Word: hilsman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MOVE A NATION, by Roger Hilsman. Candid memoir, controversial history and complex political theory are unevenly combined in this Kennedy policy reprise, by a provocative and polemical member of the State Department under J.F.K...
...banality: "In a political process, finally, the relative power of the different groups involved is as relevant to the final decision as the appeal of the goals they seek or the cogency and wisdom of their arguments." In history and memoir, which fortunately occupy the bulk of the book, Hilsman is pungent and direct in his appraisal of men and events. Defense Secretary McNamara is described as "almost totally lacking in self-doubt," former CIA Director John McCone as a man with "a rough and ready sense of decency" that redeems his "streak of the alley fighter...
...Trollope Ploy. As "case studies," the author retells seven of Kennedy's major foreign policy crises, from the Cuban missile confrontation to Viet Nam. There are no monumental disclosures, but a great many small touches based on firsthand observation. Hilsman describes how Bobby Kennedy devised the "Trollope ploy" in the touchiest moments of the missile crisis. It was named after "the recurrent scene in Anthony Trollope's novels in which the girl interprets a squeeze of her hand as a proposal of marriage." When Moscow seemed to be stalling about pulling the missiles out of Cuba, the White...
...long analysis of Viet Nam policy, Hilsman asserts that soon after Johnson became President, he foresaw L.BJ. escalating the war in a way he could not support. His dissent turns on whether guerrilla warfare should be treated "as fundamentally a political problem or fundamentally a war." To Hilsman, it is a political problem, which the U.S. buildup and the bombing of North and South have exacerbated rather than helped to solve. Though he admits that no one can be sure, he argues that Kennedy shared this view and would not have raised the military stakes as high as they...
...have been forced by events into much the same decisions as Johnson. As to whether guerrilla war is "fundamentally" a political or military problem, the only answer is that it is both. The U.S. has never done so well on the political side as, ideally, it should have. But Hilsman seems to overestimate just how much could have been accomplished in the circumstances by political means alone, against a determined opponent who from the start used both military and political weapons in complete conjunction...