Soon thereafter, Marshall attended a weekend peace conference held at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Following the conference, the guests were invited to share their thoughts with one another in groups organized around various professions. Marshall wandered into the room set aside for businesspeople, feeling that here, at least, were people he knew shared a common point of view. "I didn't really know what I was looking for," he says. "I just wanted to get involved in some way. I had really felt safe in exposing my changed views only within my church community. I was afraid of being ridiculed. Seeing those other businesspeople in that room gave me a lot of confidence."
Enough confidence, in fact, to write to his customers. "I took a risk sending out that letter," he says. "Who can tell? Maybe even talking about the danger of nuclear war would be considered unpatriotic in my industry. I didn't want to jeopardize my business, but I felt compelled to speak out on what I regard as the most crucial issue of our time. I was just trying to get something started, a little spontaneous combustion. It's awesome. We go on day after day as if everything's normal. But there's nothing normal about these times."
Sitting in his South Boston warehouse surrounded by hundreds of paint cans, Marshall looks unequal to the enormous threat of a nuclear holocaust. Yet it is precisely in such unlikely champions as Doug Marshall that the future of a new national movement may lie. Until recently, the "little spontaneous combustion" he was looking for simply didn't exist anywhere within the vast and powerful business community on any of the issues considered part of the debate on national security. Other professions spoke up: Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and, more recently, U.S. Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control. But business somehow couldn't find its tongue. Only within the past two years has the one segment of society that many observers regard as the most influential been heard from as an identifiable coalition of interests.
At the moment, this nascent movement is little more than a disparate collection of organizations and individuals who, like Marshall, have decided that someting needs to be done. The organizations include Business Executives for National Security (BENS), a Washington, D.C.-based trade associaion; affiliates like Business Executives for Nuclear Arms Control (BENAC), in Philadelphia; and a few independent groups such as the New Forum in Palo Alto, Calif. (Business Alert, which Marshall joined two years ago, has since merged with BENS.) The individuals involved range from everyday businesspeople like Doug Marshall to full-time entrepreneur-activists like Harold Willens, the former chairman of California's 1982 Bilateral Nuclear Freeze Initiative. All told, the movement probably is made up of no more than 2,000 businesspeople, of which BENS alone accounts for 1,250. But even these numbers, some observers insist, are disproportionately impressive, given business's legendary lack of interest in social issues. "In a society as diverse as ours," says Larry K. Smith, executive director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, "no one segment can do it alone. But the involvement of business in these issues represents an important, essential, and even historic moment."
The conviction that informs this collage of groups and personal initiatives is that many of the techniques used in building a successful business can be applied productively to issues of national security as well. Executives and entrepreneurs, it is said, are practical, action-oriented, and open-minded. They understand the relationship between costs and benefits; they can relate short-term tactics to long-term goals; and they can move quickly from a plan that doesn't work to one that might. "If a guy is hard-headed enough to run a business," says New Forum co-founder Allan M. Brown, also president of Vance M. Brown and Sons Inc., a building contractor in Palo Alto, "he presumably has a rational, pragmatic approach to life, as opposed to being a total visionary or philosopher.I mean, I have to approach everything in a problem-solving way, what's right and wht's wrong. Here it's bricks and mortar, and I have to put one on top of the other every day if the business is going to succeed."
Whether business can direct itself to national-security issues is, of course, an open question. Skeptics claim that the business community will never turn out in force, because it is intractably greedy and self-serving. But sympathizers are unperturbed. It has happened before, they say, and it can happen again.
A large part of the impulse powering the current business movement, in fact, traces its source to a surprisingly simple event in the mid-1960s. As Henry E. Niles, former chairman of Baltimore Life Insurance Co., remembers it, his wife, Mary-Cushing Niles, one day called on Joseph D. Tydings, then a U.S. Democratic senator from Maryland, asking him to urge the President to stop sending troops to Vietnam. During the course of their conversation, Tydings said. "I hear from the clergy, I hear from civic leaders, I hear from all kinds of groups. But where are the businessmen?" When Mary-Cushing got home she said to Henry: "Joe Tydings sent you a message. He wants the businessmen to speak out. What are you going to do about it?"
