WINTERS, Calif. — Craig McNamara had come prepared to talk about heavy things.
He was, after all, promoting a new memoir about his father, Robert McNamara, the polarizing secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, whose actions prosecuting the Vietnam War had hung over his son's entire life. The book's title is a gut punch: "Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, From Vietnam to Today."
And McNamara, the former head of California's Board of Food and Agriculture, was also carrying a weight of worries about what climate change is doing to his family's walnut farm. He bought the property here on the banks of Putah Creek four decades ago — not long after he returned to the United States from Mexico and South America, places he had fled to to escape what his father's war was doing to the country, and to himself.
