Roger Hilsman

Roger Hilsman, Jr. (born November 23, 1919) is an American government official, political scientist, and author. He served as an American soldier in Merrill's Marauders, and then with the Office of Strategic Services as a guerrilla leader, in the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II. He later was as an aide and adviser to President John F. Kennedy and, briefly, to President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the U.S. State Department, serving as Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research during 1961–63 and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs during 1963–64. There Hilsman was a key and controversial figure in the development of U.S. policies in South Vietnam during the early stages of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.^[1] He left government in 1964 to teach at Columbia University, retiring in 1990. He was a Democratic Party nominee for election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972 but lost in the general election. He is the author of many books about American foreign policy and international relations.

Early life, military service, and education

Hilsman was born on November 23, 1919, in Waco, Texas^[2] (living there only briefly),^[3] the son of Roger Hilsman, Sr., a career officer with the United States Army, and Emma Prendergast Hilsman.^[4][5] Hilsman spent part of his childhood in the Philippines, where his father was a company commander and later commandant of cadets at Ateneo de Manila, a Jesuit college.^[3][6] He then returned to the U.S. and attended Sacramento High School in Sacramento, California, where he was a leader in a Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program and graduated in 1937.^[3]<ref name=">"Sacramento High School - Review Yearbook (Sacramento, CA) – Class of 1937". e-yearbook.com. pp. 61, 90. Retrieved January 31, 2014. </ref>

After a year at a West Point preparatory school and another traveling around Europe,^[7] Hilsman attended the United States Military Academy and graduated in 1943^[2] as a second lieutenant. Meanwhile, with the outbreak of U.S. involvement in World War II, his father, a colonel, fought under General Douglas MacArthur during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.^[3] Two weeks into the conflict, newspaper reports described Colonel Hilsman as still holding Davao on the island of Mindanao;^[8] later reports reflected his retreat to Malaybalay after facing overwhelming Japanese forces, followed by another move to the island of Negros^[6] after which he was captured by the Japanese once all the islands were surrendered during 1942.^[3]

After graduation, the younger Hilsman was immediately posted to the South-East Asian theatre of World War II and joined the Merrill's Marauders long-range penetration jungle warfare unit, fighting the Japanese during the Burma Campaign.^[5] There he found morale to be poor due to typhus outbreaks and unhappiness with the generals leading the unit.^[9] He participated in infantry operations during the battle for Myitkyina in May 1944 and suffered multiple stomach wounds from a Japanese machine gun while on a reconnaissance patrol.^[3][5][2] After recovering in army field hospitals, Hilsman joined the Office of Strategic Services.^[3] By now a captain,^[10] he at first served as a liaison officer to the British Army in Burma.^[3] Then he volunteered to be put in command of a guerrilla warfare battalion, organized and supplied by OSS Detachment 101, of some three hundred local partisans, mercenaries, and irregulars of varying ethnicities, operating behind the lines of the Japanese in Burma.^[3][5] There he developed an interest in guerrilla tactics and found them personally preferable to being part of infantry assaults.^[3][9] Hilsman's group made hit-and-run attacks on Japanese forces and kept a Japanese regiment ten times its size occupied far from the front lines,^[3] all the while staging their own battle with ever-present leeches, other insects, and various diseases.^[9]

Soon after the Japanese surrender in 1945, Hilsman was part of an OSS group that staged a parachute mission into Manchuria to liberate American prisoners held in a Japanese POW camp near Mukden.^[5] There found his father, who became one of the first prisoners to be freed.^[5] (Decades later, Hilsman related his wartime experiences in his 1990 memoir American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines.^[9])

Returning from the war, Hilsman served in the OSS as assistant chief of Far East intelligence operations during 1945–46, and then once the Central Intelligence Agency had been created, served in it in the role of special assistant to executive officer during 1946–47^[4] (he belonged to the Central Intelligence Group during the interim period between the two organizations).

