As McMaster demonstrates in his book, McNamara maintained complete confidence in his own judgment and his commitment to continually escalating force against the Viet Cong and their patrons in Hanoi. Working with Maxwell Taylor, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, McNamara cut the Pentagon’s service chiefs off from Kennedy and then Johnson, and stacked every decision tree with carefully preselected acolytes. Johnson cared only for the politics of the situation, McNamara for his own vindication. But dissent didn’t vanish. It grew in an embittered senior military leadership and eventually broke into public view with publication of the Pentagon Papers. Public quiescence vanished slowly and, as costs escalated, the famous “credibility gap” grew. Disaster awaited with collapse of support for the war and for South Vietnam.

We have begun to see a similar deterioration of the public’s trust in public health and education authorities, and a deep, never-before-experienced suspicion of both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. Part of this is the result of misinformation and anti-vaccination points-of-view that unfortunately have taken deep root. I was a strong and early supporter of vaccines and boosters and remain convinced that the best means of persuading the “vaccine skeptical” is engaging with them and calmly reviewing the evidence of effectiveness — not shaming, dismissiveness or caustic declamations.

But it is the “Fauci as McNamara” comparison that has now settled in my mind. A new NBC poll asked respondents: “Do you trust what the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says?” 44 percent said yes; 43 percent said no. That’s a crisis of trust in public health authorities, a new “credibility gap,” and it is itself a public health crisis.