Original, insightful study of the intellectual eminence grise behind two presidents and their disastrous policies in Vietnam.
Although Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara are usually blamed for the military escalation in Vietnam, this convincing, well-documented study by Milne (American Foreign Policy/Univ. of Nottingham) emphasizes Walt Rostow’s key role in creating the self-justifying rationale that mired America in war for a decade. Having emerged from academia—first Yale, then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then MIT as a professor of economic history—Rostow formed his ideological posture while watching the rise of McCarthyism and the Korean War. His magnum opus was a full-throttle repudiation of Marx called The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, in which he extolled the benefits of liberal capitalism predicated on mass consumption and opined that underdeveloped nations needed substantial American assistance to arrive at capitalist rewards. As Milne cogently points out, this sounded positive in theory but did not hold up in practice, a fact Rostow refused to recognize. He caught John Kennedy’s ear with such rousing assertions as, “This country is ready to start moving again” and catchphrases like “New Frontier,” both of which became standards in the candidate’s stump speeches; President Kennedy appointed the rising anticommunist zealot his deputy special assistant for national security affairs. Rostow was able to convince Kennedy (and later LBJ) that capitalism would surely eclipse communism in the battle for economic supremacy. He was isolated by Kennedy’s minions when he advocated attacking North Vietnam and invading Laos, but the more hawkish President Johnson elevated him to national security adviser. Milne demonstrates skillfully that LBJ’s bombing policy came largely from Rostow, while his relentless positive spin kept the besieged president from knowing the full extent of the catastrophe until public opinion had turned against him.
An astute look at the debacle of the Vietnam War through the life and work of the unrepentant prophet of America’s victory over communism.Pub Date: March 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-10386-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
