New Releases by Robert S. McNamara

President Kennedy''s former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and coauthor Blight (international studies, Brown U.) offer suggestions as to how the United States could and should change its foreign policy and defense policy to incorporate the core objectives of post-WWI Wilsonian ideals. They suggest that the United States make the end of war a major goal of foreign policy and argue that while the U.S. will have to provide leadership, it must not apply its economic, political, or military policy unilaterally. In order to successfully maintain a peaceful world, they believe that a complete rapprochement with China and Russia is necessary in order to prevent the real dangers of Great Power conflict. In addition they offer suggestions towards strengthening the U.N. in a move towards true multilateralism in the reduction of communal violence and the threat from nuclear weapons. c. Book News Inc.

The former Secretary of Defense, and leading scholars from the U.S. and Vietnam, offer a groundbreaking new study of exactly how the Vietnam War happened-- and why it could not be stopped before three million people died.

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER. The definitive insider''s account of American policy making in Vietnam. "Can anyone remember a public official with the courage to confess error and explain where he and his country went wrong? This is what Robert McNamara does in this brave, honest, honorable, and altogether compelling book."—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Written twenty years after the end of the Vietnam War, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara''s controversial memoir answers the lingering questions that surround this disastrous episode in American history. With unprecedented candor and drawing on a wealth of newly declassified documents, McNamara reveals the fatal misassumptions behind our involvement in Vietnam. Keenly observed and dramatically written, In Retrospect possesses the urgency and poignancy that mark the very best histories—and the unsparing candor that is the trademark of the greatest personal memoirs. Includes a preface written by McNamara for the paperback edition.

SCOTT (copy 1) From the John Holmes Library collection.

In the thirteen years that Robert McNamara served as President of the World Bank, he transformed that institution into the worlds largest and most important single source of international development assistance. When he took office in 1968, the Bank was lending about a billion dollars a year. By 1980, that figure had grown to $12 billion. In his final year, this one development agency was supervising over 1,600 projects, with a total value of some $100 billion, in more than a hundred developing countries. Those are impressive statistics. But they do not reveal the full dimensions of Mr. McNamara''s achievement. That becomes clear if one peruses what has now been collected together here for the first time in one volume: his major policy addresses as an international civil servant. In effect, this volume constitutes a careful, reasoned, and sometimes impassioned commentary on the human condition of late twentieth-century man-and what the international community can and ought to do about it.