Robert McNamara Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 4 of 8
Let's talk a little about your operating philosophy. You were always and you remain a liberal, enthusiastic about the role of government.
Well, I hope so. As a matter of fact, in Reagan's second-term election, the word "liberal" was so despised that finally Cy Vance and I and some others paid for an ad in The New York Times saying we were proud to be liberals, we thought our society should understand what liberalism meant and the denigration of it was irrational, unreasonable, and ultimately a disservice to the society. 
I believed it then and I believe it today.
Why do you think that philosophy has come into such disrepute? I guess the high point was when the Kennedy administration came in.
The high point was the inaugural address of President Kennedy when he used those famous words "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." That's what citizenship meant to me then, it's what it means for me today, but that is not widely accepted today. Why not? Because people have totally lost confidence in their government and those who serve. Now why have they lost confidence in their government? Several events have contributed to it. Certainly Vietnam and the tragedy of that, the controversy of that contributed. Surely Watergate and Nixon's career contributed to it. I think unfortunately the loss of respect for government and those who serve it has been contributed to by many of our recent political leaders, including Democrats. President Carter when he was running severely criticized the bureaucracy. President Reagan did, President Bush did; I think that is inexcusable. I don't mean to say that government servants are all perfect, but what I do mean to say is that the senior public servants that I served with, the senior public servants that I have observed, including the senior public servants of today, both Republicans and Democrats, are at least as competent, at least as dedicated, as their private-sector counterparts, and they are paid far, far less. I was in a meeting a month ago and addressing this theme, and I saw sitting in front of me, in the front row of the audience, a federal judge (whom I didn't know well but I knew he was very competent), and I said "You people in this audience don't agree with me on this, and I want to tell you something. Here is sitting in front of me a federal judge, he has dedicated his life to serving you, he has a lifetime tenure as a judge, he is working 12 and 14 hours a day for you and he is being paid less than 10 percent of what he could earn in private legal practice. We should admire that. And he's not unique -- others in the government are doing the same."
So will the pendulum swing back?
I hope it will. I am very pleased you are asking me these questions and somebody hopefully will listen to the answers and I hope be moved by it. I am here as you said as a Regents Lecturer, and I'm associated with the School of Public Policy. They sent me a document to read on the plane as I came out a few days ago, and I want to read two or three sentences. The letter, which Dean Smolensky wrote, deals with this exact point. He said "I'm tired of the cynical denigration of government. Of course government could do better, but it does well now." That's exactly the point. Surely government could do better, it's not perfect, but I simply want to tell you, if you want to talk about competence, if you want to talk about dedication, it does at least as well as the private sector, and both could do better and both should do better.
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