Robert William "Blowtorch Bob" Komer (February 23, 1922 - April 9, 2000) was a key figure in the pacification effort to win South Vietnamese "hearts and minds" during the Vietnam War, heading Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support.
Born in Chicago, Illinois but raised in Saint Louis, Komer graduated from Harvard University, served in World War II and joined the Central Intelligence Agency in its infancy in 1947.
Komer served on the staff of the National Security Council, which was led by McGeorge Bundy. After Bundy's departure, Komer briefly succeeded Bundy as interim National Security Advisor, before he was assigned to the Vietnam pacification campaign.
While in Vietnam, Komer was to head up the Phoenix program, a CIA-inspired operation which Komer later testified resulted in 20,587 deaths.[1] Noam Chomsky argues that the Phoenix program's death toll should be estimated at 60,000 dead during the Komer period. Chomsky also considers Komer a legendary "Cold Warrior," of "a particularly vicious stripe."[2]
Komer also had a hand in South Vietnam's Strategic Hamlet Program, a program of forced resettlement of peasants into what some claimed to have amounted to concentration camps.
As the first civilian head of the "new model" pacification in Vietnam, beginning in 1966, Komer believed that "sustained local security" was the first and primary objective. Though he initially reported directly to President Lyndon B. Johnson, he was happy to fit his program under the structure of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), then headed by U.S. Army General William Westmoreland, because he felt the military was less bureaucratic and more action-oriented than civilian agencies, and also it had most of the resources, whether U.S. or Vietnamese.
In a revealing discussion with military historians,[3] Komer said: "Everybody and nobody" was responsible for counter-insurgency against the communist Vietcong guerrillas. He said it "fell between stools which accounted for the prolonged failure to push things on a large scale even though many correctly analyzed the need."
Following his Vietnam service, he served as ambassador to Turkey, in the Rand Corporation, and in the Jimmy Carter administration as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
On December 23, 1967, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.
In 1968, when Komer was named ambassador to Turkey, he was succeeded by William E. Colby, who later became head of the CIA.
Ambassador Komer has left a special mark in Turkish history: on January 6, 1969, at the beginning of his tenure as the US ambassador to Turkey, his car was set on fire in Middle East Technical University[4] by a group of students who then formed the core of the Marxist-Leninist movement in Turkey under the banner of Dev Genç. Komer was visiting the campus at the invitation of university president Kemal Kurdas, who relied on American donors to finance the building of the modern campus.
Speculation goes that the student group included Sinan Cemgil tr:Sinan Cemgil, Hüseyin İnan tr:Hüseyin İnan, Mustafa Taylan Özgür, Yusuf Aslan tr:Yusuf Aslan, Seçkin İnceefe, Halil Çelimli, Tuncay Çelen, Sabit Big, and that the car was torched by Hüseyin İnan, and that the scarf used to set the car on fire belonged to Sinan Cemgil.
This attack on Komer's car, often referred to as the "Komer incident", is an integral part of an era in Turkish social history.
| Legal offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Carl Kaysen |
Deputy National Security Advisor 1965 – 1965 |
Succeeded by Francis M. Bator |
| Government offices | ||
| Preceded by Stanley Rogers Resor |
United States Department of Defense Under Secretary of Defense for Policy 1979–1981 |
Succeeded by Fred Ikle |