2) Why did you decide to marry mom?
Simply because I loved her - her sense of humor, and because I could not imagine being without her. She was quick. We had fun together. I only had three serious girl friends - two in high school and your mom. Mom was different - when I first met her she was in academic trouble and I think I helped her stay at Pacific.
NOTE - The comments about Quinlan are a lot more detailed - how I met her (at Pacific - in fixing her guitar); how we have made decisions over the last 50+ years (we both have always had bank accounts and made lots of decisions independently; what intrigued me about her (sense of humor was big); how she is often the most fascinating person in the room even after 50 years. Etc.
3) What was your experience of Dan or your peers going to Vietnam? What did you feel about the war? Did you think the US should be there? What should they have down instead? Not what you think now but I’m curious what you felt then.
NOTE - This set of stories is not a part of the final manuscript. Vietnam was something that everyone in my generation experienced. It was perhaps the one time, when I listened to Bill Clinton’s stories about the draft, that I felt an affinity with him. Although as noted in a chapter on famous people I have met - when I met him as President - he was the best extemporaneous speaker I think I ever heard. In the book I do comment on why I thought our involvement in Vietnam was poorly managed, especially based on the Hubris of Robert McNamara. As you will read in the chapter on Experts v. Crowds in the final version of the book I have a lot of faith in the expertise of people as a group over narrowly constituted experts. There was a great quote from a British labor politician in Britain after WWII - who said “The gentleman in Whitehall really does know better, what is good for the people than the people know themselves.” I believe that logic is consistently false. It is a big part of what I believe about how we should organize ourselves in common purpose. The philosophy chapters in the middle of the book argue that individuals often have specialized knowledge that is always better than the experts. We need to know how and when to use that. A recent book (Wake Up Call by John Mickelthwait and Adrian Wooldridge - well worth the read by the way) argues that governments in the West made a series of absurd decisions about how to deal with the pandemic of COVID. For me at least the two big government initiatives in the Johnson Administration were serious examples of the hubris of advocates of big government. Guns and Butter was something that LBJ thought was possible. As you will read in the book the democrats are not the only ones who believe that anything is possible - the only differences between many of our leaders in the last half century was what they defined as guns and butter. Non est talis res ut liberum prandium (there is no such thing as a free lunch) is still true. An odd saying indeed for someone who spent 40+ years on both sides of lobbying!
Government to be successful needs to decide what it is trying to accomplish. From my perspective that should be a short list - but once we figure out what we want to do we need to think about how to pay for it. In recent years, because of something Mancur Olson observed (in the Logic of Collective Action) we haven’t bothered to have serious discussions of either what we want to accomplish or how to pay for it. For me Vietnam and the Great Society came at a time in life when I was trying to figure out key questions about government - throughout my life I have kept coming back to those basics. So below are comments that won’t be in the book - but the book does have some discussions about the other side (the butter). I had one brother who served and several friends, including a friend who was a ranger and another to who flew Hueys. So here are my thoughts on Vietnam, contradictory as they were then and now.
Vietnam is perhaps the most complex event in my generation’s history. We eased into it in part because of anti-communism of Ike and JFK but also because of the hubris of LBJ and the absolute incompetence of Robert McNamara. LBJ thought, because of his Senate experience that you could stage manage anything. A good part of our problems today in the US were created by LBJs attempts with the Great Society - a set of programs where we have spent trillions of dollars to end poverty with few positive results and a large set of problems which produced societal pathologies that we still live with.
I had mixed feelings about the war - I thought we should either commit ourselves to go after the enemy or not be there. When we did fight back (as in Tet - where we clearly won) that worked. Even with that the press completely misrepresented the outcome. McNamara (who had been a car executive and the lead General (Westmorland) made our policy inconsistent. According to most reports Johnson actually spent a lot of time in the Situation Room - discussing strategy and the idiots in the Armed Forces accepted that. McNamara was a numbers guy (Scientific management) so the bureaucrats down the line created numbers which were phony.
