ABSTRACT
But while my first persona remained a partisan in this conflict, my second identity witnessed this awful event as an observer, an institutional historian struggling to understand the present, to construct a teleology that would adequately explain why experienced, intelligent people made the series of decisions leading to this crisis: from the idiotic dismissal of KPFA general manager Nicole Sawaya two weeks before KPFA's fiftieth anniversary to a shutdown that provoked the biggest demonstration in Berkeley since the Vietnam War era. Searching for models that would facilitate an understanding of the Pacifica National Office and Board of Governors, I thought of scholars who analyzed the decision-making process that led to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. What were the broader historical factors that made those at the helm of Pacifica see what they were doing as something that made sense?
