In the mid-1960s, Craig McNamara and his mother were both diagnosed with ulcers. Craig has a theory about why they were afflicted simultaneously: “I think we both felt the weight of my father’s decisions throughout our bodies and in every part of our minds.”
It’s a rare child who doesn’t have some kind of love-hate relationship with his or her parents, and that was especially true for all of us who came of age in the 1960s. But as McNamara makes clear on every page of his searing memoir, those feelings are magnified a thousand times if your father was Robert McNamara, secretary of defense to John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and the architect of the Vietnam war, America’s worst modern foreign policy disaster.
