Director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding Martin Sherwin spoke to students on Wednesday about his life, his work as a historian and his involvement with the current Enola Gay controversy.
In his speech at the first summer meeting of Voices, a club formed last term to facilitate personal interaction and discussion between students and faculty, Sherwin cautioned students about their life choices.
"It is very important to think about your life in an evolutionary way," he said. "Although you will always have certain traits, characteristics and values, who you become is not a given. It depends on the choices you make."
Sherwin, who will leave the College at the end of August to become a history professor at Tufts University, specializes in the history of the nuclear age.
When he decided to do his dissertation on the building of the atomic bomb that ended World War II, Sherwin said he felt an "evolution of a sense of commitment and activism through his work as a historian."
"Be very careful what you become in terms of your work" Sherwin, who is a member of the Class of 1959, warned students,"because you are likely to become like the people you work with."
Sherwin said that it was not until last year that his work took him beyond the scholarly community, when the curator of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum asked him to be a member of a committee to discuss the controversial exhibit of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In Sherwin's opinion, the exhibit was too celebratory.
"No matter what they did with that plane it would be seen as a celebration of the 140,000 civilians that were killed," he said."To role it out on the 50th anniversary was the wrong message at the wrong time."
Sherwin said he also believes the historical section of the exhibit was inadequate because Congress had allowed only one interpretation of the historical evidence of the bombing.
"There is something wrong in this country when censorship becomes national policy," he said.
As a closing bit of advice Sherwin advised students to "try to get a job where you are swimming against the tide.The world needs people like you to get in there and fight the good fight."
Sherwin also discussed Robert McNamara's book, in which McNamara declares the Vietnam War a mistake.
McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Lyndon Johnson "could have done no more harm in the world than make mediocre cars, but he accepted the appointment and became the architect of the Vietnam War," he said. "And because he is a sensitive and bright man he is living a living hell right now."
Sherwin used McNamara's example to conclude, "The more sensitive you are the more painful life will be if you are not doing the right thing."
He said there are "complicated pressures that force you to behave in ways that in the abstract you don't want to behave."
Founded by Kenji Hosokawa '98, Ken Yasuhara '98 and Grayson Allen '97, Voices is a group whose purpose "is to encourage open-mindedness by providing an opportunity to discover and explore the diversity of personal values that exist among the College's students and faculty," according to a flyer put out by the organization.
Hosokawa, who attended Phillips Exeter Academy last year, said he got the idea for the organization from the weekly "meditations" he attended at his former school.
At the meditations, faculty members spoke to students about important life experiences.
