Craig McNamara's memoir is a provocative and engaging reflection about growing up in the shadow of his influential and infamous father, Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Because Our Fathers Lied provides a revealing account of how Robert McNamara's unwillingness to discuss his involvement in the Vietnam War with his family ultimately worked to the detriment of the McNamara family, particularly for the relationship between the family patriarch and his only son. Although the centrality of this relationship to the work makes Robert McNamara a constant presence, the book is very much Craig McNamara's story. In contrast to his father's 1995 memoir In Retrospect, which analyzed past decisions, policies, and judgments, Craig McNamara's account is preoccupied with trauma, the nature of truth, and reconciliation. The memoir is divided into three sections that proceed narratively, occasionally shifting between past and present as McNamara reflects upon his past experiences. In part I, McNamara revisits his childhood with recollections of his visits to the Johnson White House, observing his father at home, life at boarding school in New Hampshire, and a summer 1967 encounter with antiwar protesters at the family retreat in Aspen, Colorado. Part II finds Craig as a freshman at Stanford. Already disenchanted with the war, Craig dabbled in antiwar activities before dropping out of college to join his friends on a motorcycle trip to South America. In something reminiscent of a capitalist variant of Che Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries travels, the younger McNamara endured bad weather, a few crashes, and other indignities as he traversed the roads of Mexico, Central America, Colombia, and Peru before arriving in Salvador Allende's Chile in 1971. McNamara spent the next two years dividing his time between Santiago and Easter Island, returning to the United States shortly before the military coup that abruptly ended Allende's presidency. McNamara saw American society and consumer culture from a very different perspective upon his return, and he ultimately decided to embark on a career as a first-generation farmer. Part III focuses primarily on McNamara's efforts to forge a deeper relationship with his father during the latter's final years, and on his attempts to grapple with his father's legacy in the wake of his father's death. The author laments that although he made frequent visits to Washington, D.C. to visit his aging father, Robert McNamara deflected Craig's attempts to initiate meaningful conversations about Vietnam, and the two were unable to completely reconcile prior to Robert McNamara's 2009 passing. Craig devotes the final chapters of the book to discussing the collaborations and experiences related to his 2018 visit to Vietnam, relating how attending an art exhibition of his father's office chairs led to an unexpected friendship with a Vietnamese artist, and contemplating upon how these experiences helped him reconcile his father's historical legacy with his self-identity. Because our Fathers Lied is less a chronicle of Craig McNamara's life than it is an account of his struggle to understand his own identity by discovering and reconciling the complex truths about his father. McNamara covers significant time, space, and emotional ground in the work, but as the full book title suggests, the core issue in this father-son relationship was Robert McNamara's role in the Vietnam War. The author was “unique in being the son of the war's architect” (40), and Craig's growing awareness of the war was accompanied by growing, albeit disquieting, reservations about his father's role in the conflict as he struggled with academics and homesickness at a distant New Hampshire boarding school. Upon arriving at Stanford in 1969, he explains that he protested the war partially out of personal conviction, partially as a way to “survive my own family trauma” (83), and partially because it “would have been odd to remain silent” (82). As an adult, McNamara remained burdened by his identity as Robert McNamara's son, and as a result he continually revisited and reassessed his father's past actions and public reputation. Over the years, Craig repeatedly reached out to Robert in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to persuade the former Defense Secretary to confide in his son and share his thoughts about his involvement and decisions on Vietnam. Craig appears to have hoped that the intimacy of heartfelt one-on-one conversations—while not fully exonerating Robert McNamara in his eyes—might help him better understand and ultimately forgive his father. Although McNamara introduces the ambivalent nature of his relationship with his father in the opening pages, the depth of their rift becomes evident in Craig's later remark that “if Robert McNamara had been the hero of my childhood, Fidel Castro held that place when I was in my early twenties” (114). This is not a casual nod to a sixties icon, but rather the recollection of the estranged son of a US cabinet official who, in 1971, found himself in socialist Chile cheering on Castro alongside hundreds of enthusiastic students. Although the geographical and ideological gap between the two narrowed when Craig returned stateside, Robert McNamara's continued inability to confide in his son precluded a complete reconciliation. Accordingly, Craig's doubts about his father's integrity lingered, even as he tried to stay loyal to a father who was “caretaker, loving dad, hiking buddy-obfuscator, neglectful parent, warmonger” (34). He recalls that in the mid-1980s, he still saw his father “as a basically decent person with occasional bad judgement” (65), yet at other points in the book he flatly calls his father a warmonger. Robert McNamara's unwillingness to speak candidly about his activities in Vietnam left his son ill-equipped to define his father's true character. Because Our Fathers Lied does not fit seamlessly into the scholarship of the Vietnam War, peace history, or the history of US foreign relations, but McNamara's willingness to explore the moral ambiguities of Robert McNamara's character, as well as to ask broader questions about historical memory and truth, make this recommended reading to scholars in all of