Road to Disaster by Brian Vandemark

Author:Brian Vandemark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

Rostow had no hesitation about emphasizing his own opinions in the paperwork he submitted to the president. He had been secretly promoting himself for months through starry-eyed back-channel memos to the president that bypassed both his boss at State, Secretary Rusk, and Bundy at the NSC. Rostow was an idea man, who, Johnson said, “is trying to suggest things all the time.”91 (Indeed, Rostow loved ideas, particularly his own.) Rostow would bring considerable intelligence and analytical skills to the demanding job of national security advisor, together with an open and friendly approach to his colleagues. He would also, Johnson pointed out to Rusk, “be loyal and he seems to have been very friendly with you and me.” Yet he had a weakness. “Walt was an enthusiast,” recalled Bator, who had his office next door to Rostow’s at MIT’s Center for International Studies in the 1950s. “He was very good at formulating a coherent option, but he was not very good at saying that’s one possible option but there are others. He wasn’t a powerful self-critic. He would create a rich and persuasive story, but he wouldn’t reach outside of it.”92 (President Kennedy once remarked that Rostow might have ten ideas, nine of which could lead to disaster, but one of which would be brilliant.) It was via these limits that Rostow was a natural optimist and gifted advocate, serenely confident in his own opinions and judgment, whose unflagging support for the war appealed to a president feeling increasingly besieged and criticized. He would not “turn tail,” per Johnson’s Texas expression, as the war became tough sledding.

A smart and pleasant man with an owlish face and clear plastic horn-rimmed glasses who always wore a button-down oxford-cloth dress shirt, a herringbone tweed jacket, and a faintly patronizing smile, Rostow, like Bundy before him, looked the Ivy League part. An economist, he viewed Vietnam as a testing ground for his favorite theory of national development, determined to prove that capitalism worked for former colonial peoples like the Vietnamese. Another favorite theory of Rostow’s concerned bombing. During World War II, he had selected targets for U.S. bombing missions against Nazi-occupied Europe. This experience made him a true believer not only in the notion that a country could be pounded into submission as a result of a detonated economy and collapsed morale but in the efficacy of transporting the lessons he had learned to Vietnam. As a result, Rostow continually pushed for heavier bombing, convinced this would be the key that would win the war. In August 1965, he told an associate “that the Vietcong are already coming apart under the bombing. They’re going to collapse within weeks. Not months, weeks.”93 These ideological convictions were matched by a fierce anti-Communism that made Rostow both a firm believer in the American effort in Vietnam and someone who always looked for evidence that supported his conjecture. He was, said Bundy, “a persistent believer that the real world must have the shape of his own.”94 In turn, he had “a great capacity not to see what he did not choose to see,” noted a colleague.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.