Features

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.

BAY OF PIGS aftermath: Cuban soldiers stand by an anti-aircraft artillery at the Havana waterfront following the unsuccessful 1961 invasion. Blight says another name for this kind of crisis is "a royal international screw-up."

"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."

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.

 Easy to print version