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Wage Peace, Not War
When it comes to strife, why does history keep repeating itself? Two UNH alums have devised an ingenious way to help policymakers

By C.W. Wolff

James Blight '73G, '74G and Janet Lang '74G, '77G first met Robert McNamara in 1984 in Big Sky, Mont., at a conference on nuclear weapons.

"The conference was a boondoggle," recalls Blight, who rarely minces words. A new fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Blight was the most junior scholar in the room, and he was disturbed at the direction of the discussion. He raised his hand and said, "I hear all this discussion about targeting and equipment and all this. One thing is missing. In a crisis, it's people who are deciding when to make a decision whether or not to push that button. The psychology of how those people feel in that crisis is not going to change with equipment."

His point was politely acknowledged, and conversation quickly returned to tonnage, deterrence and kill-potential. After all, many of the scholars present had helped write the 1983 best-seller Living with Nuclear Weapons. Blight was not one of them. Neither was McNamara.

The former U.S. Secretary of Defense and architect of the Vietnam War sought out Blight and Lang during the next break. "McNamara leads us down a corridor and pushes us into a stairwell," says Lang. "And he says to Jim, 'That's exactly the right point. You are absolutely on target. You pursue that.'"

That pursuit would lead Blight and Lang, working closely with McNamara, to create a radical new way to examine pivotal events of the last 50 years, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the Iran-Iraq War. One of their colleagues would call it "a genuinely novel invention in historical methodology." Blight and Lang would call it critical oral history.

Lang and Blight are sitting in a coffee shop not far from their home in Milton, Mass. Big fans of The Boss, they are wearing identical black Bruce Springsteen concert tour T-shirts. They are equally engaging, intense and lanky, although Blight, at 6 feet, 3 inches, towers over Lang and usually everyone else in the room. In a nod to their respective heights, Lang has adopted a lowercase "j" for her first name ever since they team-taught psychology and referred to themselves as "Big J" and "Little j."

Their mutual admiration after more than 30 years of marriage is almost palpable--"an old-fashioned love," says John Limber, emeritus associate professor of psychology, who was Lang's graduate school adviser at UNH. "The way they are with each other in public is not seen very often among academics."

"Of all the places we've been--Michigan, Harvard, Brown--we feel most deeply about UNH," says Blight, who first spotted Lang sitting on the Dimond Library steps. "If we drive up to Durham and I walk by Conant Hall and the library, I get all weak because it all happened there."

It nearly didn't. Neither had planned to go to graduate school. In fact, Lang, who grew up in East Boston, claims she didn't even know graduate school existed until she was at Boston State College studying mathematics with a double major in psychology. And Blight, initially an English major, dropped out of college after his sophomore year to pitch for a minor-league affiliate of the Detroit Tigers. He eventually graduated from the University of Michigan in his hometown of Flint with an interdisciplinary degree in history, philosophy and psychology. Serendipitously, both met influential psychology professors who encouraged them to apply to UNH's graduate psychology program.

For more than four hours, over several coffees and one Italian dinner, they share stories with unflagging energy and good humor. They are as candid about their lives as they are about their work: the rare and incurable blood cancer (Waldenstroem's macroglobulinemia) Lang has been fighting for more than 10 years, their vow never to travel without each other, their concern for a friend who has just been arrested in Tehran, their deep affection for Robert McNamara.

Lang has been involved in Blight's critical oral history work from its inception, fitting it in around her own career in epidemiology. A colleague praises her "intense practicality and energy," but cancer has greatly compromised that energy. "I need a lot of naps," she admits. She finally gave up her career because of the profound fatigue, but she continues her partnership with Blight: "I can do a little when I feel good, and I never have to worry about leaving anyone in the lurch because Jim always picks up the slack."

