Word: saigon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Like these other writers'. Smithies's descriptions often reflected Saigon's assumptions and interests, and so worked to limit debate in the United States and thus to keep the Saigon government strong. Not all American analysts acknowledged this political effect of their writing, but to many of their critics. It was its most important aspect. For the politics underlying questions of Vietnamese economic development included more even than questions about who shouk, manage development and profit from it. The human, political context AID economists could all but ignore also included the struggle over these questions that was killing people...
...Defense Analyses, called "Economic Development in Vietnam: The Need for External Resources," and based on a "planning assumption" of "military stalemate and withering away of the war, a process that can last for a decade or more." Smithies called for $500 million a year in American aid to the Saigon government "during the next decade," and $700 million more in financing, preferably from an international consortium of countries, "for the indefinite future." And while noting some of the bad effects of the war on South Vietnam's economy--such as an unfavorable balance of trade, governmental corruption, the destruction...
During the height of campus anti-war activity, Smithies recalls, "People used to go around screaming 'CIA Agent!' and things at me." Saigon most summers--Smithies wrote several reports, comparable to other American economists' and political scientists' attempts to improve the Saigon government's chances and provide scientific descriptions of its progress...
Smithies--Ropes Professor of Political Economy and a long-time adviser in the Saigon bureau of the Agency for International Development--gave up his mastership--"certainly Harvard's best job," he says--last spring. ("You can stay on past 66 as a professor but you have to retire as a master," he grouses. "It should be the other way around--the brain deteriorates before the body does.") But the story of the Agassiz Cup celebration still seems characteristic of him--both in content and in style, for a certain kind of sharp, logical humor as well as, perhaps, a certain...
...provided Vietnam with paved highways from end to end, with more airfields than it can possibly use, with spectacular harbors, with an elaborate communications system, with power plants, and with potable water in Saigon," Smithies wrote." ...While it is impossible to make an accurate inventory of the changes in the infrastructure during the war, the impression is inescapable that the plusses greatly outweigh the minuses." It was the kind of report that led Frances Fitzgerald '62 to call AID economics "perhaps the ultimate expression of American hubris...