Word: rostow
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...times, for all his series of painstakingly individual biographies, Halberstam seems to be in the process of inventing a sort of composite Kennedy man: Walt McNamara Rostow-Bundy. A man with "impeccable credentials" (the phrase occurs again and again) and the small withering smile that confirms them. A man less liberal than he might try to look. A superclerk, the "supreme mover of papers," possessed by "the belief that sheer intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything...
Again as in all proper tragedies, there are choruses to sound the alarum on the McNamara Rostow-Bundys, including old Senate Majority Leader Sam Rayburn ("I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once"). There was also plenty of handwriting on the walls. As early as 1954, General Matthew Ridgway had drawn up a report indicating that if the U.S. wanted to follow France into Indochina the price would be between 500,000 and 1,000,000 men tied down to a prolonged guerrilla...
...advice accepted. But he had no partisan aims and detested competitive, less knowledgeable, contributors to American foreign policy--especially the Congress. Certainly his ambition has been anything but unique among post-war Intellectuals. What surprises is that he felt so completely frustrated. The success of a Kissinger or a Rostow contrasts markedly with Kennan's failure. But to explain the different outcomes in terms of personality begs the question. Kennan's failure was rooted in an institutional bias in favor of a Cold War mentality which could not appreciate the subtleties of Kennan's analysis...
...dangerously concentrated the nation's power in the presidency, with Congress relegated to a kind of restive passivity. The fault lay not only with the three Presidents who prosecuted the war but with the executive elites with whom they surrounded themselves, hubristic warrior-intellectuals like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow and Robert MacNamara. Under Lyndon Johnson, at least, there was an odd blending of machismo styles?the President's "coonskin-on-the-wall" Texas mystique with the cooler but no less assertive air of the intellectuals. This "cando" mentality, it may be, suffused the executive thinking, the very traditional American...
...Ellsberg" (ultimately to go on permanent exhibit in the lobby of Littauer Center when it becomes a daycare facility following the opening of the Kennedy School some time in 1993), in conjunction with the world premier of the film version of the Pentagon Papers, starring George Jessel as Walt Rostow and John Wayne as Volume...