Robert McNamara as a loving father - who couldn’t talk about Vietnam

In 2015, Craig McNamara - the son of former defense secretary Robert McNamara - got in touch with Rich Rusk, son of former secretary of state Dean Rusk. They had a lot in common. Their fathers had been chief promulgators of the war in Vietnam. Both sons had opposed the war. Both loved their fathers desperately, although Rusk once refused to speak to his for 14 years. Both had gone off the grid for extended periods of time - Rusk, salmon fishing in Alaska; McNamara, traveling and, for years, subsistence farming in South

America. They talked about visiting Vietnam together, but they never made it. On Jan. 28, 2018, Rusk killed himself by jumping off a bridge.

That Craig McNamara has survived, and thrived, and given us this staggering book, is something of a miracle. “My life has been a journey outward,” he writes in “Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, From Vietnam to Today.” “Maybe up, toward light.” It certainly was a struggle. Robert McNamara would have been a difficult father under the best of circumstances - loving and sometimes doting, but distant, unable and unwilling to talk to his son about his work, especially about the colossal tragedy he supervised in Vietnam. And about other, more personal things, too. This book is full of metaphors. One of the first comes early when Craig was a student at the exclusive St. Paul’s School outside Concord, N.H., in the mid-1960s. He was a great athlete but a lousy student. He suffered from dyslexia. He suffered from ulcers (as his mother did). A liberal friend decided to have a “teach-in” about the war in Vietnam. Craig wanted to support his father’s position. He called and asked his dad for information and leaflets. “Sure, Craigie. I’ll have my secretary get on it.” An uneasy silence ensued. “I remember his voice fading off . . . . I wonder what he was thinking during that silence. Was he envisioning his most recent trip to Saigon, punctuated by talk of body counts and defoliating napalm bombings? Was he wondering how to explain it all to his only son? Or was he holding his breath, waiting for the moment to pass?” Of course, no information or leaflets ever arrived.

Well before this memoir was written, Robert McNamara emerged as perhaps the most tortured figure of the Vietnam era. He had come to the Kennedy administration from the Ford Motor

Company. He was notoriously brilliant and surrounded himself with a team of “Whiz Kids” at the Defense Department. He stayed on as Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He supervised the transformation of the Viet- nam conflict from a small holding action against a communist rebellion into a full-scale war. When Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, McNamara left government and became president of the World Bank. Years later, he allowed himself to be interviewed at length for Errol Morris’s extraordinary documentary “The Fog of War.”