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Earl Comstock

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Stephensonia

Defense Secretary Earl Comstock, a mad anti-communist, was pushed off a ski lift by Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe

Defense Secretary Robert McNamara

"One journalist criticised McNamara as a " 'human IBM machine' who cares more for computerized statistical logic than for human judgements." His other sarcastic nicknames include "Mac the Knife," "arrogant dictator" or just "an IBM machine with legs."" - wikipedia

It is on this basis that I believe Stephenson portrays Earl Comstock as an IBM executive. However, McNamara served under Army Air Corps General Curtis LeMay, not MacArthur, during WWII, analysing bomber effectiveness. As Defense Secretary he founded the Defense Intelligence Agency. During the Vietnam conflict, he pioneered the micromanaging style of fighting the war from the White House that so disgusts the military establishment today, and was obsessed with quantitative measurements of military effectiveness like body counts and tonnage of bombs dropped. His notorious 'rules of engagement' are reviled by active and retired veterans alike for hamstringing military units to their detriment for the sake of political expediency and PR. McNamara is the sole civilian administration official of the Vietnam era who would have inspired such revulsion in a military veteran so as to be thrown from a ski lift.

As a boy he was the son of a San Francisco wholesale shoe store manager (think Al Bundy). So try to imagine Bud Bundy as the descendant of the Golden Comstock clan... He couldn't afford Stanford. He graduated in 1937 from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in economics and philosophy, and earned a master's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1939. PostWWII he became one of the "Whiz-kids" group of war veterans who turned Ford Motor Company around.

Furthermore, I have found this story in which an individual named Andrew Kopkind, while skiing, once came upon McNamara at the edge of a cliff at Aspen, and stated he was so close "he could have reached out with a ski pole and pushed him over the edge". I believe this is the story which Stephenson converts into Doug Shaftoe pushing Comstock from a ski-lift.

Other Candidates

  • former Nixon Secretary of Defense Elliot L. Richardson, served for four months, spending most of his time testifying before congress and closing a few surplus military installations. He was then made Nixon's Attorney General for a short period before resigning in protest to Nixon's dramatic firing of Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox in what is now known as "The Saturday Night Massacre". Richardson died in 1999. Descended from early New England settlers, Richardson was born in Boston and was related to many of Boston's prominent families. He earned a bachelor's degree cum laude from Harvard University in 1941, served in World War II, and in 1945 became editor and president of the Harvard Law Review. He never was involved with IBM. He later served as Ford's Secretary of Commerce, and held several ambassadorial posts. He is a past Director of the Council on Foreign Relations.
  • former Nixon Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, who also once served as head of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was not old enough to have served during WWII. He worked at the Rand Corporation before joining the CIA, and given the involvement of Rand with the Pentagon Papers, he might be a viable alternative to McNamara to attract the ire of Vietnam vets. He also served on the Atomic Energy Commission. As SecDef, he led the post-Vietnam transition, worked hard at maintaining military morale, and helped launch the modernization programs that were later brought to fruition by Reagan. His only really well known incident of treachery was in stating in confirmation hearings that he would order bombings of North Vietnam after US withdrawal if NV attacked South Vietnam. When North Vietnam resumed the offensive against the south, US support never materialized and the eventual defeat of the South was assured. This sense of dishonor may also be a motivator for Doug Shaftoe. He is a Council on Foreign Relations member.
  • former Nixon Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird. His son John O. Laird was named by Reagan to the National Advisory Council on Women's Educational Programs. While SecDef Laird proposed the "Vietnamization" programs of transitioning defense of S Vietnam from US units to ARVN units, he had little long term impact on the war.

Both of the above officials have testified before the Senate that they believe that the US left many US military pilots in enemy hands, unreported as POWs and unreleased, at the end of the Vietnam War.