Influences of the 1960s
It was from the Sonora Desert of Arizona to the Bay Area of California. You could see the Golden Gate from Berkeley’s sprawling campus. The pungent smell of the Eucalyptus trees reminded me of those first days of Marine Boot Camp in San Diego. To this day, the smell of those Eucalyptus trees reminds me of the physical challenges of the Marine Corps and the mental challenges of UC Berkeley.

Things were going well for the nation, but there were clouds on the horizon. There were American troops in Vietnam. By then I no longer had blind faith that politicians in Washington necessarily knew what they were doing. As much as I admired JFK, I was not convinced that American intervention in Vietnam was in their interests or a wise course for American foreign policy. But surely, as JFK had already been burned by the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, he would not be once again burned by a foreign policy disaster in Vietnam.

This was 1963, and the popular JFK would be up for re-election in 1964. He probably wouldn’t pull troops out before then lest he be accused of being “soft on communism,” which was the favorite stick used by Republicans to beat up on Democrats. But neither would he commit to more troops as his brother RFK, a previous hawk, had discovered that rosy reports from the embassy in Vietnam didn’t match actual results in the field. If RFK had some doubts, it was only a matter of time before the enterprise would be s caled down. But not before the election of 1964. It was a pragmatic decision.

Hey, I’m Swiss and we are a pragmatic people. I understand pragmatism as well as anybody. President Eisenhower, the military man par excellence, stayed out of Vietnam. Surely JFK would not be sucked into this morass either.

Then the worst occurred. JFK was assassinated. LBJ took over and proclaimed that no third world army was going to push this Texan around. A minor incident in the Gulf of Tonkin gave LBJ the opportunity to blow out of proportion and augment this flap into the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It passed the US Senate with only two dissenting votes, a nd gave LBJ what he needed to expand the war. The rest is tragic history.

I didn’t care for the anti-war demonstrations of that time. I agreed with the demonstrators that American involvement in that war was a terrible idea. But I didn’t identify with the unruly behavior and slovenly appearance of the demonstrators. I was, after all, not that long out of the Corps. I still wore my hair reasonably short and kept my shoes shined. And I didn’t like the way that supposedly intelligent people blamed the military, including teen-aged draftees, for the war instead of the politicians in Washington who made the decisions.

I suppose it was then that I became permanently interested in politics—because it is politicians who make decisions that so profoundly affect the rest of us.

My academic emphasis at Berkeley was on natural resource economics, but I always had a deep interest in macroeconomic policy as well. I was then, and remain, convinced that the right economic policies can enable good things to happen. But the wrong economic policies will guarantee that bad things will happen. And we are experiencing today some of the devastating effects of bad economic policies ranging from the Reagan era to the policies of George W. Bush. More on this later.

Click on a chapter title to read more...
Growing Up in Green County
From Farm Boy to Marine
Education: Fulfillment of "The Epiphany"
Influences of the 1960s
My Career: University of Minnesota
My Career: New Mexico State University & Sultan Qaboos University in Oman
Bush's War in the Middle East
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