In Because Our Fathers Lied (Little, Brown, May), farmer and antiwar activist McNamara probes his relationship with his father, former U.S. defense secretary Robert S. McNamara.
How did the book come about?
Throughout my adult life I’ve been a journaler. My wife and I had the opportunity to be students at Stanford in 2018 at the Distinguished Career Institute. It enabled us to take any graduate or undergraduate courses we wanted and I took a deep dive into creative writing because I knew I wanted to write this memoir. That was the year and it’s been an additional two years in the writing and editing.
In the book, you describe trying to get your father to talk to you about the Vietnam War, especially after you turned against it. Why do you think he never did?
The journey of writing this memoir opened up that issue once again. My father was recalcitrant; I couldn’t penetrate the shield that he put up around him—and that he put up around me. Looking back on it now, having him die in 2009, I realize I should have tried harder. Even knowing for 60-plus years that I probably wouldn’t be successful, I think I owed it to myself and I owed it to my father, and I owe it to Vietnam veterans and to families whose fathers, sons, and brothers died in Vietnam to have gone deeper. I don’t think I could have changed him or the outcome, but I could have known the truth. And just think how profound that would be to have understood that. I wish I’d taken the opportunity to challenge him and to challenge myself to learn more about his life and his decisions.
How did you choose the title?
I knew from the onset that the book would be about truth and honesty and dishonesty and my relationship to the Vietnam War and my relationship to my father. In my creative lit class I found the Rudyard Kipling poem, “Epitaphs of the War, 1914–1918” with the lines, “If any question why we died,/ Tell them, because our fathers lied.” It’s very powerful; it resonated with me. The word fathers I’m applying to men who are fathers who are powerbrokers in the government and the military in times past and continue to serve.
What are your feelings about the Vietnam War today?
My heart continues to weep as I think about the lives that were ended, the men who were killed, and the families that were heartbroken over the losses of their sons. That’s something that in my own life is deeply within me—that loss. I am not a person who lives by regrets, but I do have one: that my father didn’t fully apologize. I wish that he had told people who served in Vietnam and said from his heart, “I am so sorry for your loss.”
