Robert Murphy Interview

Robert Murphy, interview with Volker Janssen, 25 August 2009. Volker Janssen: We are here to talk with Robert Murphy in Palmdale, California, for the Aerospace Oral History Project organized by the Huntington Library and the Huntington- USC Institute on California and the West. My name is Volker Janssen. Bob, we’ll start talking a little bit about your early years, your childhood. When and where were you born? Robert Murphy: I was born on April 17th, 1930, in Hoosick Falls, New York, which is a small town, an old town founded in the late 1700s near Bennington, Vermont. All my early childhood was during the Depression. However, I don’t remember suffering from any hardships, and we had the freedom of running the town in those days. There is a river that ran through town and two different railroads, but if you were four or five years old, you were on your own. Nobody worried; they figured you were smart enough not to drown yourself or get run over by a train. So I had a very enjoyable childhood. I was sitting with my mother and sister when Pearl Harbor was attacked. I’d always had an inclination towards airplanes for some reason. My father wouldn’t give me five dollars to take a ride in a Jenny in 1936 or ’37, so then my only contacts with airplanes were watching the mail plane fly over from Albany, New York, to Montreal every day. But when the Second World War started, when you’d see the Movietone News of the B-17s and B-25s and so forth, then I really got jazzed up about airplanes. I really wanted to get in. I wanted to be a pilot and so when I graduated—my father had died when I was 14— there were no junior colleges or anything like that in those days, it was just the primary universities that are still around. And of course my mother couldn’t afford it and I certainly didn’t have any money, and I wanted to go into the Air Force anyway, so I talked my mother into signing the papers so I could enlist in the Air Force when I was 17. There wasn’t a draft on or anything. VJ: I understand that you had at that time two brothers-in-law who had seen military service and combat, but they themselves didn’t tell you much about their experiences, correct? RM: They didn’t say anything. I was really surprised. I didn’t want to ask them any questions and they didn’t offer anything. But like I say, when my sisters got married, it was after the war and it wasn’t long after that—I was 15 when the war ended—that I went in the service. They got married probably a year or so after the war, so they had only been married a year or less when I went in the Air Force, and I never went back home. I mean I went home on leave occasionally, but when I got out of the Air Force, I came directly to California. VJ: Did World War II politicize you in any way? RM: Well, let me tell you, the only politics that I ever heard mentioned, my father, I can remember he came home and he was furious. He said, “We just lost control of the country.” This is whatever year, and it was during the war, I can’t remember, where they went to withholding tax out of your paycheck every week, rather than previous to that you had to pay all your taxes in one day. Well, that really hurt. How many people had the money saved to do it? So his theory was, and it’s true, they passed that law, and he said they can keep raising it a dollar at a time, and you won’t even notice, it’s only a dollar a week, you know, or five dollars a week, whatever it happens to be, and he said, “We lost control of our government,” and he was right. Now, Ronald Reagan fought that in California for years for the state income tax, but they finally got it. VJ: Did you get a new perspective on international politics as a result of the war? RM: Oh sure. In the first place, geography and history were always my favorite subjects, and I knew where all the countries were, and I watched where the battle lines were. I still am interested, and last night I was telling my wife what a knucklehead that General Clark was in Italy and he only got the job because of politics. There were plenty of blunders made, I’ll tell you, that cost a lot of guys their lives for no reason. So that interest started in the Second World War. My first book was I Saw the Fall of the Philippines. In fact I wrote my term papers on it every year, the same book, by a Filipino who was a colonel under MacArthur and he escaped with MacArthur. Romalis, I think, was his name, and he wrote that book, and that started my history of the Second World War. VJ: You said that right after high school you joined the Air Force; you had a signature from your mother. Where did that take you? RM: Well, it took me down to San Antonio, Texas, right off the bat. Oh, I’ve got to tell this story. I’m 17; I weighed 129 pounds. I was so skinny, they used to say I could sleep in the shade of a clothesline. I looked about 12. I get down to New York City, I mean, you know, I’m from this little burg, I’ve never been to these places. They had us all in a fleabag hotel and then the next day they got sixty of us in this room and the guy got up in front and he says—oh, we took a test, and after the results of the test were known, the next day he had us back and he says, “Private Murphy, front and center.” So I go up. Now some of these guys were there from New York City, I mean they were sent to join because the judge said it’s either jail or join the military, you know, I mean, some of them were 28, 29 years old. He said, “Here are bus tickets from the bus station around the corner to Newark, New Jersey. And here are the train tickets from Newark to Washington, D.C.,” and he puts them in a big envelope. “And here’s the meal tickets for the train. Here’s the train tickets from Washington, D.C. to St. Louis, Missouri. Here’s the meal tickets.” He said, “Here’s the rail tickets to San Antonio, Texas.” He said, “You will be in charge of these guys. If any of them leave, you will be held responsible and you are to make sure they all get there.” [laughs] What, are you out of your mind? Myself? Well, years later I said, “I must have got the highest score on the test,” or else he was a sadist, because I was the smallest, skinniest guy in the group! VJ: You kept them all together, though? RM: Yeah, well, I got in the bus, but on the train in those days the dining car was very fancy, with a maitre d’ and the whole shot. Some of these guys had the manners of a goat. 2 Anyway, we get in the first meal, these meal tickets were worth like three dollars each. And on the train, for three dollars you didn’t get very much. So these guys are bitching and raising hell and yelling, and these other people are all dressed up in the dining car. And we had a Pullman, we had sleeping berths. Well, anyway, the maitre d’ comes to me says, “You’ve got to get control of these guys. We can’t have that disruption three meals a day.” I got a flash. I said, “Tell you what I’ll do.” I said, “I’ll sign all these meal tickets right now. We’ll eat after you close. We’ll come in at 1 o’clock or 1:30 or whatever, and you give us everything that’s left.” He says, “That’s not a bad idea.” He says, “We always make this and we make that and whatever.” So I did, and that’s how I kept them happy all the way. So we get to San Antonio . VJ: So you really traveled across the country with these marching orders, right? RM: Right. So we get down to Biloxi, now this was run at that time just like the army, just like you are going in the infantry. They picked us up in a bus and took us to this building on the base, stripped us down to our undershorts, sat us—and they were sadists— on these benches, everybody straddling the bench, and gave you all the shots for smallpox and whatever. Anything they could think of, you got, right then. Then they took you in and cut all your hair off. Now this is all on the same day, and I remember it was raining. Then you went down and they issued you your clothes and your mattress and everything, and then this lieutenant, this brand-new second lieutenant, double-timed you to the barracks, and then you had to learn how to make your bed.

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