I'm John Batchler. It's a pleasure to welcome the author Tevi Troy, his most recent book about

the president, The Power and the Money, the Epic Clashes between Commanders-in-Chief and Titans

of Industry.

We go to a Titan of Industry and a Commander-in-Chief and a new book, McNamara at War,

a new history, Philip and William Taubman.

Tevi has written for Civitas Outlook at the Civitas Institute.

Importantly here, we're talking about a man who perhaps is lost in the midst of time to the

younger people.

You're not responsible for a snap quiz about him, but McNamara was the face of the Vietnam

war when I was a young man facing the draft. And to have a biography of him, these many decades later,

is a treat. The Talbans have done a very helpful job of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of many

people around McNamara at the time.

He was famously a whiz kid, and then he was the head of Ford, an auto maker,

responsible for some of the great cars of my youth, like the Mustang.

And then he was in charge of the Pentagon, an odd mix.

Tevi, congratulations for identifying the things that never worked decades ago for me

and still don't entirely work.

Bob McNamara was a hardworking young man from the right side of the tracks,

but they were careful with their pennies, his family.

The genius that he was,

the ability to remember things and to recite statistics. Was that with him at a young age? I don't recall when that was first noted. Good evening to you, Tubby. Yes, thanks for having me. And,

yeah, he was a brilliant guy. It was identifiable from a young age. His mother wanted to cultivate that. He got into Stanford, but because the news said they were careful with pennies, they weren't a wealthy family. He had to go to Cal Berkeley, which is a public school, not a private school. And then he went to Harvard Business School and was fast-tracked for faculty status there.

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