Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy

Robert McNamara served as the United States Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, a period that saw the intensification of American involvement in the Vietnam War. This book, his attempt at a postmortem of the tragedy, is inscribed to someone else whose name is linked with a tragedy of the 1960s: Nicholas Katzenbach, whose time working for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations overlapped with McNamara's. On November 25, 1963, three days after Kennedy's assassination, Katzenbach sent a memo to the new President's assistant in which he declared that the public must be satisfied that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin, and that speculation as to the man's motives must be cut off. When what is now called "The Katzenbach Memo" was released by the National Archives in 1994, it fueled the longstanding claims that Kennedy's assassination had been a conspiracy that was immediately covered up by the authorities.

A meaningful association copy from the Katzenbach estate, testifying to the deep friendship between two men who played key roles in mid-20th century US political history.