Robert S. McNamara, President of the Ford Motor Company, Secretary of Defense for Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson
Robert S. McNamara, President of the Ford Motor Company, Secretary of Defense for Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson
“Finance was soon a power of its own. It principal driving force was Bob McNamara, and [his] basic philosophy was:
“Whatever the product men and the manufacturing men want, deny it.
“Make them sweat and then make them present it again, and once again delay it as long as possible. If in the end it has to be granted, cut it in half.
“Always make them fight the balance sheet, and always put the burden of truth on them.
“That way they will always be on the defensive and will think twice about asking for anything.”
— from The Reckoning by David Halberstam
[Note 1: Robert McNamara may not be a name familiar to some readers. As an executive and later Ford Motor Company President McNamara’s arrogance, refusal to innovate and invest in the future and his belief that he could manage a company without understanding the product it made played a significant role in destroying Detroit’s position as automobile capital of the world.
[McNamara (and he was by no means the only culprit) nearly killed what had been the 4th largest U.S. city when I was born. (It is now the 18th largest.)
[For my generation born after World War II, the largest generation in U.S. history, Robert McNamara was a household name. In 1961, President John Kennedy (JFK) hired McNamara from Ford to become his Secretary of Defense. After Kennedy’s death, McNamara served President Lyndon Johnson continuing McNamara’s role as the principal force who designed, implemented, and took the actions resulting in the U.S. losing the War in Vietnam. From 1961 to 1968, the Vietnam War was frequently referred to as “McNamara’s War.” Arguably, McNamara was more responsible for the War in Vietnam than the Presidents under which he served. Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Robert Caro estimates that the Vietnam War and its extension into neighboring Cambodia and other southeast Asian countries may have resulted in a death total of 10 million people.
Note 2: This is my favorite Vietnam War poster. A different and I believe more erotic version of this poster hung on the wall of the History Department at Columbia College where I worked in the summer of 1968, chilling from the anti-War demonstrations at my college in the spring. 1968 was the summer when supporters of the War denounced the Columbia demonstrations from the podium of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
[Note 4: Stay tuned to www.e-architect.co.uk for the second column in the series Is Detroit dying? If you see me on the street before this article is published chase me back to my computer. ]
Premature Publication Excuse: An-as-yet incomplete posting explaining the meaning of life
It is taking me a while to achieve completion because I am writing for readers who may not have heard about Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney.
One problem, of course, is if I were Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney was trying to seduce me so I do not go off to India to find the meaning of life, would I have the spiritual courage to say NO?
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I am goaded into publishing this post prematurely due to the kind permission of Mary Reilly Nichols, a prominent yoga teacher and spiritualist based in New York City to discuss her spiritual experiences..
“I have been teaching Yoga since 1982, upon completing a five-year stint of ashram life under the auspices of my Guru, Swami Muktananda.
“We didn’t really practice Hatha Yoga in his ashram as a discrete activity. All the branches of yoga were unfolding at all times, so that is the way I teach Hatha: as inseparable from all the other branches of yoga.
“If you sever a branch from the vine, the branch withers. Hatha must be connected to its root, or it is merely acrobatics. Yet it is a foundation for liberation when aligned with understanding.”
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Book jacket of The Razor’s Edge featuring the two main characters in the forthcoming movie
The central character in the most significant book in my life (The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham) achieves his understanding of the meaning of life at an ashram in India where he has an out-of-body experience.
Tyrone Power played the central character in the 1946 film version of Maugham’s 1944 novel. Although he died at age 44 in 1958, his fame was so enduring that his photographic appears on The Beatles’ iconic 1967 album cover for St. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band. Tyrone Power is so perfectly cast in the 1946 version of the movie that although Maugham named his main character: Larry Darrell, I automatically think Tyrone Power.
I find that this cinematic accomplishment helps add validity to Tyrone Power’s out-of-body experiences.
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Nichols has an extensive section on her site describing her out-of-body experiences including those that preceding meeting her guru in India. Nichols, a graduate of Harvard University, had her first out-of-body experiences as an undergraduate.
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“It was the spring of my junior year in college and i was writing my junior thesis, a major term paper, for the anthropology department. I had chosen as a topic the ecstatic religious cults of New Guinea.
“It was about how ecstatic religious movements function to help people adapt to conditions of extreme social stress. Visionary religious experience, arising from the unconscious, transforms the deep psycho social programming of human beings undergoing major anxiety and stress.
“The strain can result from culture contact, especially with a technologically superior culture. But any radical change of environmental or social conditions can render traditional cultural categories irrelevant and unproductive, which is extremely stressful.
“The whole process of writing this paper had been unusually energizing and compelling. I was so excited by the material, and wanted nothing else but to read and write about it.
“One evening i sat at my desk writing, listening to the street music wafting up from the streets of Cambridge. The not terribly brilliant thought occurred:
“Doesn’t my own contemporary Western culture qualify as a society who’s traditions are breaking down due to rapid change? We must be ripe for ecstatic religious renewal.
“At that moment there was an explosion of energy at the base of my spine, energy which wriggled upward with the gushing power of a fire hose to the crown of my head.
