Toward the end of the 1990s, office workers in downtown Washington noticed the regular appearance of an elderly pedestrian, waiting to cross the street or moving slowly along the sidewalk, his thinning hair and tremulous lips matched by haunted, watery eyes. Only his weathered Burberry raincoat, seemingly worn in all seasons, belied the impression that, at dusk, he had no home to return to.

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Many of those workers (of which I was one) could hardly have failed to recognize Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the president of the World Bank until his retirement in 1981. Most of them, if asked who McNamara was, might well have remembered him as the unexpected star of John F. Kennedy’s Camelot cabinet: the supersmart, self-confident reformer of the military establishment with a taste for the cocktail circuit who was gradually transformed into the architect, mastermind and chief public advocate for Lyndon B. Johnson’s disastrous Vietnam War.

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By the end of his tenure at the Pentagon in 1968, Vietnam had become “McNamara’s War,” a disruptive and increasingly desperate enterprise carried out by a government at odds with itself and a defense chief who, as early as 1965, had concluded that the conflict, which ultimately consumed 58,000 American lives, could not be won. In the course of seven years, McNamara’s reputation plummeted from celebrated maestro of defense minutiae to lord high executioner of American boys for ill-fated policies in which he no longer believed.

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McNamara became a public pariah, albeit a well-compensated one: shouted down by undergraduates, subjected to insults from journalists and historians, shunned on the tennis courts of Martha’s Vineyard. For two decades after leaving office, McNamara, who believed that loyalty was a principal virtue in statecraft—or at any rate, an excuse for standing by while Vietnam burned—resolutely refused to speak publicly about his time as the secretary of defense, seeking absolution by battling global poverty at the World Bank with the same intensity and, to some degree, the same results, that he had prosecuted the war.

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Then, after retiring from the bank, he changed his mind. From then until his death in 2009, McNamara could scarcely keep his mouth shut. “We were wrong,” he declared into Errol Morris’s documentary film cameras in “The Fog of War” (2003). He traveled incessantly to any conference or symposium or television studio, from Cambridge to Hanoi, to apologize, proselytize, break down in tears or seek forgiveness for the bulk of his public career. Vietnam was not a Cold War confrontation, he explained, but a civil war in which we were clueless interlopers. The North Vietnamese, who fought relentlessly to unite their country under communist rule, were not so much global Marxist ideologues as local patriot-nationalists.

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Whether McNamara’s personal behavior—the freely shed tears, the pleas for redemption, the alternating moods of distant depression and awkward conviviality—was strategic or a reflection of his lifelong nervous tension, the authors of “McNamara at War: A New History” cannot quite decide. Nor could anyone, for that matter.

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The son of a glacial father and suffocating mother, McNamara was a bright, ambitious, ingratiating lad who breezed through the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard Business School and, after service as a staff officer in the Army Air Forces in World War II, emerged as a familiar postwar American character: the driven, stony-faced man in the gray flannel suit, married to a wife but in love with his job—in his case at the Ford Motor Co., where he and a handful of organizational “whiz kids” revived the somnolent automaker with managerial systems learned at Harvard.

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He had been promoted to the presidency of Ford in November 1960 when, one month later, President-elect Kennedy, who had never met McNamara, recruited him to be the secretary of defense. It was a surprising choice and, in some respects, inspired. Kennedy had been elected largely on the presumption that the Eisenhower White House was asleep at the controls and the Pentagon was in need of younger, dynamic leadership to shake things up.

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McNamara swiftly discovered that America’s “missile gap” with the U.S.S.R.—JFK had claimed on the campaign trail that, thanks to Eisenhower’s reputed somnolence, the Soviets now had a vastly superior arsenal—was not only a myth but, in truth, strikingly in favor of the United States, enabling Washington to confront Moscow during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Still, his vigorous use of Ford-tested doctrines as they applied to a “flexible response” to “brushfire wars” and other challenges, as well as his mastery of systems and statistics, led inexorably to Vietnam.

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In that sense, “McNamara at War,” by the brothers Philip and William Taubman, faithfully records what has since become received wisdom on the subject. Philip Taubman, the New York Times’s former Washington bureau chief, is the author of a biography of George P. Shultz; William Taubman is an emeritus professor of political science at Amherst College and the author of a biography of Nikita Khrushchev. The authors’ richly detailed account of McNamara’s life leads to familiar conclusions: that the confidence—one might say arrogance—of the Kennedy-Johnson administrations doomed them from the start, and that persistence and resistance to contrary advice pushed an ill-fated policy into national (and, for McNamara, personal) tragedy.

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It’s a complicated story, to be sure, with large elements of truth, but also some revision. Was Vietnam McNamara’s war? The decisions in pursuit of limited objectives, made at a series of crossroads and turning points, were taken not by one cabinet member, or by the generals in his charge, but by their constitutional masters Kennedy and, after 1963, Johnson. McNamara might well have benefited from a deeper knowledge of history and politics. But even with his charts and body counts and above all his blandly authoritative manner, he was following the presidents’ leads in accordance with a misplaced notion of loyalty.

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Moreover, the authors cannot resist extending their critique to McNamara’s successors who, in recent adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere, failed to heed the lessons of Vietnam. Yet it’s striking to note how many of McNamara’s brothers-in-arms, mindful of the Korean stalemate and the “loss” of China, were, in fact, painfully aware of those lessons from the early 1950s and sought to apply them. The last war is always being refought and the lessons of the recent past can mislead as well as guide.

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In a volume replete with minor errors—JFK’s undergraduate thesis was later published as “Why England Slept,” not “While England Slept,” T.S. Eliot never wrote a poem titled “The Fourth Quartet,” Lady Bird Johnson was four years younger, not older, than LBJ, and so on—humility is good advice for authors as well as statesmen.

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