James G. Blight is a professor of international relations at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. He is the author, most recently, of Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle With the Superpowers After the Missile Crisis (2002, with Philip Brenner); and the expanded, post-9/11 edition of Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing and Catastrophe in the 21st Century (2003, with Robert S. McNamara). Together with janet M. Lang, he is the originator of the method of critical oral history, whereby former decision-makers, scholars and declassified documents are brought to bear on one another simultaneously in conference settings. The results from his application of critical oral history to the Cuban missile crisis are presented in his Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis and the Soviet Collapse (2nd expanded edition, 2002, written with Bruce J. Allyn and David A. Welch); the findings from the application of the method to the escalation of the Vietnam war are in Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy(1999, written with Robert S. McNamara and Robert K. Brigham). Three of his books provided the intellectual basis for the Academy Award-winning documentary film by Errol Morris, "The Fog of War". The books are: Wilsons Ghost; Cuba on the Brink; and Argument Without End. He has also been a consultant on more than a dozen documentary films on the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam war, including, "The Other Side of Armageddon" (2002), a production of the BBC that revealed the Cuban role in the crisis; and Fidel Castro, a two-part documentary on the life of the Cuban leader, which aired in January 2005 as part of the PBS series, The American Experience. He is currently writing a book (with janet Lang and David Welch) on Kennedy, Johson and Vietnam.
janet M. Lang is an adjunct associate professor of international relations at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, where she is co-director (with James G. Blight) of the Critical Oral History Project. She has been the project director for nearly two dozen international conferences: on the Cuban missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vietnam war, and the collapse of U.S.-Soviet detente during the Carter administration. She is the author or co-author of many studies of the history and implications of the Cuban missile crisis, and the author, most recently, of A Quiet Revolution (2003), a history of her project's research on the missile crisis. For the past three years, she has been co-principal substantive adviser (with James G. Blight) for the Errol Morris documentary film, "The Fog of War", a Sony Pictures Classics release (December, 2003). On 29 February 2004, "The Fog of War" won the Academy Award for best documentary feature film. She is the co-author of The Official Teachers Guide to the Fog of War (with Susan Graseck and James G. Blight). With co-author James G. Blight, she has just published "The Fog of War", a book to accompany the DVD of the film, in late 2004. She is also at work on a project, and book, called Kennedy, Johnson and Vietnam: The Impact of the Presidential Transition on the Course of the War, and its Implications for U.S. Foreign and Defense Policy. The initial findings from this project (being carried out with James G. Blight and David A. Welch of the University of Toronto) were presented at the Watson Institute in April 2005, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the symbolic end of the American war in Vietnam.