“Ariane is also very concerned with how we feed the public,” Eve Doe-Bruce, a veteran of more than 20 years, explained, her fork pausing above her plate. “There’s something that happens when the public eats together and they begin to share something.”

Ariane is Ariane Mnouchkine, the founder of the 45-year-old Théâtre du Soleil. Though she is not as well known in the United States as in Europe, she is considered one of theater’s most influential innovators. This year she was given the Norwegian government’s International Ibsen Award for exceptional achievement in the arts. The citation noted how “each member of the audience is drawn into a total experience — sensual, richly colored, teeming with life and absorbing in its choreography.”

Food is a part of that, Ms. Mnouchkine explained later in a makeshift office; it is akin to welcoming an honored guest into your home. She was wearing a dusty-blue T-shirt and a long brown-plaid skirt and took a moment to play with a baby, one of the swarm of children who made the journey from France. At most theatrical performances, “as soon as it’s finished, the public is thrown out as if we didn’t want them,” she said. “But we don’t want only the money of the public, but also their presence.”

Unfortunately the logistics of the armory make it impossible to feed the 578 audience members during the nearly seven-hour, two-part cycle of “Les Éphémères,” as is the practice when the troupe is at its home base, an old munitions factory in the forest of Vincennes in Paris.

“We are very isolated in the woods, very protected,” Mr. Durozier said during lunch. “That quality of life is essential. I do not think we could do the same presentation without it.”

Though Soleil is known for its left-wing politics, Ms. Mnouchkine is quick to say that her communal approach to theater is not ideological. “Immediately I was convinced that 10 people have more ideas and intuitions than one alone,” she said.

Ms. Mnouchkine is insistent on the absence of hierarchy. Everyone earns the same salary. Each actor takes on other responsibilities, like cooking or caring for the “chariots,” the rolling platforms that deliver and remove the actors and sets from the stage. She refuses to be interviewed unless other members of the company are included. And at 70 she has already discussed with the group the question of her successor. “It was very important that everyone agree,” she said. (Her assistant, Charles-Henri Bradier, will get the job.)

The approach is decidedly different from the traditional Western notion of the individual artistic vision. “It’s not based on the genius in the wild,” Ms. Mnouchkine said. “It’s based on the quest. We are a group that is chasing theater.”

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Mr. McNamara was the most influential defense secretary of the 20th century. Serving Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, he oversaw hundreds of military missions, thousands of nuclear weapons and billions of dollars in military spending and foreign arms sales. He also enlarged the defense secretary’s role, handling foreign diplomacy and the dispatch of troops to enforce civil rights in the South.

As early as April 1964, Senator Wayne Morse, Democrat of Oregon, called Vietnam “McNamara’s War.” Mr. McNamara did not object. “I am pleased to be identified with it,” he said, “and do whatever I can to win it.”

Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come.

The war became his personal nightmare. Nothing he did, none of the tools at his command — the power of American weapons, the forces of technology and logic, or the strength of American soldiers — could stop the armies of North Vietnam and their South Vietnamese allies, the Vietcong. He concluded well before leaving the Pentagon that the war was futile, but he did not share that insight with the public until late in life.

In 1965, tens of thousands of American combat troops were arriving in Vietnam and American warplanes were pounding the enemy in a bombing campaign code-named Rolling Thunder, which sent 55,000 flights with 33,000 tons of bombs over North Vietnam; the next year, it was 148,000 flights with 128,000 tons. The number of aircraft lost went from 171 in 1965 to 318 the next year; the costs soared to $1.2 billion, from $460 million.

Rolling Thunder never stopped the flow of enemy arms and soldiers into South Vietnam.

When Mr. McNamara held a rare private briefing for reporters in Honolulu in February 1966, he no longer possessed the radiant confidence he had always displayed in public. Mr. McNamara said with conviction, “No amount of bombing can end the war.”

By 1966, Mr. McNamara was planning to build an electronic barrier across the demilitarized zone that separated North and South Vietnam. Soldiers called it the McNamara Line, after the Maginot Line, a futile French defense against Germany built before World War II. The barrier proved to be worthless.

