Talk:SS President Hoover

Robert McNamara was on deck in 1937 when ship was bombed
From Fog of War, Errol Morris's documentary on Robert McNamara, in the additional features, Robert McNamara talking:

Shanghai

1937

It was hard as hell for a student to get a summer job. So my father, through some contacts he had, got me a job as a sailor on the Dollar Line ship The President Hoover. And I was in Shanghai at the time the Japanese bombed it. As a matter of fact our ship was bombed. Obviously we thought it was bombed by the Japanese. It turned out later we'd been mistaken by the Chinese for a Japanese ship. Stupidly I was on deck watching the planes bomb us! Totally unprotected! It was absurd judgment. That was toward the beginning of the Chinese-Japanese war. And I didn't know what had gone before that brought the Japanese to that point, and I didn't realize the degree to which that was a step toward Pearl Harbor. I had no understanding of the geopolitics of that area. These events were all a part of a sequence of actions. It's a sequence! And I didn't understand it.

108.193.226.67 (talk) 21:57, 6 March 2014 (UTC)