Engineer Memoirs
Whether you could have gotten to the solution you got to without this is certainly
debatable. I used to try to persuade him that if we would spend a little more time
thinking about how these things would come out, we wouldn't necessarily have to
conduct the experiment because some of them were good and some of them I didn't
believe were going to work.
I didn't think it was necessary to conduct the experiment. I thought if you thought
about it, you'd know damn well it wouldn't work. But sometimes he agreed with me
and we didn't do it, and sometimes he didn't agree with me and we did do it.
Q:
But your approaches were really almost in diametric opposition.
A:
I was much more prone to think about it and talk about it. As I mentioned earlier, my
view was that if you thought about it long enough until you figured out what there was
to do, and then you decided to do it and you did it, then you didn't turn around unless
it was obviously a catastrophe. His view was that if you had a good idea, you would try
it on a limited basis and see how it worked.
Q:
What kind of a team did that make you?
A:
It might have made a pretty strong team.
Q:
I would think it might. I don't know if there is anything else I should ask you about
that, or whether we ought to go to DSAA now.
A:
I think we ought to go on.
Q:
One of the things you already mentioned in talking about DSAA was the different
interests of the State and the Defense Departments when it came to arms transfers.
Would you clarify that.
A:
Of course, arms transfers are an instrument of policy. Now more than ever--but it has
been progressively this way--we have all these overseas interests that are vital. Our
own fate is tied to the fate of our friends and allies overseas. We might wish that it
weren't so but it is. If they do not flourish, we will not either.
But we have limited tools to deal with this. Right after World War II, we were very
powerful and very strong, economically. We were in a very favorable position to deal
with these overseas problems. Today, relatively speaking, we are much less powerful.
And certainly our economic strength does not dominate the world economy as it did in
the '50s. For that reason, policy instruments, such as military aid and economic aid, are
very important tools in dealing with these overseas issues.
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