Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today
by Craig McNamara
Little Brown and Company, £24.44

WHEN I read this book by the son of Robert McNamara, a key architect of the US war on Vietnam, I couldn’t help but compare my experience as the oldest son of an air force officer.

My dad wasn’t an architect of the US war on Vietnam; his role was that of an engineer.

Like thousands of others in the military and throughout the US bureaucracy of war, our fathers were family men.

They enjoyed vacations with us, they scolded us when we didn’t measure up and they supported our childhood interests.

Meanwhile, they went to work and figured out ways to kill people. All in the name of an ideology sold as democracy but actually just 20th-century imperialism.

Were our fathers evil, or were they just capable of committing evil acts?

Craig McNamara’s response to his father’s work was similar to mine. We both became fervent opponents.

Like me, the younger McNamara expressed his opposition to the war at first through symbolic protest — hanging anti-war posters on his wall, reading pacifist literature and attending protests.

Ultimately, his anti-war activities and understanding turned radical, as did mine. Violent protests and an anti-imperialist analysis replaced peace signs and black armbands.

Like millions of others, we realised the war on the Vietnamese was not a mistake, but a matter of imperialist policy.

When the politics of revolution became too much, Craig McNamara left for Latin America.

By then his father was no longer part of the government. Instead, he was on the board of the World Bank devising development plans for the global South.

Of course, these plans were designed to benefit Washington and Wall Street, not the people of the nations the World Bank claimed to be developing.

While the younger McNamara was living in Santiago, Chile, during the heady days of the socialist Allende government, his father was working with some of the very people who were organising Allende’s bloody downfall.

Meanwhile I headed to Berkeley and the counterculture. Communication with my father was non-existent and pointless. He refused to understand my life and I rejected his.

Like Robert McNamara, my father knew the US could not win in Vietnam. Perhaps he had even read McNamara’s memo or some version of it when it crossed his desk at the National Security Agency.

However, even knowing this, my father went to DaNang when he was ordered to.

In a conversation about Robert McNamara’s 1995 book In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, my father expressed anger at McNamara for carrying on the war knowing that it could not be won.

I then reminded him that he had told me in 1988 that he had known the same thing when he was given his orders in early 1968.

I will never forget him looking me in the eye and telling me that he had to admit that the protesters were right about the war. Craig McNamara never got that admission in such a direct way from his dad.

More than most, it seems Robert McNamara was able to compartmentalise his life. Certain things were not open for discussion with his family members. Primary among these things was his work.

At the same time, Craig fondly remembers family vacations in the wilderness and visits to the White House to watch movies and play.

Yet the book closes with the reader feeling the son will always wonder what his father really thought about his work and the scars it left upon the world. This emotional and thoughtful memoir is just one more attempt by the son to comprehend.

This review is an abridged version of the original published by counterpunch.org. Ron Jacobs is the author of Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest offering is a pamphlet titled Capitalism: Is the Problem. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.