The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara Page #2

...and Castro got very angry with me,

because I said:

' Mr. President, let's stop this meeting.

This is totally new to me.

I'm not sure I got the translation right.'

Mr. President,

I have three questions.

Number one, did you know

the nuclear warheads were there?

Number two, if you did...

...would you have recommended to Khrushchev...

...in the face of a U.S. Attack,

that he use them?

Three, if he had used them,

what would've happened to Cuba?

He said, 'One,

I knew they were there.

Two, I would not have

recommended to Khrushchev.

I did recommend to Khrushchev they be used.

Three, what would happen to Cuba?

It would've been totally destroyed.'

That's how close we were.

And he was willing to accept that?

Yes... Oh, and he went on to say:

' Mr. McNamara,

if you and President Kennedy...

...had been in a similar situation,

that's what you would've done.'

I said, ' Mr. President, I hope to God

we would not have done it.'

Pull the temple down on our heads?

My God!

In a sense, we'd won.

We got the missiles out without war.

My deputy and I brought the five chiefs over...

...and we sat down with Kennedy.

And he said, 'Gentlemen, we won.

I don't want you ever to say it,

but you know we won, I know we won.'

And LeMay said,

'Won? Hell, we lost!

We should go in and wipe them out today.'

LeMay believed that ultimately...

...we'd confront these people

with nuclear weapons.

And by God, we better do it

when we have greater superiority...

...than we will have in the future.

At the time, we had a 17-to-1 strategic

advantage in nuclear numbers.

We'd done 10 times as many tests as they had.

We were certain we could

retain that advantage...

...if we limited the tests.

The chiefs were all opposed.

They said, 'The Soviets will cheat.'

Well, I said, ' How will they cheat?'

You won't believe this,

but they said:

'They'll test them behind the moon.'

I said, 'You're out of your mind.'

That's absurd.

It's almost impossible for our people today...

...to put themselves back into that period.

In my seven years as secretary...

...we came within a hairs breadth

of war with the Soviet Union...

...on three different occasions.

Twenty-four hours a day,

...for seven years as secretary

of defense, I lived the Cold War.

During the Kennedy administration,

they designed a 100-megaton bomb.

It was tested in the atmosphere.

I remember this.

Cold War? Hell, it was a hot war.

I think the human race

needs to think more about killing...

...about conflict.

Is that what we want in this 21 st century?

My earliest memory

is of a city exploding with joy.

It was November 11, 1918.

I was 2 years old.

You may not believe

that I have the memory, but I do.

I remember the tops of the streetcars...

...being crowded with human beings...

...cheering and kissing and screaming.

End of World War I. We'd won.

But also celebrating the belief...

...of many Americans,

particularly Woodrow Wilson...

...we'd fought a war to end all wars.

His dream was...

...that the world could avoid

great wars in the future.

Disputes among great nations would be resolved.

I also remember...

...that I wasn't allowed to go outdoors

to play with my friends...

...without wearing a mask.

There was an ungodly flu epidemic.

Large numbers of Americans were dying, 600,000.

And millions across the world.

My class in the first grade was housed

in a shack, a wooden shack.

But we had an absolutely superb teacher.

And this teacher gave a test

to the class every month...

...and she re-seated the class

based on the results of that test.

There were vertical rows, and she put

the person with the highest grade...

...in the first seat on the left-hand row.

And I worked my tail off

to be in that first seat.

Now, the majority of the classmates

were whites, Caucasians, so on.

Wasps, if you will.

But my competition for that first seat

were Chinese, Japanese and Jews.

On Saturday and Sunday,

I played with my classmates.

They went to their ethnic schools.

They learned their native language.

They learned their culture, history.

And they came back determined on

Monday to beat that damn Irishman.

But they didn't do it very often.

One congressman called you 'Mr.

I- Have-All-The-Answers McNamara.'

And there's been suggestion

from some congressmen...

... that you come up there,

in spite of their experience...

... prepared to give them lessons in things.

Is that your attitude?

No. Perhaps they don't know

how much I don't know.

And there is much indeed.

I do mak e a serious effort...

... to prepare myself properly for these

congressional discussions.

I suppose I spend, perhaps,

... in testifying before Congress each year.

And each hour of testimony requires

three to four hours of preparation.

What about the contention that your

attitude is sometimes arrogant?

Have you ever been wrong, sir?

Oh, yes, indeed. My heavens.

I'm not gonna tell you when I've been wrong.

If you don't know,

I'm not going to tell you.

Oh, on countless occasions.

I applied to Stanford University.

I very much wanted to go.

But I couldn't afford it, so I lived

at home and I went to Berkeley.

Fifty-two dollars a year tuition.

I started Berkeley at the bottom

of the Depression.

Twenty-five million males were unemployed.

Out of that class of 3500...

...three elected to Phi Beta Kappa

at the end of sophomore year.

Of those three, one became

a Rhodes Scholar, I went to Harvard...

...the third went to work for $65 a month...

...and was damn happy to have the job.

The society was on the verge of...

...I don't want to say revolution...

...although, had Roosevelt not done

some of the things he did...

...it could've become far more violent.

In any event, that was what I was thrown into.

I never heard of Plato and Aristotle...

...before I became a freshman at Berkeley.

And I remember the professor,

Lowenberg...

...the freshman philosophy professor...

I couldn't wait to go to another class.

I took more philosophy courses,

particularly one in logic...

...and one in ethics.

Stress on values...

...something beyond one's self...

...and a responsibility to society.

After graduating University of California...

...I went to Harvard Graduate School

of Business for two years...

...and then I went back to San Francisco.

I began to court this young lady that

I'd met when we were 17...

...in our first week at Berkeley:

Margaret Craig.

And I was making some progress

after eight or nine months.

I proposed and she accepted.

She went with her aunt and her mother

on a trip across the country.

She telegraphed me,

' Must order engraved invitations...

...to include your middle name,

what is it?'

I wired back,

' My middle name is Strange.'

She said,

' I know it's strange, but what is it?'

Well, I mean, it is Strange.

It's Robert Strange McNamara.

And it was a marriage made in heaven.

At the end of a year,

we had our first child.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes