In a recent interview, Craig McNamara, the son of Robert Strange McNamara, the controversial (infamous to human rights functionaries and the Left) defence secretary of the United States under presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson between 1961 and 1968, has called his father a “war criminal”. The younger McNamara is, however, hesitant to accuse his father as bluntly in his 260-plus page memoir, Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today. Much of the book is about the author’s agony with regard to his father who was the chief architect of the US war in Vietnam. “I wasn’t asking him to justify the war, but I wanted his perspective,” he says.
Robert Kennedy told McNamara that the Vietnam War wasn’t winnable. “It was Bobby who, a year before being assassinated, had said, ‘Bob, this war is unwinnable’ encouraging Dad to end it.” But McNamara didn’t listen to the hard truth. Craig reports that he asked his father: “Tell me the truth, Dad — why are we there?” The conscientious son battled to arrive at the truth with his father. “He never told me that he knew. But he did know, and he never admitted it to me. More than a decade after his death, I still wonder why he was no more honest with me than he was with the American public,” he laments.
Matters are particularly difficult for Craig. “I have a deep well of love for my father, and I have a deep chasm of pain over how he misled our nation and the results of that tale of a son’s lifelong yearning for his father to look him squarely in the eye and tell him the unvarnished truth, regardless of the scale of his missteps or regrets,” he says. The father-son relationship was based on “joy and affection” relating to the things that they shared, notwithstanding the “deliberate silence and absence relating to the issues of war and peace” that divided them.
They were at opposite poles. Fidel Castro was Bob McNamara’s class enemy and he advised JFK to strangulate Cuba economically through a naval quarantine to counter Soviet influence and military weaponry. In contrast, his son viewed Castro as a hero. He recollects sitting a few feet below the podium and listening to Castro’s speech at the Universidad Técnica del Estado in Santiago, Chile. “As Castro began to speak, I was spellbound. I had never heard a political leader articulate with such intensity the importance of providing universal health care and education. Castro also spoke about the evil of US domination in Latin America. With fervor, he declared: ‘They talk about the failure of socialism. But where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America?’ For three hours, with my scalp sizzling in the noonday sun, I listened in rapture to a story so different from the one I had been raised with. It wasn’t about the red menace of global Communism but the plight of workers and farmers.” He met Castro in 1996 at the World Food Summit where he was a member of the US delegation. When he told him that he was the son of Robert McNamara, Castro smiled and said: “I have great admiration for your father.”
{{/usCountry}}They were at opposite poles. Fidel Castro was Bob McNamara’s class enemy and he advised JFK to strangulate Cuba economically through a naval quarantine to counter Soviet influence and military weaponry. In contrast, his son viewed Castro as a hero. He recollects sitting a few feet below the podium and listening to Castro’s speech at the Universidad Técnica del Estado in Santiago, Chile. “As Castro began to speak, I was spellbound. I had never heard a political leader articulate with such intensity the importance of providing universal health care and education. Castro also spoke about the evil of US domination in Latin America. With fervor, he declared: ‘They talk about the failure of socialism. But where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America?’ For three hours, with my scalp sizzling in the noonday sun, I listened in rapture to a story so different from the one I had been raised with. It wasn’t about the red menace of global Communism but the plight of workers and farmers.” He met Castro in 1996 at the World Food Summit where he was a member of the US delegation. When he told him that he was the son of Robert McNamara, Castro smiled and said: “I have great admiration for your father.”
{{/usCountry}}Craig McNamara became a farmer but, contrary to his father’s wishes, separated himself from the agri-businesses of the US multinationals. For “Craigee” farming is a “subculture”. He lives on his farm in Sacramento and was a strong sympathizer of President Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens when Chile was ruled by La Unidad Popular. After the CIA-sponsored ouster of the popular government there on 12 September 1973, he stated: “your (Chileans) struggle abounds in me, I must be with you... We have seen and lived a moment with Allende, and it will live forever”. He hated General Pinochet and writes “I knew the US was complicit in the September coup. I didn’t know the extent of my father’s complicity... Dad sang the official line of that cruel Chilean policy.”
Born in 1950, Craig McNamara was a boy during the Kennedy administration, “the white-hot center of anti-Communism” to whom the Soviets were the greatest enemy. “Fidel, we were taught, was their Latin American pawn. By the time I stood before Castro’s podium, I’d completed a 180 degree turn,” he writes.
Comprising 19 chapters, a prologue and an epilogue, the memoir, which begins during his school days, depicts his strong disapproval of America’s aggressive capitalism. His anti-imperialist mindset – the antithesis of his father’s - grew during his stay in Latin America and Vietnam. He recounts meeting Vo Hong Nam, son of the legendary General Võ Nguyên Giáp, nicknamed ‘red Napoleon’, in Hanoi. Nam presented him with a recently-released book celebrating his own father’s life. “As we leafed through the pages, I found, on page 165, a photo of General Giap and my father taken on November 9, 1995. The caption read: ‘The most brilliant Vietnamese general was the Vietnamese people, the Vietnamese nation. The Americans were defeated by Vietnam because they did not yet understand that general’.” He said to Nam, “Both of our fathers were called to duty without a significant military background.” Pat came the reply: “I think that when my father met your father, Americans didn’t understand Vietnamese culture and history”. The two agreed.
Robert McNamara did eventually admit to his son: “I made mistakes, Craigie”. But he did not apologise.
Sankar Ray is a writer and commentator on Left politics and history, and environmental issues. He lives in Kolkata.