Robert McNamara served as secretary of defense during the Kennedy and most of the Johnson administrations. In the two decades since he left the Pentagon he has been consistently thoughtful and constructively critical about past American behavior, including his own, and about prospects for the future. In this volume he succinctly describes how the cold war distorted both American and Soviet values; he describes Gorbachev's "new thinking" and pronounces it genuine, and argues that the West can respond more creatively and without undue risk even should Gorbachev fail.