The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara Page #4

...we should have burned to death

a lesser number or none?

And then had our soldiers

cross the beaches in Tokyo...

...and been slaughtered in tens of thousands?

Is that what you're proposing?

Is that moral? Is that wise?'

Why was it necessary to drop

the nuclear bomb...

...if LeMay was burning up Japan?

And he went on from Tokyo

to firebomb other cities.

is roughly the size of Cleveland.

Tokyo is roughly the size of New York.

of Chattanooga, which was Toyama.

of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya.

This was all done before...

...the dropping of the nuclear bomb.

Which, by the way, was dropped

by LeMay's command.

Proportionality should be a guideline in war.

Killing 50 to 90 percent...

...of the people in 67 Japanese cities...

...and then bombing them

with two nuclear bombs...

...is not proportional,

in the minds of some people...

...to the objectives we were trying to achieve.

I don't fault Truman

for dropping the nuclear bomb.

The U.S. -Japanese War was

one of the most brutal wars...

...in all of human history.

Kamikaze pilots, suicide,

unbelievable.

What one can criticize...

...is that the human race

prior to that time and today...

...has not really grappled with

what are, I'll call it 'the rules of war.'

Was there a rule then that said you

shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill...

...shouldn't burn to death 100,000

civilians in a night?

LeMay said, ' If we'd lost the war...

...we'd all have been prosecuted

as war criminals.'

And I think he's right.

He, and I'd say I...

...were behaving as war criminals.

LeMay recognized that what he was doing...

...would be thought immoral...

...if his side had lost.

But what makes it immoral if you lose

and not immoral if you win?

At some point, we have to approach

Vietnam, and I want to know...

... how you can best set that up for me.

Yeah, well...

...that's a hard, hard question.

I think...

I think we have to approach it

in the context of the Cold War.

But first I'll have to talk about Ford.

I've got to go back to the end of the war.

I had a terrible headache...

...so Marg drove me in

to the Air Force regional hospital.

A week later, Marg came in...

...many of the same symptoms.

It's hard to believe, and I don't think

I've heard of another case...

...where two individuals,

husband and wife...

...came down, essentially,

at the same time with polio.

We were both in the hospital on V-J Day.

A friend of mine said:

'We're gonna find a corporation

in America that needs...

...the advice and capabilities

of this extraordinary group...

...l'm forming and you gotta be in it.'

I said, 'To hell with it.

I'm going back to Harvard.

Marg and I wanna do that.

I'm gonna spend my life there.'

He said, ' Look, Bob,

you can't pay Marg's hospital bills.

You're crazy as hell.' He said, ' By the way...

...the company that most needs

our help in all the U.S. Is Ford.'

I said, ' How'd you learn that?'

' I read an article in Life magazine.'

Of the top 1000 executives at Ford...

...I don't believe there were

...and Henry Ford ll needed help.

They were gonna give us tests.

Two full days of testing...

...intelligence tests, achievement tests,

personality tests, you name it.

This sounds absurd, but I remember

a question on one of the tests was:

'Would you rather be a florist

or a coal miner?'

I had been a florist.

I worked as a florist...

...during some of my Christmas vacations.

I put down coal miner.

I think the reasons are obvious to you.

This group of 10 people had been trained...

...in the officer candidate school at Harvard.

In some tests we had the highest

marks that had ever been scored.

In other tests, we were in the upper

one percentile.

From 1926 to 1946,

including the war years...

...Ford Motor Company just barely broke even.

It was a God-awful mess.

I thought we had a responsibility

to the stockholders...

...and God knows you cannot believe

how bad the situation had been.

They had no market research

organization. I set one up.

Manager said,

'What do you want studied?'

I said, ' Find out who's buying Volkswagens.

Everybody says it's a no-good car.

It was only selling about 20,000 a year...

...but I want to know what's gonna happen.

Is it gonna stay the same,

go down, or go up?

Find out who buys them.'

He came back six months later,

he said:

'Well, they're professors, and they're

doctors and they're lawyers...

...and they're obviously people

who can afford more.'

Well, that set me to thinking about

what we in the industry should do.

Was there a market we were missing?

At this time nobody believed

Americans wanted cheaper cars.

They wanted conspicuous consumption.

Cadillac, with these huge,

ostentatious fins...

...set the style for the industry

for 10 or 15 years.

And that's what we were up against.

We introduced the Falcon

as a more economical car...

...and it was a huge success profit-wise.

We accomplished a lot.

I said, 'What about accidents?

I hear a lot about accidents.'

'Oh, yes, we'll get you some data on that.'

There were about 40,000 deaths

per year from automobile accidents...

...and about a million,

or a million-two injuries.

I said, 'What causes it?' ' It's obvious.

It's human error and mechanical failure.'

I said, ' If it's mechanical,

we might be involved. Find out.

If it's mechanical failure,

I want to stop it.'

Well, he said, 'There's really

very few statistics available.'

I said, ' Damn it, find out what can we learn.'

'The only place we can find

that knows anything about it...

...is Cornell Aeronautical Labs.'

They said,

'The major problem is packaging.'

They said, 'You buy eggs and you

know how eggs come in a carton?'

I said, ' I don't buy eggs.

My wife does it.'

They said, 'Well, you ask her,

when she puts that carton down...

...on the drain board when she gets

home, do the eggs break?'

I asked Marg and she said no.

Cornell said, 'That's because

they're packaged properly.

Now, if we packaged people in cars

the same way...

...we could reduce the breakage.'

We lacked lab facilities,

so we dropped human skulls...

...in different packages, down the

stairwells of the dormitories at Cornell.

Well, that sounds absurd,

but that guy was absolutely right.

It was packaging

which could make the difference.

In a crash, the driver was often

impaled on the steering wheel.

The passenger was often injured

because he'd hit the windshield...

...or the header bar,

or the instrument panel.

So in the 1956 model Ford

we introduced steering wheels...

...that prevented being impaled.

We introduced...

...padded instrument panels,

and we introduced seat belts.

We estimated if there would be

...we could save 20-odd thousand lives a year.

Everybody was opposed to it.

You couldn't get people to use seat belts.

But those who did saved their lives.

Now, let me jump ahead.

It's July, 1960.

John Bugas, vice president,

industrial relations...

...clearly had his eyes on becoming president.

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