A History Lesson from a Fellow Berkeley Alum

With a bit of unintended irony, last night, we dined at Le Cheval, a popular and bustling Vietnamese bistro in downtown Oakland; and afterwards, we watched a documentary that I had been meaning to see for some time now, The Fog of War, an abridged interview with former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in which he discusses the lessons he took away from the Vietnam War. As the principal architect behind the American policy in Vietnam during both the Kennedy and Johnson Presidencies, McNamara has always been a controversial figure. But what was unknown to me was his other brushes with history including his very close involvement in the strategy behind the fire bombings of Tokyo and other largely civilian targets in Japan during WWII (McNamara admits during the interview that if the U.S. had lost the war with Japan, he would have been rightfully convicted of committing war crimes); his presidency of the Ford Motor Company (the first by a person outside of the Ford family) where he pushed for the development of safety devices like the seatbelt; his lengthy tenure as the head of the World Bank; and his wife's founding of the children's literacy organization, Reading is Fundamental. His anecdotes range from the amusing (Ford Motor's early method of "notifying" managers that they were fired, i.e., by having them discover on a Monday morning that all of their office furniture was now a heap of splintered wood on the floor of their office), to the absurd (swapping a pair of khakis for a Quonset hut to expand General Le May's south Pacific island headquarters), to the bone-chilling (the admission that the U.S. government was privately on the very brink of nuclear war on three separate occasions). During my college years at Berkeley, I remember often seeing McNamara's name whenever there was an occasion to tout a list of Berkeley's many illustrious alums. Strange that one of the primary implementers of the Vietnam War graduated from the one university that was best remembered as the focal point of dissent against the war. But then again, Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer, the two scientific minds behind the development of the atomic bomb, both taught at my dear alma mater as well. I would definitely recommend The Fog of War to anyone even remotely interested in American history and especially to those wary of our current involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.