A Sweeping Biography of Robert McNamara Wins $50,000 Book Prize

A deep and wide-ranging biography of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has won a $50,000 prize.

Philip and William Taubman's “McNamara at War” is this year's winner of the Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History, The New York Historical announced Monday. The Taubmans' book traces McNamara's ascent as a business leader after World War II, and his downfall as a chief proponent of the Vietnam War in the 1960s who would later decide the conflict was unwinnable. He died in 2009, and long expressed regrets about the war.

“Philip and William Taubman’s ‘McNamara at War’ is a modern American epic chronicling Robert McNamara’s life in the mode of the classical Greek tragic cycle — arete (excellence), hubris (arrogance), ate (reckless folly), and nemesis (punishment of the prideful) — in the context of another tumultuous and divisive time in our nation’s history," Agnes Hsu-Tang, board chair of The New York Historical, said in a statement.

Robert McNamara, who served as defense secretary for seven years over two Democratic administrations, left the Pentagon in February 1968, three months after President Lyndon Johnson announced McNamara was resigning to become president of the World Bank. McNamara differed with Johnson and the military over Vietnam war policy amid an escalating anti-war movement.

At a ceremony in April, the Taubman brothers will receive an engraved medal and the title of American Historian Laureate. Previous winners have included Robert Caro 's“The Passage of Power,” Ron Chernow 's "Washington: A Life” and Beverly Gage's “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.”