Robert McNamara Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Mr. McNamara, welcome back to Berkeley.
Thank you, I'm delighted to be back.
I say "back" because you graduated from Cal.
I was a student here from 1933 to 1937 -- four of the best years of my life.
What did you major in?
Economics, with minors in philosophy and mathematics.
Did you take any international relations?
None, none, to my regret. I would have benefited, and other people would, no doubt, join in that.
Has a lot changed on the campus since you've been here?
Oh, yes indeed. You shouldn't get me started on reminiscing about those days, but it's physically totally different, in terms of buildings, numbers of students (I'm sure it's up 150 percent), so the physical changes are great, and one of the things that is most noticeable, and to me very heartening, is the percentage of minority students. I guess they are not even the minority now. I understand the percentage of Asian undergraduates is on the order of 45 percent; there is wide representation of both Hispanics and Blacks. That is totally different from the time I when I was here, and I think that it is a great step forward.
What impact did Cal have on your career and your ways of thinking?
Oh again, you shouldn't get me started. Let me tell you a little bit about what I was when I came here, and then you'll understand perhaps. Neither my mother nor father had ever graduated from college. My father hadn't gone beyond the 8th grade, and they were determined that I would go to college. I took the entrance exams for Stanford; at that time (this was 1932 and 1933), very few first-class universities required entrance exams. Stanford did; I passed. But it didn't take me long to figure out that, even working part-time and receiving scholarships, I couldn't possibly pay the board, room, and tuition at Stanford, so I came to Cal. That's the only reason I was here. It was the only first-class university in the country that I could afford to go to. What did I pay? Well I lived at home. I paid $52 tuition per year. And for that I am eternally grateful.
What other memories stand out? Anything in particular for you?
There are several things. In the first place, Berkeley was the foundation of my education. I was well grounded in economics and philosophy and in the tools of mathematics. And secondly, what stands out in my mind is the psychological, the philosophical, the intellectual environment that was maintained here at the time. And I say, "maintained" because it was not a natural environment for the time. You will not believe this, but 25 percent of adult males of this country were unemployed during my years at the university.
And those were what years?
1933 to 1937. Twenty-five percent of the adult males were unemployed. Literally, and again you'll find this hard to believe, but literally fathers of some of my classmates committed suicide because they couldn't provide for their families. It was economic chaos. We had the two great maritime strikes of the west coast while I was here, in 1934 and 1936. I went to sea as a member of the Sailors Union of the Pacific during the summer vacations in 1935 and 1937. The maritime strikes were among the most brutal this country has ever faced. Why did they occur? In part because of the terrible pressure of unemployment on jobs. 
The result was that there were so many applicants for jobs that the companies took advantage of it; they were allowing the bosuns on the ships to sell the jobs, so you couldn't get a job as a sailor unless you paid the bosun off. They were among the most brutal strikes in our history; there were machine guns on the roofs of the Embarcadero. I saw strikers knock down a person they thought was a scab on Market Street, put his knee on the curb and the ankle on the street and break the bone; it was that kind of environment.
After they won the first strike in 1934, the wages, when I went out, were $20 a month. I had rowed on the freshman crew, but I lost 15 pounds. I had 20 bedbug bites between the knee and the ankle. My point is simply that these were extraordinarily difficult economic times, and that colored so much of what was going on in our society. At that time, the population of the State of California was on the order of 4 to 4.5 million. Today it's on the order of 32 million. It was predominately an agricultural state. The legislature was dominated by rural political forces. The university depended exclusively on the legislature for its financing. And yet, in that environment, the President of the University, Robert Gordon Sproul, maintained an intellectual freedom, a searching for the truth, that was absolutely unique. And I benefited from it.
And you remain an enthusiastic supporter of the notion of a public university.
Oh absolutely, you just can't imagine what this university has contributed; not just to me, but to the hundreds of thousands of others who have passed through, and to the State of California. I believe that the State of California has been the premiere state in the country for the last 50 years. I believe it's been the premiere state primarily because of its education system, particularly the university, but also the primary and secondary education system. I think it's on the verge of losing that. It was a wonderful environment. I learned the meaning of freedom, and the meaning of intellectual opportunity. And I was confronted with the need to understand the conflict at times between obligations and rights. It was a superb education.
Is it fair to say then that Berkeley turned you into an enlighted rationalist? Or did that happen later?
Well, I'm sure some people wouldn't be willing to classify me as that today. I hope I am an enlightened rationalist, and to the degree that I am, it came from this university. Surely I went to Harvard, and I've in a sense been educated in all the years after I graduated from formal education, but my basic philosophy, my basic moral standards, my basic ethical values came out of this university and I'll be eternally grateful.
That's quite interesting. And after leaving Cal, you decided to go into...
After leaving Cal, I went to Harvard, to graduate school.
You taught.
I graduated from the graduate school of Business Administration. 
I was out on the coast for a year, and then I went back and taught there for three years before I left to volunteer to go into the U.S. army.
And after your military service, in which you were decorated...
I went to Ford Motor Company. I was on leave from Harvard as an assistant professor during the three years I was in the military. And I wanted nothing more in the world than to go back to Harvard at the end of the war, and they made some very attractive offers to me to come back, in terms of the courses I could teach and so on. But my wife and I both came down with polio, if you can imagine, infantile paralysis, in August of 1945. My case was relatively light, I was out of the hospital in a couple of months. But she was in the hospital for nine months and they thought she'd never lift an arm or a leg off the bed again. And I couldn't afford, in effect, to pay her hospital bills on a Harvard professor's salary. So I finally accepted an offer from Ford, and went there with a group of ten individuals.
What did you learn from that experience?
At Harvard?
No, the experience with polio.
Well, I learned that we're very lucky to be alive and healthy. One changes one's values somewhat after passing through that experience. She eventually, I think through the force of will, plus a remarkable physiotherapist, recovered to the point where she could ski and mountain climb, and so on. But still, one never can forget what might have been, and how lucky one is to have avoided it.
Next page: A "Wild Hare" at Ford
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