In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Rostow's War:Vietnam, 1961-1969
  • John M. Carland (bio)
America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War. By David Milne. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008. ISBN 978-0-374-10386. Notes. Index. Bibliography. Pp. xi, 268. $26.00.

The narrative arc of this morality tale—for that is what David Milne has written—begins in hope and ends in tragedy. More prosaically, it is the author's take on Walt Whitman Rostow's role in the formation and implementation of Vietnam War policy, especially concerning the air war against North Vietnam.

In his Introduction the author lays out the details of his argument. His fundamental assumption, from which all else flows, is that despite the good intentions of the United States, the Vietnam War was an avoidable disaster essentially brought about by American actions, and that Walt Rostow, as assistant to the president for national security affairs, played a critical role in causing and shaping that disaster. Also in the Introduction Milne explains his attention-grabbing title. Calling Rostow "Rasputin" (a nickname coined by Averell Harriman, who despised Rostow) is "emotive," he admits, because the characterization "leads one to visualize a conniving sinister character in possession of preternatural powers of persuasion." Milne [End Page 615] believes the description fits Rostow because "when it came to the Vietnam War, Rostow was not averse to deploying questionable tactics to achieve his aims" (p. 8). (Page numbers without an accompanying citation represent pages in Milne's book.) But was that Rostow? Having been so certain at first, Milne retreats briefly, but only briefly, into uncertainty, observing that even Rostow's adversaries believed him to be a "human being" and "a considerate, gregarious individual" and perhaps not quite so bad. (I wonder if Milne knows that in American popular culture, the name Rasputin also conjures up a character difficult, almost impossible, to kill—remember the alleged attempts by assassins to poison, knife, and shoot, not to mention drown, the Russian priest.) I suspect that we could have done without this particular title—though perhaps the publisher liked it.

Chapters 1 and 2 tell Rostow's story from his birth in 1916 until Kennedy appointed him deputy national security advisor in January 1961. Without exaggeration it is an amazing story of intellectual achievement and career success. A few highpoints make this clear: B.A., Yale, 1936; Rhodes Scholar, 1936-38; Ph.D. in economics, Yale, 1940; instructor at Columbia, 1940-41; U.S. Army, 1941-45 (detailed to the Office of Strategic Services to develop targets for allied bombing); State Department as Assistant Chief, German-Austrian Economic Division, 1945-46; accepted and rejected a full professorship at Harvard, 1946; instructor at Oxford, 1946-47; member of the Economic Commission for Europe, 1947-49; instructor at Cambridge, 1949-50; and professor of economic history, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1950-61. Despite this record, Milne sees Rostow's success in negative terms: "Having never confronted failure, his capacity for self-criticism was significantly impaired" (p. 340). Chapters 3 through 8 form the heart of the book—they narrate and analyze Rostow's years as a senior policy advisor on Vietnam (1961-1969), especially when he was national security advisor from April 1966 until the end of Lyndon Johnson's presidency. An Epilogue takes Rostow's life from that time until his death in 2003.

Although Milne discusses many aspects of Rostow's work on Vietnam in these chapters, the coverage of key issues—e.g., the incremental nature of the American intervention, the ground war, the air war in the south, pacification, negotiations—with one exception tends to receive short shrift. The exception is the air war against the North and Rostow's role in that policy. These chapters become an extended critique of Rostow, the "Rostow Thesis," and its implementation through the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign.

Milne uses his own definition of the thesis rather than Rostow's and so creates a straw man easier to demolish than the real thing: "The so-called Rostow Thesis," he writes "held that the United States must deal with externally supported insurgencies through bombing their source…" (p. 134). While Milne's words are true as far...

pdf

Share