The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara Page #8

by LeMay's command.

Proportionality should be a guideline in war.

Killing 50 to 90 percent...

...of the people in 67 Japanese cities...

...and then bombing them

with two nuclear bombs...

...is not proportional,

in the minds of some people...

...to the objectives we were trying to achieve.

I don't fault Truman

for dropping the nuclear bomb.

The U.S. -Japanese War was

one of the most brutal wars...

...in all of human history.

Kamikaze pilots, suicide,

unbelievable.

What one can criticize...

...is that the human race

prior to that time and today...

...has not really grappled with

what are, I'll call it 'the rules of war.'

Was there a rule then that said you

shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill...

...shouldn't burn to death 100,000

civilians in a night?

LeMay said, ' If we'd lost the war...

...we'd all have been prosecuted

as war criminals.'

And I think he's right.

He, and I'd say I...

...were behaving as war criminals.

LeMay recognized that what he was doing...

...would be thought immoral...

...if his side had lost.

But what makes it immoral if you lose

and not immoral if you win?

At some point, we have to approach

Vietnam, and I want to know...

... how you can best set that up for me.

Yeah, well...

...that's a hard, hard question.

I think...

I think we have to approach it

in the context of the Cold War.

But first I'll have to talk about Ford.

I've got to go back to the end of the war.

I had a terrible headache...

...so Marg drove me in

to the Air Force regional hospital.

A week later, Marg came in...

...many of the same symptoms.

It's hard to believe, and I don't think

I've heard of another case...

...where two individuals,

husband and wife...

...came down, essentially,

at the same time with polio.

We were both in the hospital on V-J Day.

A friend of mine said:

'We're gonna find a corporation

in America that needs...

...the advice and capabilities

of this extraordinary group...

...l'm forming and you gotta be in it.'

I said, 'To hell with it.

I'm going back to Harvard.

Marg and I wanna do that.

I'm gonna spend my life there.'

He said, ' Look, Bob,

you can't pay Marg's hospital bills.

You're crazy as hell.' He said, ' By the way...

...the company that most needs

our help in all the U.S. Is Ford.'

I said, ' How'd you learn that?'

' I read an article in Life magazine.'

Of the top 1000 executives at Ford...

...I don't believe there were

...and Henry Ford ll needed help.

They were gonna give us tests.

Two full days of testing...

...intelligence tests, achievement tests,

personality tests, you name it.

This sounds absurd, but I remember

a question on one of the tests was:

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