The Strategist

...But in this case the observation seems motivated less by scholarship than by the desire to discredit the Iraq war and its supporters...

...Milne’s analysis is arguable, but he never takes the trouble to justify his major objections to what became known as the Rostow Thesis...

...Milne admits as much when he observes that “today’s neoconservatives have taken up Rostow’s internationalist, crusading mantle and have run with it to potent effect...

...And given Milne’s leitmotif that ideology motivated Rostow, one would expect an explanation for why the American generals in Vietnam—presumably less invested in academic theories and more cognizant of the actual military situation—largely supported Rostow’s calls for escalation...

...This may well be a tenable argument...

...It primarily recounts the internal debates between hawks like Rostow and the Joint Chiefs and skeptics like the CIA and, eventually, McNamara...

...Despite his antipathy for Rostow’s internationalism, Milne does not embrace realism—and certainly not Kennan’s version, which was based on a kind of Anglo-American chauvinism...

...The basic argument of America’s Rasputin is that Rostow’s well-intentioned and sincere zeal for crushing the Communists was a dangerous ideological project that confl icted with reality...

...We’re familiar with the debate between those who idealistically defend human rights around the globe and those who prefer to stay anchored in American national interest...

...The reader fi nds in America’s Rasputin the language of armchair commentary, not historical scholarship: to recall my history teacher, too little knowledge, in terms of research and analysis, and too many opinions...

...BY DANIEL SULLIVAN A history teacher of mine once quipped that he was annoyed to have to teach post-World War II history because “we know so little and have opinions on so much...

...If Milne wants to disprove its premises, he ought to provide more history of the military situaDaniel Sullivan is a writer in Chicago...

...And the account soon sounds like a broken record...

...The unsubtle title, derived from a remark by Averell Harriman, sounds like the author sharpening his hatchet...

...Thus Rostow’s consistent position—that bombing the North’s industry would scare it out of the war and deprive the Viet Cong of its main source of support—rested on false premises...

...Such may be the fate of most attempts to write the history of times too close for historical distance...

...he could not see that patriotic belief drove both Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, and that American bombing only stiffened their resolve...

...In particular, he urged Kennedy and Johnson to bomb North Vietnam’s industrial complex and use ground troops to cut off the North’s support for the Viet Cong in the South...

...In politics he became a consistent advocate of escalating American involvement in Vietnam...

...Though perhaps less well remembered than Robert McNamara or Dean Rusk, Walt Whitman Rostow was an important voice on foreign policy in the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson...

...In almost every chapter Milne reiterates his core objections to Rostow: He failed to appreciate that the Viet Cong were as much a South Vietnamese nationalist movement as a Northern fi fth column...

...In this respect, at least, he does not disappoint...

...foreign policy—never grasps the tensions in the uncomfortable third position he takes, abhorring in practice the universalist politics he applauds in theory...

...Indeed, the politics of the Bush years indelibly mark this account...

...From that perspective, America’s Rasputin is interesting for what it shows about a particular position—one which emerged during the Vietnam war and has come into its own during the Iraq war...

...A child of Russian immigrants, Rostow made his academic name as a liberal internationalist and theorist of Third World development, for which purpose he supported generous foreign aid...

...but one senses in Milne’s uncritical hostility towards Rostow’s war plan an ideology of its own...

...For David Milne, Rostow’s positions were those of a consummate ideologue, born of anti-Communist zeal and tireless optimism in the face of consistently bad news...

...It fi nally becomes apparent that the shadowy target for whom Walt Rostow stands in is Paul Wolfowitz, and by extension, the neoconservative argument for the Iraq war...

...But all we get is the echo chamber of rarifi ed foreign policy debates, to which America’s Rasputin adds one more self-authenticating voice...

...Milne too often takes the times and their fi gures not on their own terms but on the terms of present-day debates and personalities...

...Rostow found this ethically unproblematic because he himself believed the stories he spun...

...More than that, Milne accuses Rostow of suppressing CIA reports that questioned the effi cacy of the bombing campaign and highlighting the good news to convince LBJ to keep fi ghting...

...According to Milne, Rostow’s escalation strategies produce little progress on the ground but he continues to advocate more of the same...

...It appears in numerous occasions of unscholarly hyperbole—Milne describes Rostow’s civil and restrained memos as “pour[ing]” hostility on Robert McNamara—and in Milne’s curious dismissal of the Eisenhower administration as “atavistic...

...This account of Walt Rostow and the escalation of the Vietnam war involuntarily proves the point...

...Yet in criticizing Rostow and Kennan, Milne—and, perhaps, some other left-wing critics of U.S...

...The narrative refl ects this...

...tion...

...He staked out this ground well before anyone else, and persisted in it well after most of the “wise men” advised Johnson to leave the fi eld...

...Milne admires John F. Kennedy’s fi rst inaugural speech, which George W. Bush’s second inaugural plainly evokes...

...There may be something to the parallel between Rostow and Wolfowitz, or between mid-century liberal Wilsonians and today’s neoconservative ones...

...Milne recognizes that Rostow represents a full-throated, assertive Wilsonian internationalism, and in one of his more insightful passages, juxtaposes it with the realism of George Kennan, with whom Rostow corresponded about Vietnam...