On Aug. 26, 1966, Mr. McNamara read a book-length C.I.A. study called “The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist,” which concluded that nothing the United States was doing could defeat the enemy. He called in a C.I.A. analyst, George Allen, who had spent 17 years working on the question of Vietnam.

“He wanted to know what I would do if I were sitting in his place,” Mr. Allen wrote in his 2001 memoir of Vietnam, “None So Blind.” “I decided to respond candidly.”

“Stop the buildup of American forces,” he said he told Mr. McNamara. “Halt the bombing of the North, and negotiate a cease-fire with Hanoi.”

After that moment of truth, Mr. McNamara told his aides to begin compiling a top-secret history of the war — later known as the Pentagon Papers — and he began asking himself what the United States was doing in Vietnam. Many Americans were asking the same, giving rise to a growing antiwar movement that even Mr. McNamara’s own son participated in as a student protester at Stanford.

On Sept. 19, 1966, Mr. McNamara telephoned Johnson.

“I myself am more and more convinced that we ought definitely to plan on termination of bombing in the North,” Mr. McNamara said, according to White House tapes.

He also suggested establishing a ceiling on the number of troops to be sent to Vietnam. “I don’t think we ought to just look ahead to the future and say we’re going to go higher and higher and higher and higher — 600,000; 700,000; whatever it takes.”

The president’s only response was an unintelligible grunt.

The turning point came on May 19, 1967, when Mr. McNamara sent a long and carefully argued paper to Johnson, urging him to negotiate a peace rather than escalate the war.

The war, the paper began, “is becoming increasingly unpopular as it escalates — causing more American casualties, more fear of its growing into a wider war, more privation of the domestic sector, and more distress at the amount of suffering being visited on the noncombatants in Vietnam, South and North.”

“Most Americans,” Mr. McNamara continued, “are convinced that somehow we should not have gotten this deeply in. All want the war ended and expect their president to end it. Successfully. Or else.”

That was the last straw for Johnson, who came to believe that Mr. McNamara was secretly plotting to help Robert Kennedy, then a Democratic senator from New York, run on a peace ticket in the 1968 election. The president announced on Nov. 29, 1967, that Mr. McNamara would give up his defense post to run the World Bank. Mr. McNamara left the Pentagon two months later, never comprehending, in his words, “whether I quit or was fired.” It was clearly the latter.

Mr. McNamara had sought to transform the armed services. But his often aloof and occasionally arrogant conduct left him with few allies inside the Pentagon when the war began to go wrong. At a going-away luncheon given by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Mr. McNamara wept as he spoke of the futility of the air war in Vietnam. Many of his colleagues were appalled as he condemned the bombing, aghast at the weight of his guilt.

He had thought for a long time that the United States could not win the war. In retirement, he listed reasons: a failure to understand the enemy, a failure to see the limits of high-tech weapons, a failure to tell the truth to the American people and a failure to grasp the nature of the threat of communism.

…In 1995, he took a stand against his own conduct of the war, confessing in a memoir that it was “wrong, terribly wrong.” In return, he faced a firestorm of scorn.

By then he wore the expression of a haunted man. He could be seen in the streets of Washington — stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind — walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.

He had spent decades thinking through the lessons of the war. The greatest of these was to know one’s enemy — and to “empathize with him,” as Mr. McNamara explained in Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary, “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.”

“We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes,” he said. The American failure in Vietnam, he said, was seeing the enemy through the prism of the cold war, as a domino that would topple the nations of Asia if it fell.

In the film, Mr. McNamara described the American firebombing of Japan’s cities in World War II. He had played a supporting role in those attacks, running statistical analysis for Gen. Curtis E. LeMay of the Army’s Air Forces.

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo — men, women and children,” Mr. McNamara recalled; some 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals.”

“What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” he asked. He found the question impossible to answer.

… Unlike any other secretary of defense, Mr. McNamara struggled in public with the morality of war and the uses of American power.

“We are the strongest nation in the world today,” Mr. McNamara said in “The Fog of War,” released at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn’t have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better re-examine our reasoning.

“War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend,” he concluded. “Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.”

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