MELISSA BLOCK, host:
John Wheeler was a defense consultant, a former top official in the Air Force, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who worked hard to get the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall built on the National Mall here in Washington.
On Friday, John Wheeler's body was discovered in a landfill in Delaware. Authorities are investigating the homicide. The writer James Fallows was a long-time friend of John Wheeler, and he joins me now to talk about his life and his work.
Jim, I'm sorry to hear about your loss.
Mr. JAMES FALLOWS (Writer, The Atlantic Monthly): I certainly extend my wishes to John Wheeler's family, but I'm glad to have a chance to talk about his life and achievements.
BLOCK: How did you come to know John Wheeler? This was back in the early 1980s.
Mr. FALLOWS: Yes, in 1981, I published a book called "National Defense," and one of its themes was how, in the long run, in both technological and budgetary and also civic ways, the United States could prepare for its national defense after the real disasters and strains of the Vietnam War.
And John Wheeler read the book and got in touch with me, and one of his great themes through his adult life was the aftereffects of Vietnam and alleviating them for the military and for the whole, you know, civic society, too.
So we started talking about those themes then and really did over the next 30 years.
BLOCK: John Wheeler, as we mentioned, graduated from West Point, class of 1966, went to Harvard Business School and then to Vietnam, served, as I understand it, 12 months but not in combat.
Mr. FALLOWS: Yes. And this distinction may seem minor to those of us who were either not in the military or not in Vietnam, but within the community of soldiers, the fact that John Wheeler, who came from a long line of career and distinguished soldiers and went to West Point, was in the military but not in combat was a point, sometimes, of friction between him and others who had been combat veterans at that time.
BLOCK: What did John Wheeler tell you over the years about the legacy of the Vietnam War, how it affected all the work that he did afterward?
Mr. FALLOWS: The main continuity in my contact with John Wheeler over 30 years was his concern about appropriate respect for people who had served in uniform and their families and those who had suffered loss for the nation's defense.
And again, even though he had not himself been in combat, he had a lot of friends from his West Point class who had died in Vietnam or been injured there, and he made it his cause in the decades after that to empathize with people in the subsequent wars.
And so I think the main issue that I think he would like to be remembered for is finding appropriate civic respect for the people who sacrifice in the name of America's defense and liberty.
BLOCK: I'm curious about John Wheeler as a man. You describe him in a post on your blog, Jim, as a complicated man, very intense and sometimes changeable friendships, passions and causes.
Mr. FALLOWS: Yes. And I've been corresponding in the last day or two with a lot of people who knew him at different stages in his life: at West Point, in Vietnam, at the Harvard Business School, when he was head of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, et cetera. And I think everybody had a sense of on the one hand, he looked like a very sort of buttoned-up and respectable lawyer-type person, and he was, in fact, a graduate of the Yale Law School and once worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission. But he could be very emotional.
And the standard discussion I would have with John Wheeler, either in person or on the phone or over email, was his arguing a point to what I considered about 50 percent beyond a reasonable conclusion and my saying, well, yeah, but what about X and Y and Z? And he'd say okay. And then we'd back it down to what I thought was a more reasonable point of agreement.
But for somebody who was as professionally accomplished, he also was a very passionate, almost heart-on-his-sleeve person. This made him some loyal friends. It also caused him some enemies because he said things that were probably not fully prudent, but it made people think that he threw himself entirely into the whole range of things that he did.
BLOCK: James Fallows, thank you very much.
Mr. FALLOWS: Thank you, Melissa.
BLOCK: James Fallows is national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. He also appears regularly on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED on the weekends. We were talking about defense consultant John Wheeler, whose body was found in a Delaware landfill on Friday.