by Jonathan Stevenson
As Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, wrote in his book “Dereliction of Duty,” the early stages of the Vietnam War caught America’s military leaders flat-footed. Having gone through World War II and Korea, they were all ready for a conventional war. But insurgencies and unconventional warfare were something else. As a result, they were inordinately acquiescent to the wishful thinking of their civilian overseers — and no one thought more wishfully about the war than Walt Whitman Rostow.
A Yale Ph.D. and a Rhodes scholar, Rostow left his academic perch at M.I.T. to join the State Department under John F. Kennedy; he was later Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser during the center-cut of American involvement in Vietnam, from April 1966 to January 1969. More than anyone else, he epitomized the overweening confidence of the civilian strategists of the era — he was the best and the brightest of “the best and the brightest.” He could lay distant claim to operational warfighting competence, having selected bombing targets as a major in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. But like many other prominent civilian strategists of the day, he was by training and disposition an economist and a technocrat.
In his 1960 book “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,” Rostow posited that robust growth was a nation’s best insurance against the political emergence of Communism, and cast growth as a multistage process that depended crucially on a “takeoff” period propelled by rapid expansion in key segments of an economy. Though criticized as tendentiously Western-centric, the book attracted Kennedy’s attention. In a matter of months, Rostow moved from holding forth in the academy to planning America’s strategy in Vietnam, tightly guided by his ideas about economic development.
No comments:
Post a Comment