamara," he says, "as a kind of postwar technocratic hubristic fable. He was an extraordinarily impressive person, almost a new Adam, who abused his trust, and knows he did, and has spent the rest of his life paying for it."

Perhaps. Americans, by and large, lack the tragic sense in their historical imaginings, and we have always tried hard to plot the orbit of our national consciousness along the poles of good and evil. More venerable societies might not have found the experience of the Vietnam War nearly so unsettling, in terms of national identity, as we did. This is not a question of cynicism or sophistication; it is more a matter of faith. For the ancient biblical understanding of history as the arena of Providence, in which justice is sought as a kind of divine equilibrium, has always found a deep resonance with the American soul and persists even to this day.

Hendrickson himself proceeds largely out of this tradition and, although he does not actually speak of guilt or innocence per se, leaves little doubt that his task has more to do with judgment than intelligence. There is nothing merely anecdotal, then, in the accounts of McNamara worrying about power-window motors at church on Sunday, or opening his Christmas gifts with a notebook beside him so that he could record who gave him what. There is a helpful epigraph from Jung, in case we miss the point, concerning the psychic traumas induced by an "artificial personality." And there is the history of the war itself, which is unveiled through the recollections of five witnesses: a marine corporal, an army nurse, the son of a South Vietnamese politician, the widow of the Quaker pacifist who immolated himself outside the Pentagon, and a Martha's Vineyard artist who once assaulted McNamara aboard the Wood's Hole ferry.

It is hard to say what all of this adds up to in the end, although the spectacle of discrete lives connected through fate and circumstance - Hendrickson himself comes into the picture as an unhappy seminarian in 1965 reading a Life article about the corporal's squadron - seems calculated to point to McNamara as an agent, if not the actual source, of their misfortunes. To some degree he was, of course. But it is striking how few of the five (the artist excepted) seem to have thought in such terms. For them, as for most of us, it was the war itself that was the disaster. McNamara himself is off the map.

McNamara's pronouncement, in one of his last conversations with Hendrickson, that "the real history of Vietnam hasn't been written yet" is as obvious and unhelpful, in its way, as his admission that "we were wrong." It is true for all that, however, and in the end Hendrickson can't be said to have contributed much more than a counter-memoir to McNamara's own. Perhaps that was all he had hoped to do, although it seems unlikely. A heroic view of history requires villains, whose malice must be invoked to explain the failure of the just. More often than not, this is as good an explanation as any, and in the face of some epic catastrophe it is usually the most comforting. In regard to the Vietnam War - which was, after all, perpetrated and subsequently abandoned according to the will of a great majority of the American public - it is a comforting notion of which we need to disabuse ourselves.

James J. Uebbing is the editor of Love Had a Compass: Journals & Poetry (Grove Press), a collection of Robert Lax's work.