The Living and the Dead - Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War

The Living and the Dead reveals the Vietnam War as it has never been seen before - through the prism of the crucial, tangled decisions made by one man, US Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara. It illuminates those decisions by revealing the man: by turns cold and emotionally tumultuous; the numbers-worshipper who came to believe that the war was tearing America apart was wrong, but contiued to support its escalation. In the looming shadow of McNamara we are shown, in equally intense detail, the stories of five real people irrevocably changed by those life-and-death decisions: an artist who tries to kill him; a young marine physically and psychologically scarred by Vietnam; a Quaker who self-immolated in protest outside the Pentagon; a nurse desperate to believe her agonies in Vietnam were for a good cause; and a member of a Saigon family enlisted and then tragically abandoned by America...