“Because Our Fathers Lied”

On Saturday October 15 at 7 pm in the evening, I will have the great pleasure of conversing onstage at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, CA with Craig McNamara, author of Because Our Fathers Lied, the searing memoir about his father, the late Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. I have not seen Craig, an organic farmer, since I interviewed him in 1984 for a Mother Jones cover story about his father's reincarnation as a peace advocate during the nuclear freeze movement. That article drove a wedge between father and son, but later Craig acknowledged it was true. (He writes about the family fallout from my article in his book.)

Like Craig himself, I had a complicated relationship with Robert McNamara. I interviewed him again for my 2007 book Brothers, zeroing in on the Kennedy presidency and JFK's plans to completely withdraw troops from Vietnam after the 1964 election. McNamara, who became a Vietnam hawk under President Johnson, could have easily evaded the truth. But instead he strongly confirmed JFK's peace intentions.

In my book, I portrayed McNamara as a tragic, complex, haunted public official. If President Kennedy had lived, McNamara would've gone down in history as a hero -- one of the men who helped Kennedy keep the peace. As it was, he became a war criminal with a conscience, a man so racked with guilt that LBJ shunted him to the World Bank. After Brothers was published, McNamara had the courage to call me and tell me "you got it right."

Late in his life, McNamara's efforts to explain himself -- as in Errol Morris's Oscar-winning documentary Fog of War -- were both convoluted and moving. As far as I know, Robert McNamara is the ONLY high U. S. national security official to express any guilt for what he did.

I'm looking forward to speaking with Craig again -- not just about his father, but our own deeply and bitterly divided national family.

Get tickets to the Litquake event here:

Robert McNamara (left), Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor and President Kennedy