“The whole room turned into dazzling white light, myself included. The light spoke clearly to me: ‘A great Being is in a body in your lifetime, and you will recognize him.’ The light conveyed some other knowledge as well.
“After regaining a sense of my physical body, I ran out of there, afraid. Only later would I understand that I had had a classic kundalini awakening, and learn that Kundalini Shakti, subtle energy normally dormant at the base of the spine, rises to the crown center through yogic processes producing states of super consciousness.”
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Not yet prepared to describe my own spiritual experiences that led to a life-altering event when I discussed The Razor’s Edge with my grandmother at age 16, I asked Nichols for permission to cite her account. She granted permission with the cautionary note:
“I have found that reporting those experiences sometimes results in very angry feedback, so share at your own risk! “
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Mindful of Nichols’ warning, the rest of this post-in-progress represents my summoning up courage to explain my notion of The Meaning of Life.
I will let you know if I complete it earlier given that I am worried about the fate of the Detroit’s Institute of the Arts as a consequences of Detroit’s bankruptcy, the largest of any city in U.S. history.
Lengthy preparation prior to getting the point (not yet included)
Note 1: It is customary for fastidious movie goers and book readers (who may stray to this site) to be warned that (despite my assertions it does not matter) the following posting is so filled with spoilers it might be prudent to stop reading now.
Note 2: For the rest of you, who actually belong here, I am preparing for Thanksgiving by discussing the most influential film in my life The Razor’s Edge starring Tyrone Power shown here and released 68 years ago—one year before I was born.
Rarely, does Tyrone Power wear a tuxedo in the movie. He stars as Larry Darrell, a man searching for the meaning of life which he finds dressed in second-hand clothes in a cabin high up in the Himalayan Mountains.
Maugham writes about Darrell, “[I]t may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow-men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.”
This preparation for Thanksgiving includes a discussion I had with my grandmother Celia Schneider when I was 16 about Somerset Maugham’s novel upon which the movie is closely based.
My grandmother Celia Schneider is shown here right in an early 1940s photo. Celia is standing next to her daughter Miriam Pell, years before she met my father. As a child, Celia was the most stable adult influence on my life. Her favorite book was W. Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel The Razor’s Edge.
Mother engraved a quotation from The Razor’s Edge on my grandmother’s tombstone.
The book title (which the author reproduces as an epigraph) comes from a verse from the Katha-Upanishad:
“The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.”
The Katha-Upanishad is a Hindu treatise probably composed after the fifth century BC and it contains passages that suggest contact with Buddhist ideas. I am not sure I agree with the concept that the path to Salvation is hard. [What do you think?]
Talking to my grandmother about life’s meaning changed my life. Discussing this subject seems a useful way to get ready for Thanksgiving.
The book and the film are so closely tied together in my mind, especially the superb casting of the three main characters that I often think about the two separate genres as if they were one.
This is a wonderful movie—a way to getting Thanksgiving rolling toward meaning while providing fun for everyone.
While you have yet to meet the heroine, much fun involves snickering at the third of the main characters Clifton Webb who plays the role of a diverting snob.
Maugham writes of Elliott Templeton, Webb’s character (to whom I shall return as the story does) to effectively lighten up the story’s serious Main Purpose.
“The Paris season was drawing to a close and all the best people were arranging to go to watering places or to Deauville before repairing for the rest of the summer to their ancestral châteaux in Touraine, Anjou, or Brittany. Ordinarily Elliott went to London at the end of June, but his family feeling was strong and his affection for his sister and Isabelle sincere; he had been quite ready to sacrifice himself and remain in Paris, if they wished it, when no one who was anyone was there, but he found himself now in the agreeable situation of being able to do what was best for others and at the same time what was convenient for himself.”
Parsimonious accolade: I only give the movie four stars instead of five because:
The music is dreadful. Every time something significant happens, a violin plays or two or three or the entire orchestra.
The key spiritual moment is explained away as being caused by God rather than as Maugham described it by a generic spiritual power. (Before discussing this at the dinner table, please pass the cranberry sauce.) [More on God. Before Larry has his defining moment with an Indian guru, Maugham describes a conversation he had concerning God with Isabel Bradley (played by Gene Tierney). The conversation eventually will appear below, following another photograph of Gene Tierney “Acclaimed,” Wikipedia writes, “as a great beauty.”
The Plot (as yet incomplete)
W. Somerset Maugham’s begins The Razor’s Edge by denying the book is a novel.
“If I call it a novel it is because I do not know what else to call it…I have invented nothing.” Maugham invented quite a lot .
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Note: Last month, I celebrated my 67th birthday. Increasingly, I find myself eager to communicate with women and men in their 20s and 30s—the age of my two daughters Joanna and Amelia.
One reason I am eager to communication with this specific demographic is because I live half a block away from Webster’s Bookstore and Café where recent friends include the baristas and non-baristas who serve me coffee and organic salads, sell me books, and sit with me and talk about books and life.
Two years ago, Tom Connolly, a musician who is currently playing in a rock band in Philadelphia, shared Thanksgiving with me at my apartment with a mutual friend .While I made turkey (Tom helped), he set up a drum and cymbal set which I later played with great delight.
