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

were whites, Caucasians, so on.

Wasps, if you will.

But my competition for that first seat

were Chinese, Japanese and Jews.

On Saturday and Sunday,

I played with my classmates.

They went to their ethnic schools.

They learned their native language.

They learned their culture, history.

And they came back determined on

Monday to beat that damn Irishman.

But they didn't do it very often.

One congressman called you 'Mr.

I- Have-All-The-Answers McNamara.'

And there's been suggestion

from some congressmen...

... that you come up there,

in spite of their experience...

... prepared to give them lessons in things.

Is that your attitude?

No. Perhaps they don't know

how much I don't know.

And there is much indeed.

I do mak e a serious effort...

... to prepare myself properly for these

congressional discussions.

I suppose I spend, perhaps,

... in testifying before Congress each year.

And each hour of testimony requires

three to four hours of preparation.

What about the contention that your

attitude is sometimes arrogant?

Have you ever been wrong, sir?

Oh, yes, indeed. My heavens.

I'm not gonna tell you when I've been wrong.

If you don't know,

I'm not going to tell you.

Oh, on countless occasions.

I applied to Stanford University.

I very much wanted to go.

But I couldn't afford it, so I lived

at home and I went to Berkeley.

Fifty-two dollars a year tuition.

I started Berkeley at the bottom

of the Depression.

Twenty-five million males were unemployed.

Out of that class of 3500...

...three elected to Phi Beta Kappa

at the end of sophomore year.

Of those three, one became

a Rhodes Scholar, I went to Harvard...

...the third went to work for $65 a month...

...and was damn happy to have the job.

The society was on the verge of...

...I don't want to say revolution...

...although, had Roosevelt not done

some of the things he did...

...it could've become far more violent.

In any event, that was what I was thrown into.

I never heard of Plato and Aristotle...

...before I became a freshman at Berkeley.

And I remember the professor,

Lowenberg...

...the freshman philosophy professor...

I couldn't wait to go to another class.

I took more philosophy courses,

particularly one in logic...

...and one in ethics.

Stress on values...

...something beyond one's self...

...and a responsibility to society.

After graduating University of California...

...I went to Harvard Graduate School

of Business for two years...

...and then I went back to San Francisco.

I began to court this young lady that

I'd met when we were 17...

...in our first week at Berkeley:

Margaret Craig.

And I was making some progress

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