"They are the most interesting people I've ever met," says David Welch, CIGI Chair of Global Security at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. They are also adventurous. After many years at Brown University--and after Lang finished a rigorous 23 weeks of chemotherapy in Boston--they packed their bags and moved to Canada this January to join Welch at the Balsillie School in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

Blight's only interest in studying the past is to understand what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. It's a mission he shared with McNamara, who died last summer at age 93. Both acutely believed a nuclear holocaust is a frighteningly real possibility.

In fact, Blight's fear that President Ronald Reagan might push the button was the reason he began taking security studies classes at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in the early 1980s. At the time, he was a fellow in Harvard's history of science department and Lang was studying for her doctorate in epidemiology.

Blight chose to focus on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, even though most historians believed there was nothing new to learn. But Blight thought perhaps the right questions had not yet been asked of the right people in the right way.

"We want to know what it was like to be in that situation...What were they afraid of, and what is that like? These questions are rock-bottom for us," says Lang.

"Most historians don't think about this stuff very much because they are into the narrative," says Blight. But he was a student of William James, a 19th-century psychologist and philosopher who believed that "...the recesses of feeling... are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done."

The challenge was how to get at those feelings, especially decades after the fact. "Jim had this idea of setting up constructive conflict between former decision-makers, documents and scholars. It was a totally brilliant idea," says Welch.

The first critical oral history conference in 1987 brought together aging members of President Kennedy's inner circle, including McNamara, to discuss those tense October days 25 years earlier when the world came dangerously close to nuclear war in a face-off over Soviet missiles in Cuba. "It was fascinating," recalls Welch. The group learned how frightened--or unfrightened, in some cases--the Kennedy administration had been. "We also realized we needed to know what the other side was feeling."

So over the next 15 years, Blight and Lang organized five more missile-crisis conferences in Havana, Moscow and Antigua. They also organized two critical oral history conferences on the Bay of Pigs invasion, five on the collapse of U.S.-Soviet detente, six on the Vietnam War and, most recently, two on U.S.-Iran relations.

Critical oral history is a simple but ambitious concept. Carefully selected key decision-makers from all sides of a historical crisis--or as Blight likes to say, "a royal international screw-up"--are invited to a conference. Also at the table are scholars who have deeply studied the crisis, and stacks of documents, often recently declassified. The scholars and documents serve as checks, balances and jogs for memories that may be faulty, incomplete or self-serving.

For several days, people talk about what they felt, as well as what they thought; what they knew and didn't know. No scripts. No prepared papers to read. "It's like throwing highly combustible chemicals into a test tube. It often generates self-sustaining chain reactions," says James Hershberg of Georgetown University.

Participants talk at meetings, at lunch, late into the night over drinks. At times, the conversation can resemble the television program "Crossfire" on a bad night. People get mad and walk out, they yell at each other. But at other times, there are moving revelations that shatter what a scholar or policymaker believed to be true. A "cross between oral history and group therapy" is how Pulitzer-winning author Frances Fitzgerald described the critical oral history gestalt.

"Jim and Janet ask core questions about human motivation and interactions that scholars too often ignore, avoid or don't have the capacity to even assess... questions so fundamental and challenging that they require a kind of intellectual growth by all of us," says Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The approach creates what Blanton calls a "a rich stew that is a whole different level of scholarly nutrition" than the normal fare at history conferences.

One of the most startling revelations to come from this "stew" was at a 1992 conference in Havana, when, almost incidentally, a former Soviet general noted that in Cuba in 1962 there were tactical nuclear weapons, as well as nuclear warheads, ready to be used if the United States had attacked.

McNamara "started pulling at his headphones, yelling that something was wrong with the translation," recalls Blight. The best U.S. intelligence in 1962 had suggested the missiles in Cuba lacked warheads; the presence of tactical nuclear weapons hadn't even occurred to Americans. McNamara had just had his worst fears confirmed: nuclear war had barely been avoided. A shaken McNamara concluded: "We're damned lucky to be here."

