More to the Story

One of the more intriguing and creative intriguing and creative developments I’ve recently seen in the troubled world of publishing is Peter Osnos’ PLATFORM newsletter installments on Substack entitled LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail.

Unfolding in eighteen highly readable, weekly installments, Osnos tells the fascinating story of the rocky relationship between Lyndon Baines Johnson, America’s 36th president, and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, the two American leaders who usually shoulder most of the blame for a disastrous Vietnam war that led to the death of 54,000 Americans and 3.1 million  Vietnamese. 

photo by Marion S. Trikosko from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs

Although many Americans don’t know much – or would rather forget – about the Vietnam War, which lasted from November 1967 to April 1975, it is considered America’s first high-profile military defeat. The war also arguably created the national security and political mindset that paved the way for the nation’s misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and America’s hand in many other wars now raging around the globe. It is a history that remains as relevant as when it was fought decades ago.

For me, Vietnam was a seminal moment. As a twenty-three-year-old kid just out of college, I volunteered for the Army believing I had a duty to serve my country. I still believe in that duty, and I’m proud of my service. But I was luckier than many of my fellow soldiers. I ended up going to Korea.

While I was at an Army infantry base in California learning how to clear the Viet Cong from Vietnamese villages, North Korean commandos shot up a group of American soldiers near Korea’s Demilitarized Zone, a no-man’s land that stretches across the Korean peninsula. At the time, America had a skeleton crew of soldiers in Korea, little ammunition, and outdated weapons. The U.S. Army’s Korean ranks had been thinned by the U.S. commitment to Vietnam, and the attack on the DMZ stoked Pentagon fears of an imminent North Korean attack.

So, in a matter of weeks, I went from the warm sandy soil of California’s Monterey County to the frozen turf of Korea. Over the next sixteen months, I witnessed sporadic fighting there as a member of the 31st Infantry and later as a reporter for an Army newspaper. The fighting was nowhere near the scale of Vietnam and my time as an Army reporter led to a successful career in journalism and book writing.

Osnos had a different experience, He went to Vietnam as a correspondent for the Washington Post, covering the war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He returned to the U.S. for a distinguished career in journalism and book publishing. As a publisher, he became a champion of non-fiction books on significant subjects, including McNamara’s memoir In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lesson of Vietnam. As a reporter, editor, writer, and publisher of the memoirs of several senior government officials involved in the war, he is more than qualified to write LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail.

Peter Osnos is a colleague and friend of mine. He published my last book and played a crucial role with me in co-founding the Chicago News Cooperative, an innovative non-profit news start-up in partnership with The New York Times. Nevertheless, I consider Osnos’ latest venture interesting enough to overcome my reservations about reporting on projects involving friends.  

Osnos borrows from the old and new in his latest venture. He uses the same techniques as Charles Dickens, who first published his novels as serial installments that ran monthly or weekly in magazines, making them more affordable for mass audiences. The Substack weekly installments of LBJ and McNamara are free, although you can support Osnos – and other writers on Substack – by paying for the stories if you want. I encourage anyone interested in independent journalism to pay. Substack writers are rarely that expensive. Visit the first installment on Peter Osnos’ PLATFORM here: peterosnos.substack.com/p/origins.

In a new twist, though, Osnos delivers LBJ and McNamara in a digital world format for storytelling, the way podcasts do with audio. He supplements his story with a fascinating audio clip of his discussions with McNamara over the manuscript Osnos edited for the former defense secretary’s memoir. McNamara died in 2009. You can access the audio at platformbooksllc.net.

The audio is a behind-the-scenes view. Readers rarely experience the crucial give and take between a writer and editor recorded in the audio clip. In crafting his narrative, Osnos relied heavily on “hundreds of pages of transcripts and tape recordings” from his extensive discussions with McNamara in the editing process. The clip he published is just two of many hours in those sessions. One can hear Osnos and other editors and assistants urging a reluctant McNamara not to pull punches when writing about experiences that might embarrass or anger some of his friends or colleagues.

At one point, Osnos outlines the value that an important witness to history brings to the credibility of his story by including candid reports on the human nature of the author and his subjects with all of their attributes and fallibilities. An author doesn’t have to denigrate a subject to make them credible. “There is nothing,” he tells McNamara, “more powerful than human nature.” But you owe readers of your book unvarnished views of history, Osnos advises his author. The audio recordings reveal that a hesitant McNamara recognizes the wisdom of his editor’s advice, regardless of his misgivings. At one point, the former defense secretary, discussing his growing doubts about Vietnam in the early days of the war, blurts out: “My anguish was we were killing people in a war, and we were not achieving our mission, and I didn’t know what in the hell to do about it.”  

Osnos pushes McNamara to answer the bedeviling question posed by the title of David Halberstam’s award-winning book on the war, The Best and the Brightest. How, he bluntly asks McNamara, could men like you, some of the most brilliant men in the world, stumble into this tragedy called Vietnam? “McNamara,” he says, “did his best to explain what had gone wrong. It would never be seen as enough.”

Overall, Osnos covers a broad sweep of history of LBJ and McNamara. The book spans President John F. Kennedy’s decision to tap McNamara, a forty-four-year-old management whiz running the Ford Motor Company, as his first Secretary of Defense, to America’s ignominious defeat and chaotic departure from Vietnam, a scene indelibly seared into my memory by our Vietnamese allies desperately clinging to the skids of U.S. military helicopters departing to escape the approaching enemy troops.    

photo by Yoichi Okamoto, LBJ Library, Public Domain

In between are the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s assassination, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the Tet Offensive, and many other markers of this incredible and illustrative history. Osnos draws heavily on his experiences as a war correspondent, and as an editor of books he published and edited. He responsibly recognized his reliance on the works of others, such as Robert Caro’s masterful yet unfinished five-volume biography of the deceased President Johnson.

I suspect many readers view the relationship between an editor and writer as one in which the writer writes and the editor edits, correcting spelling and grammar errors. That’s part of the relationship for sure. There’s so much more to the creation of a credible manuscript, though. Editors help you shape your story. They think of things a writer fails to consider, push you to do your best, anger you, make you laugh, and encourage you to broaden the scope of your story. In many cases, editors and writers become cherished friends. In many cases, they don’t. But they always remind a writer he or she is responsible only to one person: The reader. You owe them the truth as best as you can tell it.

By including the excerpt of his deep discussions with McNamara, Osnos delivers more than one story. There’s the history and then there’s the insights into the editing process that are just as enlightening and entertaining.

“You know, everyone thinks they know what we do,” Osnos told me during a conversation. “Actually, no one knows what we do.” 

I am reading LBJ and McNamara as serial reports on Peter Osnos PLATFORM on Substack, where I am a subscriber. I find the book fascinating. However, I found the two-hour audio clip just as captivating and highly recommend it.

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.