A growing number of businesspeople are looking beyond the survival of their own companies -- and becoming outspoken participants in the nuclear arms debate.
Douglas Marshall is the third generation of his family to own and operate the H. Newton Marshall Co., a union painting contractor specializing in commercial and industrial work. It is a small company, with roughly $1.4 million in annual revenues and an average of 25 employees, but it is an important source of his considerable pride. His grandfather started it in 1900; Marshall grew up in the business at his father's side, and finally bought it from him in 1970. He would never do anything that might damage the company's heritage and reputation.
Nevertheless, in April 1983, Marshall wrote a letter to about 100 of his customers, primarily builders and general contractors, which began: "I'm taking a business gamble contacting you about a difficult topic, the nuclear arms race, because I believe its momentum poses an overriding concern." In the paragraphs that followed, he described his personal conviction that the placement of Pershing missiles in Europe would further increase the risk of nuclear war. He then said that he had joined Business Alert to Nuclear War, a group of businesspeople with similar concerns," . . . because I find that for me the best way to deal with the deep fears generated by this prospect is to try to do something about it." He closed the letter by asking him customers to consider joining the group -- which, he said, "has a tremendous potential for influencing public policy, because as businessmen we are perceived as being conservative. Perhaps wishing to arrest the momentum of the arms race and avoid holocaust is the ultimate conservatism."
Doug Marshall is not a man who makes such statements lightly, nor is he some kind of radical zealot who spends his time buttonholing passersby on the street. Most days, in fact, he has all he can do making his rounds of the Boston area bidding for jobs. Still, if he sees an interest or senses an opening, he will talk about peace and about how his attitudes have changed. "For a long time," he says, "I felt that the containment policies backed by nuclear threat had been successful, and I had been content to assume that these policies would work for the next 30 years. But now I think the whole issue has to be rethought. I believe in deterrence, but now we have so much deterrence that the danger of nuclear war -- particularly by accident -- is increasing, not decreasing."
Marshall came to these convictions by a route that can best be described as circuitous. Twenty-nine years ago, he was an anti-submarine-warfare officer aboard the destroyer U.S.S. Leonard F. Mason, having graduated from Harvard University as an ensign in the Navy's Reserve Officer Training Corps program. For most of Marshall's two years in peacetime service, the Mason floated tranquilly in the Pacific Ocean, and he peered at the equally placid surface of his sonar screen. But once, in November 1956, there was an ominous stirring in the green, glowing depths below. As Marshall remembers it, the Mason was part of a large fleet dispatched to guard Hong Kong against the possibility that the Chinese Communists might grab for it while international attention was focused on the Suez crisis. The Mason was three days out of Los Angeles when, at three o'clock in the morning, one of the petty officers under Marshall's command reported the presence of an unidentified submarine apparently trying to penerate the destroyer screen. Marshall was ordered to arm the ship's depth charges. For about half an hour, the mystery blip drifted along the edges of the sonar screen. Then it disappeared completely.
Following his tour aboard the Mason, Marshall went to work in the family business, where he served as a project manager and estimator. Then came the Berlin Wall crisis in 1961, and Marshall was recalled to active duty and assigned to the destroyer U.S.S. Miller, which was to patrol the Straits of Denmark between Iceland and Greenland. There the Miller would wait for the anticipated deployment of Soviet submarines from Northern Russia into their battle positions in the Atlantic. "That, to me, was the most crucial part of my life because I felt it was not farfetched to visualize myself as pulling the trigger on World War III," says Marshall. Indeed, he considered the threat so real that he built a small bomb shelter in the basement of his home in Norwell, Mass. But the Berlin Wall incident unraveled into history and the Russian submarines never appeared.
Marshall laughs, but not for long, when it is pointed out to him that twice he has showed up for a war and nobody else came. "It goes to show you how far we've come," he says, "because today that joke's true. The weapons we've got now are so sophisticated that really nobody has to show up. It could start with a bad computer chip. How does it make you feel, trusting your security to the same computers that handle your credit cards?"
During the 1960s, Marshall was a hawk on the Vietnam War -- a position that put him at odds with his wife, Jean. "The whole thing is very painful for me," he says. "I was so sure that I was right. My whole training told me that I must be right. But it turned out that actually she was right. I used to think I was an expert, 25 years in the Naval Reserve, a lieutenant commander trained in geopolitics. I don't think that way any more; there's another kind of wisdom." As their three children grew older, Jean herself became more and more involved in the peace movement through her local church. Today she is the part-time coordinator of peace-related activities for the United Church of Christ in southeastern Massachusetts. "She's kept me locked into the issues," Marshall says. "I listened to her describe her own work and I kept wondering what I could do."
In the spring of 1981, Marshall and his wife attended a church-sponsored lecture that changed his life. The speaker, a former senior missle adviser to the Air Force, emphasized that the proliferation of nuclear weapons had not increased national security but had, in fact, decreased it. "When he said that," Marshall recalls, "somehow everything congealed for me, and my perspective changed. Until that moment, I thought having more planes, more bombs, more everything was the way to increase security. After the meeting, I sensed I had heard something profound for me, but I couldn't articulate it."