these fields. Indeed, the work will likely resonate with anyone who has struggled to communicate with loved ones or who lost an estranged family member in recent years. Craig McNamara spent much of his adult life attempting to understand his father as both a parent and as a historical figure, which in turn prompted him to probe difficult moral questions and explore the related, albeit uncomfortable truths involved. McNamara concludes that he once believed that his father “knew the truth and kept it from me. Now I'm not sure I can define truth” (134). Because our Fathers Lied presents exciting possibilities for teaching precisely because McNamara does not provide his readers with easy answers. The phrase “I wonder” appears frequently throughout the book when McNamara reflects on past events and his personal decisions, and when he muses about what his father might have thought or done. In one such instance, Craig recalls his father's April 1972 visit to Santiago to speak at a United Nations conference during Craig's self-imposed exile in Chile. Asking students to write about or discuss Craig's question—“What would he have thought about my transformation?” (120)—and to imagine a potential meeting and conversation between Robert McNamara, then World Bank President, and his radicalized, estranged son, provides opportunities to explore that question in full within the historical context of 1972. The question can also be framed to encourage students to consider why the 2022 version of Craig McNamara was more receptive to such a meeting than his 1972 counterpart. This is but one of several hypothetical questions McNamara poses throughout the work that instructors can use to prompt critical thinking and discussion about historical memory, truth, and the importance of multiple perspectives. McNamara does not shy away from examining his family's trauma, and much of the book unfolds like a Greek tragedy. Craig, like Sisyphus, relates his recurring, ultimately futile quest to persuade his father to share his perspectives and talk openly about his role in Vietnam. One cannot help but sympathize with the younger McNamara as he recounts his father's 1995 trip to Hanoi that followed the publication of In Retrospect. Craig, after learning that other members of Robert McNamara's delegation were bringing extended family, told his father he would like to accompany him to Vietnam, only for his father to reply, “Oh, I don't really think it would be appropriate” (229). The closest he came to a “meeting of the minds” with his father was in 2003, when Robert invited him to the Telluride Film Festival to attend a screening of Errol Morris's McNamara biopic, The Fog of War. Yet even then, the moment fell short, as initial optimism gave way to disappointment as Robert maintained a distant, remote attitude throughout the festival. Although the two men found common ground through hiking and Craig's visits to Washington, the failure to bridge the ominous silence on Vietnam inevitably increased the distance between father and son. Craig's mother's death in 1981 made communication more difficult, as Margaret McNamara's passing deprived Craig of his translator, his, “first, last, and only way” of gaining insights to his father's heart (52). A significant factor that impeded the ability of father and son to sustain a closer relationship is that Robert and Craig McNamara viewed the world in fundamentally different ways. In a memorable anecdote, Craig recalls conversations with his father about farming after Robert had agreed to invest in Craig's California walnut farm. Craig conceded that while his father respected his son's initiative and love for his work, the former Defense Secretary and World Bank president “truly didn't know a thing” (177) about farming. Yet Robert McNamara's ignorance and unfamiliarity with agriculture did not prevent him from placing frequent early morning calls to his son from Washington to make numerous requests for myriad data and spreadsheets related to the farm. Craig admitted that these conversations began to irritate him, as his father's requests for statistics “reminded me of the misleading statistics that had so doomed his wartime strategy” (177). Craig McNamara came to interpret the world far differently than his father from an early age, partially due to childhood dyslexia. Craig explains that his resultant academic struggles were compounded by the added pressure of his family name. “It was pretty damn discouraging to get poor grades while being the son of someone who was considered…one of the sharpest minds of his generation” (9). Unable to interpret the world in the same way as his father did, the younger McNamara increasingly came “to experience and see things at the ground level” (233) and to understand and perceive things far differently (and arguably far more empathetically) than his father. McNamara's account provides a distinct sense of loss, angst, and frustration about his inability to convince his father to speak candidly and openly with him about his involvement and role in the Vietnam War. It appears that Craig saw such a discussion as prerequisite to establishing a deeper relationship based on mutual trust. Based on this account, readers may conclude that this is the one discussion that Robert McNamara was unwilling to have with his son, and perhaps even with himself. In the preface to In Retrospect, Robert McNamara acknowledged that “my involvement (in Vietnam) deeply affected my family.” Nevertheless, the former Secretary of Defense went on to write: “…but I will not dwell on its effect on them or me. I am not comfortable speaking in such terms” (In Retrospect, xviii). Sadly, Robert McNamara miscalculated in believing that he could insulate his family from his role as Defense Secretary during the war, and he repeated his self-deception in thinking that he could distance himself from the war after he departed the role. In no uncertain terms, McNamara declared in In Retrospect that “My involvement with Vietnam ended the day after I left the East Room” (319). Yet as Craig McNamara points out eloquently in his own memoir, when Robert McNamara left the East Room, the war continued to haunt him and his family for years to come.
Matthew Loayza (Fri,) studied this question.