McNamara "started pulling at his headphones, yelling that something was wrong with the translation," recalls Blight. The best U.S. intelligence in 1962 had suggested the missiles in Cuba lacked warheads; the presence of tactical nuclear weapons hadn't even occurred to Americans. McNamara had just had his worst fears confirmed: nuclear war had barely been avoided. A shaken McNamara concluded: "We're damned lucky to be here."

At an earlier critical oral history conference in Moscow in 1989, McNamara made what Lang calls "the empathy leap." The Cubans explained how the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion convinced them the United States was bent on conquering their island. While denying that was ever the plan, McNamara conceded: "If I was in your shoes, I would have believed the same thing." The head of the Cuban delegation was amazed. McNamara would go on to conclude that empathy with the enemy is the single most crucial element needed to prevent nuclear war.

Critical oral history is beginning to catch on. Blanton notes that Eastern Europe organizations are especially interested, where topics have included the 1968 Prague Spring, the liberal reforms in Czechoslovakia that were put down by Soviet forces; the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall; and the rise of the trade union Solidarity in Poland. Even some traditional academic conferences are beginning to include at least one critical oral history session. Blight calls this "critical oral history lite."

The method has its limitations. "Not everyone has the wherewithal to pursue something like a crazy person for five or six years until you finally get to Hanoi or Havana," says Blight. The politics can be overwhelming; the logistics daunting; the cost prohibitive. (Blight once flew to Hanoi for breakfast and lunch when a serious, but delicate, issue arose.)

Politically, timing often is crucial. A planned conference in Havana in 1996 was postponed for six years when the Cubans shot down some Cuban-Americans from Miami who entered their air space. Conversely, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and his national security advisor were thrilled to host a conference in Moscow on the missile crisis.

And there's the challenge of getting the right people to agree to attend. "That's why McNamara was crucial," says Lang. "He was willing to let us use him as 'bait.'" Without McNamara, Fidel Castro probably would not have been at the table, nor would have the Vietnam project happened.

It took courage, Lang says, for McNamara to participate in the conferences as well as agree to be the subject of the 2004 Academy Award-winning documentary "The Fog of War." (Blight and Lang supported a nervous McNamara during the filming and then wrote the accompanying book and study guide.)

Not everyone is willing to participate in critical oral history. They note that Henry Kissinger, for instance, attended one conference and said, "Never again."

For the current Iran project, Blight and Lang have enlisted as "bait" Thomas Pickering, a career ambassador with wide name recognition, and Bruce Riedel, who spent 29 years on the CIA Middle East desk and most recently has focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"Each project is a novel unto to itself and each person is a whole courtship," says Hershberg. "Jim and Janet do a careful job at bringing together a diverse, carefully chosen group for each project." He credits their "blithe American over-optimism" as well as their understanding that no one likes to leave the writing of history to the enemy.

There was one particularly thorny conference, a lead-up to a larger one in Havana. McNamara called a late-night meeting to pound on the table and declare he would not be going to Havana. Lang chose to use the language of statistics, which she shared with McNamara: "Let's say it's a zero probability you're going to Cuba. But maybe there's an upper confidence interval of trivial non-zero? Is it single digit?" McNamara looked at Lang and growled, "Low double digits." Everyone left the room convinced the Havana conference was off. But Lang knew they would be going. And they did.

During an 11-day trip to Tehran in 2008, Blight and Lang noticed a license plate with two upside-down hearts--Farsi for "55." They use that number now as a personal shorthand to remind themselves, as Lang says, "to keep it human and don't be surprised when things are turned upside down."

The Iran project has already been turned upside down a couple of times. First, Blight and Lang changed the focus after realizing how emotionally powerful the Iran-Iraq War continued to be in Iran, and how it was a source of much anti-U.S. feeling, specifically because of the Iranian belief, now confirmed, that the United States provided logistical support for the Iraqis' use of chemical weapons. More recently, the project suffered a setback because of deteriorating U.S.-Iran relations. "This work never happens easily, never quickly," sighs Lang. But she's smiling. ~

C.W. Wolff is a freelance writer who lives in Kittery, Maine.


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