Miller Center presidential recordings featured in the spotlight
New biography of Robert McNamara makes use of Secret White House Tapes
President Donald Trump’s rebranding of the Department of Defense as the Department of War comes at a time when one of its more notable chiefs has emerged as the subject of a new biography. Robert McNamara, whose command of the military establishment spanned virtually the entire 1960s, is now more fully realized, if not more fully scrutable, in the soon-to-be published McNamara’s War: A New History, written by the brotherly tandem of Philip and William Taubman, the former New York Times Washington bureau chief and Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, respectively.
In addition to leveraging a remarkable cache of letters that McNamara both sent and received, as well as the diary of his chief assistant during key phases of the Vietnam War, the Taubmans make great use of the secret White House tapes that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson made during their time in the Oval Office. The Miller Center, which established the Presidential Recordings Program in 1998, has published thousands of transcripts from the Kennedy and Johnson collections, as well as from the Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan collections. The Center facilitated the Taubmans’ use of these materials, allowing them to paint a more revealing picture of McNamara which highlighted, among other things, the gap between his public comments and his private thoughts on Vietnam.
The tapes also facilitated the Taubmans’ astute reading of the relationship between McNamara and the surviving Kennedys—Bobby, Ted, and, most intriguingly, Jackie, with whom McNamara forged a special, even intimate bond. The letters that Jackie and McNamara exchanged testify to their deepening personal connection, a theme that runs throughout much of the book. But the tapes are especially helpful in decoding the equally complex, triangular relationship between McNamara, Jackie, and Lyndon Johnson—and, along with it, what the Taubman’s describe as McNamara’s “irrepressible ambition” (239). As evidenced repeatedly throughout the book, the “fly on the wall” nature of these materials make them invaluable for probing the nuances of policy, the process of decisionmaking, and the uses of power, all filtered through the office of the presidency.
Aside from providing this research support, which the Taubmans graciously recognize in their acknowledgments, the Miller Center has regularly offered similar help to authors, scholars, filmmakers, and journalists. Those with whom we’ve worked include Robert Caro, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bob Woodward, Mark Bowden, Ken Burns, and Lynn Novick. Repeatedly, they tell us that without the tapes and our assistance, their stories would be far less revealing and impactful. Indeed, without resort to the tapes, the political history of the 1960s and early 1970s would lose both the color and explanatory power of these remarkable materials, key resources for understanding the nation during one of its most tumultuous eras.
As for McNamara’s own story, it reveals the difficulties and sorrows that accrued when, arguably, the country’s foremost business executive helped to lead a country into combat, when managerial expertise sought to rationalize and quantify the recipe for victory in Vietnam, and when the secretary of defense—widely acknowledged for contributions he made to running the Pentagon—assumed the role of secretary of war.