My brother Dan spent several tours in Vietnam on a small ship which patrolled the Mekong river. He enlisted in the Navy at the end of my Senior Year in High School. His stories about his deployments are interesting. Peter at one point had a long talk with him about those experiences.
I did two contradictory things. I disliked the draft intensely - If you know me at all you know my distrust of bureaucracies - and yet I tried twice to enlist in the Air Force. I failed the draft physicals and the Air Force physicals (but because of sinuses not blood pressure). In 1967, the Congress reauthorized the draft so that those of us with student classifications were forced to double the time of our eligibility for the draft. I studied up on the draft and the new law and was so incensed that I wrote an impassioned letter of a 21 year old to my local draft board telling them I they were neither Selective, did not perform a Service and certainly were not a system. I am convinced that put a red letter on my file.
The rules of the Selective Service allowed one physical and one re-check. I was marginally hypertensive (high blood pressure). In the end they sent me six notices for a physical. In the last one I was mildly above - so they put me in a green room - I was so mad when I came out my BP actually went up.
When I got to graduate school in DC I did two contradictory things. First, I tried twice to enlist in the Air Force either to be a pilot (where my sinuses knocked me out) or in intelligence. In those two physicals I passed except for sinuses. But at the same time I worked to make sure I would not be drafted.
When the sixth notice arrived I went to a law office of a guy who specialized in Selective Service cases. He wrote a letter which I signed which officially retained him as my attorney of record. I got a 4-F in 7 days. That certainly was an exceptional response, I am not sure how that happened.
Should we have been there? Hard question. Our role evolved so that by the time JFK was assassinated we had only a couple of hundred troops there. But then came the Gulf of Tonkin resolution - which was a doctored up crisis to get us into war. After that the number of troops escalated quickly.
The Intellectuals turned against the war as soon as it became real. When the Tet offensive happened Walter Cronkite began to change his opinion - it was the first time that I noticed that the news establishment could be biased. By the time 1968 rolled around it was clear that LBJ could not get re-elected. He had this idiotic speech on March 31 where he stated “If nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve.” I had written my Honors Thesis on the James McGregor Burns theory of presidential invincibility - where I argued Burns was wrong. I got the paper back two days before the speech. After the speech I went over to my professor’s house - and he laughed (he thought Burns was right) and said “I will not change the grade.”
A couple of my fraternity brothers enlisted into the National Guard. For some reason I did not even try.
Oddly, one of the biggest supporters of the Volunteer Army was my boss in the Senate - Winston Prouty.
The draft was wrong on several levels. The local boards could be arbitrary and the exclusions got seemingly healthy but relatively wealthy young men out of serving. In the last physical I took, for some reason I was asked to take a second IQ test. (Go figure but for those of you who did not go through a draft physical see the scenes from Alice’s Restaurant mixed with One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The Air Force physicals were almost pleasant. In the last draft physical I took there was a group of perhaps 60 guys in a class room and a short Napoleonic NCO came in trying to look tough and claiming that if any of us intentionally failed the test, we would immediately be sent to Vietnam. There was a huge Black guy from Baltimore behind me - it was clear he would eventually end up as a draftee, he was angry. He started ask all of the guys in the back to give him their pencils. As the NCO was about to finish his harangue, the big guy stood up with about 30 pencils in his hand assembled like a bundle of twigs, broke them in half and then said “Hey Honkie, we need some more pencils here.” The NCO looked like he was going to faint but quickly handed the guy a new set of pencils. The draft physicals were bureaucratic in the extreme.
Opponents of the volunteer army consistently argued that everyone owes a debt to their society and the draft was a great equalizer. The problem was it was not a good way to do that - young men with resources found all sorts of ways to avoid the draft from the national guard to medical claims. And yet I remain opposed to the idea of universal basic service. BUS presents all sorts of problems in my mind - the conception of a common culture when I was growing up depended on a series of activities including flag salutes and all sorts of opportunities to understand the unique nature of our American system. We lost those things in part because of cynicism. From my view that came from a common understanding of the over-reach of the supporters of expansions of government and a concurrent absurd reading of the thinkers like Adam Smith.
