Because Our Fathers Lied

December 1, 2021

President and owner of Sierra Orchards, McNamara is also the son of Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy's secretary of defense and hugely responsible for escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Stanford dropout Craig failed his draft-board physical, took to the road on his motorbike, and eventually participated in antiwar demonstrations. His memoir investigates father-son tensions while capturing the larger tensions in the country at the time. With a 35,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 28, 2022
Walnut farmer McNamara, founder of the Center for Land-Based Learning, debuts with a stunning, deeply personal look at his life as the son of the prime shaper of America’s Vietnam War policy, secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara. In searing detail, the younger McNamara reveals reams of hitherto unreported details about his controversial father’s family life and how the elder McNamara’s lies and obfuscations about the war led to their estrangement. Craig McNamara recounts hanging Viet Cong flags in his bedroom as a protest against his father; dropping out of Stanford to travel through Central and South America on a motorcycle; and ultimately becoming a dedicated practitioner of, and advocate for, sustainable farming. His unique perspective on the war’s “architect” reveals a man who was a “caretaker, loving dad, hiking buddy” as well as an “obfuscator, neglectful parent, warmonger.” Offering a complex, introspective look at how his relationship with his father turned into “a mixture of love and rage,” the author sheds light on an entire generation’s disillusionment with their forebears and reaches a depth of understanding about Robert S. McNamara that no previous book about his role in the Vietnam War has achieved. This is a must-read.

May 1, 2022
An aggrieved memoir by the son of a best-and-brightest architect of the Vietnam War. "He never told me that he knew the Vietnam War wasn't winnable. But he did know, and he never admitted it to me." So writes McNamara of his father, Robert S. McNamara, whose middle name--Strange--made its way into the iconic figure of the Atomic Age, Doctor Strangelove. The junior McNamara was a familiar in the White House under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The author notes that it was Bobby Kennedy who told his father that Vietnam was a losing cause. Though McNamara reserves much of his indignation for the fact of the war itself, there is most definitely a personal dimension to his complaint: His father was an unrevealing man who kept his own counsel, so much so that his son had to learn the facts of his life from books. "I shouldn't have had to learn about it through second- and third-hand sources," he writes. Like the son of Dean Rusk, another friend, McNamara went to the counterculture and back to the land, to which his father dismissively responded, "Craig's dream is to save the world through farming." He also traveled, making a second home in a country that would undergo its own Vietnam at U.S. hands: Chile. Writing this memoir is clearly a cathartic exercise for McNamara, who decries his father's "misleading statements" and "inadequate apologies." Also cathartic was a visit to Vietnam a few years ago, where the author met the son of his father's North Vietnamese counterpart, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap. "I've lived my life through the lens of the Vietnam War," writes the author. Despite the closeness of the writer to a key source, so did millions of people, and this memoir, though readable, sheds only a little light on the matter. A footnote to history, of some interest to students of the Cold War and its hot theaters.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.