Areas of Interest: International security, nuclear weapons and nuclear crises, the psychology and recent history of US foreign policy.
James G. Blight began his academic career as a cognitive psychologist, but later turned his attention to a new method for investigating post-world War II US foreign policy conflicts and crises. The method, critical oral history, makes use of memories of key decisionmakers, scholars, and declassified documents, to generate new data and interpretations of events. Blight and his colleagues have applied this method to the Cuban missile crisis, Bay of Pigs invasion, collapse of US-Soviet detente in the Carter-Brezhnev period, and US war in Vietnam.
Blight and janet M. Lang served as principal substantive advisers to Errol Morris, during the three years his documentary film, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, was in production. The film was released in December 2003, and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2004. They were also co-authors (with Susan Graseck and Andrew Blackadar of the Watson Institute’s Choices Program) of a teacher’s guide for the film, which was underwritten by the film’s distributor, Sony Pictures Classics. And in the spring of 2005, Blight and Lang published The Fog of War: Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield). In addition, Blight and Lang have screened a specially-edited version of the film, which focuses on the Cuban missile crisis and the escalation of the war in Vietnam, at more than three dozen venues throughout North America and in Europe.
Blight is the author of a dozen books on the recent history of US foreign policy, including Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis (with Philip Brenner, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (with David A. Welch, expanded paperback edition, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing and Catastrophe in the 21st Century (with Robert S. McNamara, PublicAffairs, 2001); and Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (with Robert S. McNamara and Robert K. Brigham, PublicAffairs, 1999). Blight has also served as a consultant on several documentary film projects with many domestic and foreign broadcast organizations and individual filmmakers.
Honors
Recent honors include:
• During August and September 2005, Blight, Lang, and David A. Welch, of the University of Toronto, were resident fellows working on the Virtual JFK Project at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Villa Serbelloni Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. Blight and Welch also presented their initial findings to the other resident fellows in Bellagio; and Blight and Lang screened The Fog of War for the fellows and led a discussion of it.
• Blight and Lang were also invited to give the keynote presentation to an international conference of historians of the Cold War, 27-29 in April 2006 at the Villa Medicea “La Ferdinanda,” in Artimino, Italy, hosted by the Machiavelli Center for Cold War Studies, at the University of Florence, Italy. Their presentation was entitled: “When Empathy Failed: Why US-Soviet Détente Collapsed in the Carter-Brezhnev Years.” Blight and Lang presented some of the findings from their “Carter-Brezhnev Project”—in this case, the reasons for the collapse of the nuclear arms control negotiations between the US and Soviet Union. They also challenged the other (roughly 100) participants from around the world to consider the “virtual history” of US-Soviet détente, if the arms control negotiations had succeeded, and if the events in Afghanistan in 1979 had been managed by the Soviets and Americans in a collaborative spirit, rather than as a zero-sum competition then typical of their Cold War rivalry.