The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

There was an additional reason why Rostow did not fear confrontation in Vietnam, and that was an almost mystic belief in air power. He was convinced, indeed he knew, that we had an unbeatable weapon, that we could always fall back, even if reluctantly, on our real might, which was the gleaming force and potential of the U.S. Air Force. Perhaps all men tend to be frozen in certain attitudes which have been shaped by important experiences in their formative years; for young Rostow, one of the crucial experiences had been picking bombing targets in Europe. It had been a stirring time, a time when he was of great service to his country. He had believed in strategic bombing, in the vital, all-important role it played in bringing victory during World War II, that it had broken the back of the German war machine. His enthusiasm for bombing and for his own role had allowed him to withstand all the subsequent intelligence of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (not by chance were two of that survey’s chief members, John Kenneth Galbraith and George Ball, among the leading doves on Vietnam), which proved conclusively that the strategic bombing had not worked; on the contrary, it had intensified the will of the German population to resist (as it would in North Vietnam, binding the population to the Hanoi regime). Rostow remained uniquely oblivious to counterarguments about bombing; if anything, he believed that we had not used enough of it against the German oil depots and electric gri...