Robert McNamara Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 8 of 8
Since you're a Regents' Lecturer, I guess I can call you Professor, and we can assign the paperback edition of your book for your students. This edition, as you've indicated includes many of the reviews of the original edition --
There are eighteen of them.
-- some of which are quite critical of the book. So my last question would be a question for Professor McNamara, and that is, recognizing the times will be very different with different historical forces operating, what lessons should students derive from your life and your career? Not the lessons of Vietnam; the lessons of your life.
Well, one lesson that I've drawn from my life is the value and necessity of the freedom of debate, and that's what I really want to focus on in that book. If you accept Vietnam as a tragedy, and certainly I believe the majority of Americans today do, you should ask how it came about. I think that's the lesson from my years on this campus. As I suggested earlier, this campus was chaotic when I was here. This is a slight exaggeration, but not much: society was on the verge of revolution. Twenty-five percent of the adult males were unemployed. Parents of my classmates were committing suicide because they couldn't provide shelter and food for their families. There was a march of veterans on Washington. This was a chaotic period, and yet in that chaos this University fostered freedom of expression, freedom of debate. Out of that came social and economic advances, I don't mean just from this University but out of that debate in our society came the tremendous advances, and we should be very proud of those advances. While it's true that we have twice the percentage of our children below the poverty line as do Germany and Canada, it is also true that, compared to what existed in the thirties and twenties, we are taking relatively good care of our elderly today. That came out of the decisions in the debate of the times; we should be very proud of that and we should go on to responsibly address and debate the best way of solving our other problems of today. Forty million without adequate health care, homelessness, crime, drugs, education systems deteriorating. These are problems we should debate and develop solutions through that debate.
Mr. McNamara, thank you very much for sharing this time with us, and for joining us for this conversation on international affairs.
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