October 7, 1999

Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara lectured in the Chapel. Vassar Professor of History Robert K. Brigham, historian James G. Blight of Brown University, Vietnamese scholars and former military and civilian officials participated in six extended discussions on the Vietnam War with McNamara between November 1995 and February 1998. Brigham, Blight and McNamara published Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy in 1999. In an interview with The Miscellany News, Jim Bright explained, “All of us feel a sense really as we’re passing into the next century that it won’t be long before the people in your generation come to power and have positions of responsibility, but have no first-hand sense of how close one can really come to a nuclear war, how you can stumble into things, putting one foot after the other to come out with three or four million people dead and countries destroyed.”