| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Robert Gallucci Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Bob, welcome to Berkeley.
Thank you.
Where were you born and raised?
Born in Brooklyn, raised on Staten Island and then on Long Island outside New York City.
And in retrospect, how do you think your parents shaped your character?
My father grew up in Italy, and so I'm sort of first or one-and-a-half generation; my mother was Italian as well. Growing up, I remember a couple of things which I'm sure had an impact on me. One was what a lot of us at that point heard about, which was how bad the Depression was, and how important economic security was, particularly personal economic security. And that was translated, interestingly, into how important education was. There are two kids in our family -- I have a brother, I was not an only child -- and he and I both were taught and very much impressed with the importance of as much education as we could acquire. My father's line was, "No one can take that away." So my brother went on to be an academic, and he's teaching at the University of Washington at Seattle, has been for thirty years; and I went and got my Ph.D. I think that was very much directly tied to some of what my parents convinced us was important in life.
Do you remember any books that you read as a young person that influenced you?
I remember, distinctly, my brother trying to give me books to read. He was six years older than I was. And never with a lot of effect, except he gave me a bunch of law books because he decided I should become a lawyer when I was in high school. I can't go into why that was, but he thought that would be appropriate for me. I don't know that I read those books. I kept them near me, but I don't think I read them. But I did read a book by Robert D. Murphy, Diplomat among Warriors. I was junior or senior in high school, or younger, and I was, ever since then, fascinated by war. This was a part of war, it's was a diplomat's view of war and a diplomat's role in war. I was very impressed with that, and I think that had a lot to do with the direction I ultimately headed in my life.
Where were you educated, where did you do your undergraduate work?
Brentwood High School on Long Island, and then I went to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and then onto Brandeis for my MA and Ph.D.
What did you work on in your dissertation, what problem became the focus of your concern?
As I indicated, war was always a focus on my concern. Up until graduate school, really, it was nuclear war. I was impressed with the magnitude of destruction and the need to do something about it. I was in high school during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it had a big impact on me. When I was in college I studied International Relations. When I got to graduate school, I was gravitating to the same direction; strategic nuclear issues were the focus of my intellectual concern. But something else was going on at the same time, and that was the Vietnam War, and that also had my attention. I was at the right age to be drafted, and we focused on the Vietnam War, all of us of that same age cohort, both because of how that could impact our personal lives, and because intellectually that's what we were interested in as well -- foreign policy, international security, international relations. So the dissertation that I ultimately completed and turned into a book was about the Vietnam War, the conduct of the war.
How did that experience of the sixties, being in school then, protesting a war, what were its long-term effects on you, do you think?
I was a bit conflicted. I didn't consider myself a war protester when I was an undergraduate. I barely tracked the war then very much. When I went to Brandeis, it became much more of a current political issue for me. While I did attend some marches, and I was quite opposed to the war and thought it was the wrong thing to do, I didn't have any intellectual or emotional sympathy for the New Left, and the idea of intolerance for discussion struck me as antidemocratic and not what our country was about. So I found myself where a lot of people were, which was a position of opposition to the war, but not feeling entirely comfortable with all of the political views of the opponents of the war. That, I guess, through my life has informed me about government. Which is to say, I have tremendous respect for government, and I also have a healthy skepticism of government at the same time.
After you finished your degree, you taught a while, but then you went into government service. Tell us about that.
My intent in getting the Ph.D. and struggling through that, was, of course, to become a university professor. While I was writing the dissertation, I taught at Swarthmore College for a couple of years, and when I finished I did a post-doc at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The subject of the dissertation was Vietnam, but the intellectual approach was something called "bureaucratic politics," something which was being then popularized by Graham Allison. I used that intellectual approach to try to help explain some events in the conduct of the Vietnam War. Which led me, though, at the same time to think, "Gee, I ought to go into government, and see how those bureaucratic politics actually play out."
In truth, I also was losing some of the faith required by the discipline of political science. I say this almost as someone who is now a dean at a Catholic Jesuit institution. I lost a little faith in political science, the discipline. The idea of policy was very appealing to me. Though, I did really think that I would only do that for a little bit, and then I would come back to the university. As it turned out, "a little bit" was just over twenty years before I came back to the university.
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