The next post describes my feelings about becoming a father.
My brother Dan corrects my memory of his service in Vietnam ....
ReplyDeleteInteresting and thoughtful
A couple of points on Vietnam.
1. I spent almost no time during my 3 tours (26months total) in IV Corp - Mecong delta. My first two tours were aboard an APD (USS Diachenko). We did beach surveys (with UDT and recon marines) from the DMZ to Vung Tau. We were also involved in a half of dozen amphibious assaults similar to WWII operation. Third tour was in Assault Craft Division 13. I had 14 boats from 38 feet to 165 feet under my command. We mostly ferried supplies up the Cua Viet River ( in I Corp - just south of the DMZ) in support of the siege of Khe Sung near the Loas border.
2. My first two tours - morale was high and we were confident we would prevail. Third tour - morale had fallen. I left Vietnam 0n Dec 24, 1967. Tet was in January of 68, so I just missed it. I all accounts we crushed their will to fight but the lame dick in the White House could not see it. ( it’s interesting that, in my opinion, the two presidents at the bottom of presidential performance are both named Johnson. LBJ is next to the last - but that’s a close race.
3. After Tet drugs appeared (I never saw any drugs nor any evidence of impaired performance on duty during my 3 tours.
Just wanted to get the details straight - give or take a lie or two
From an Irish Friend in Mexico -
ReplyDeleteAs you can imagine, I enjoyed reading your Emily Questions´ stuff which is starting to shape up.
1.- I cannot imagine anyone better suited to be your life companion as Quinlan, and I am delighted about what you have to say about her.
2.- The family stories are interesting, although in many ways without an experiential context for me. I am glad you organized it and put it together in a sequential and logical form that the past really never has, but we need to come into contact with it. I learnt things about the US and the formation of the great society which now seems to be shooting itself in the foot. Thanks. Overcoming procrastination is productive.
3.- It led me to think about my own family narrative.I think about my own story in terms of vikings, anglo-norman invasions, Cromwell, St Patrick, unionized strikes, De Valera, Robert Emmett etc... the many things that as a nation we experienced but may soon fade from the collective memory through the incessant work of university history "scholars" of a pro-british ilk or some sort of anachronistic shame of the past.
The plantations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantations_of_Ireland) and penal succession laws set my folk so far back that they were only getting off the ground at the end of the nineteenth century, many were involved in the independence movement, were suffragettes, local literary people, lawyers, artists but also because of circumstance blacksmiths and retainers. In general they seem a far rowdier crowd than your orderly ascendancy. Ireland is indebted to the same wonderful wisdom of government that has characterized England that has sown conflict and division and in some ways lives on. My stock is partly northern Irish (victims of Peep-o-Day boys) and partly from the pale (. One of my sisters tried to build a genealogical tree. There seem no to have been too many emigrés to the US, although funnily there is a Boston connection. Part of my family was protestant. A few freemasons of unitarian persuasion. I was taught not to have negative feelings towards the English, but rather forgive.
4.- Vietnam gripped me as an adolescent, since my family was very anti-tyranny in any form, socialist or communist, and in many ways I was schooled in the art of "watching out for abuse of authority". The pencil story is great. My dad was in the army during the war, and although they tried to get him to stay on he decided it was no place to rear a family. We did not take any american money (Marshall) after the war. We never had conscription in Ireland and there are very founded reasons but were taught not to shirk our duty even to death. Still, I am glad none of you were maimed, killed or psychologically undone and it seems that the whole issue of regional wars is a great quandary, and I am in accord with the conviction of keeping the bureaucrats, "great" leaders and war theoreticians at bay.
5.- I was taught as a child to be grateful to the Americans for helping go stop Hitler. So I am also grateful to your brothers.
6.- Most of all I am happy that you are doing well and I think San Miguel is a good place at this moment.
By the way I am in quarantine for COVID after a lady I attended turned out to be positive. I took a test on the 6th day and am negative. It was the 14th when I made the contact. No symptoms and well. A lot of people have me undeservedly in their prayers.
Excuse any typos