Hilsman married the former Eleanor Willis Hoyt in 1946.^[4] They raised four children together.^[4][5] Hilsman attended Yale University, earning a master's degree in 1950 and a Ph.D. in political science in 1951.^[4][3] There he studied under noted professor William T. R. Fox.^[11]

By 1951 Hilsman had risen to the rank of major.^[4] He worked on planning for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization with the Joint American Military Advance Group in London during 1950–52 and the United States European Command in Germany during 1952–53.^[4][5] He resigned from the United States Army in 1953.^[4]

Lecturer and researcher

Hilsman turned to academia, becoming a research associate and lecturer at the Center of International Studies at Princeton University from 1953–56 and a part-time lecturer with the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University from 1957–61.^[4] In 1956 he published the book Strategic Intelligence and National Decisions, which subsequently became well thought of in government circles.^[5] He was a lecturer on international relations at Columbia University during 1958.^[12]

He was the chief of the foreign affairs division of the Congressional Research Service within the Library of Congress during 1956–58 and then deputy director for research for them from 1958–61.^[4][5] There he met Senator John F. Kennedy and other members of Congress who were interested in foreign affairs.^[3]

Kennedy administration

During staffing of the incoming Kennedy administration, Under Secretary of State-nominee Chester Bowles aggressively sought people from the ranks of academia and the press who would be committed to the ideals of the New Frontier.^[10] As part of this, Hilsman was selected to be the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research for the U.S. Department of State,^[10] assuming the position in February 1961. There his duty was to analyze foreign events and trends as part of the department's long-range planning.^[2] Hilsman soon became a key planner within the administration's foreign policy circles.^[5] Like many of the "New Frontiersmen", he had fought with distinction as a junior officer in World War II,^[10] and Hilsman was particularly effective at talking to members of the U.S. Congress because that military background and war record appealed to hard-liners while his academic history and intellectual leanings appealed to those more of that bent.^[3]

Due to his background in guerrilla warfare, during 1961, Hilsman, together with Walt Rostow, pushed for the U.S. armed forces and the State Department to emphasize counterguerrilla training.^[10] Hilsman was involved in the U.S. responses to Soviet actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.^[10]

Hilsman became one of the main architects of U.S. policy in Vietnam during the early 1960s and, in January 1962, he presented the plan "A Strategic Concept for South Vietnam".^[2] It stated that the war was primarily a political struggle, and proposed policies that emphasized that the Vietnamese in rural areas were the key to victory.^[2] It also recommended that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam start using guerrilla tactics.^[2] Out of the report came Kennedy's approval of U.S. participation in the Strategic Hamlet Program, the relocation of rural peasants into villages consolidated and reshaped to create a defensible, networked perimeter, with the goal of removing population from contact and influence with the Viet Cong. Implementation of the program by the South Vietnamese government became problematic, however, and Hilsman himself later stated that their execution of it constituted a "total misunderstanding of what the [Strategic Hamlet] program should try to do."^[13]

Hilsman (far right) at the White House in April 1963 during a presentation of gifts with President Kennedy and Deputy Prime Minister of Malaya Tun Abdul Razak

During 1962, reports from American journalists in South Vietnam about the progress of the conflict of the Viet Cong, and the characteristics of the South Vietnamese government under President Ngo Dinh Diem that differed from the picture the U.S. military was portraying.^[10] President Kennedy became alarmed, and in December 1962, Hilsman, together with Michael Forrestal of the National Security Council staff, were sent by Kennedy on a fact-finding mission to South Vietnam.^[14] The resultant Hilsman–Forrestal Report was delivered to President Kennedy on January 25, 1963.^[14] It described weaknesses in the South Vietnamese government; the corruption of Diem and his brother Ngô Ðình Nhu and their cohorts; and the increasing isolation of, and lack of support for, the Diem regime from the South Vietnamese people.^[14] Overall, however, the report came to some optimistic conclusions:^[14] "Our overall judgment, in sum, is that we are probably winning, but certainly more slowly than we had hoped. At the rate it is now going the war will last longer than we would like, cost more in terms of both lives and money than we anticipated ..."^[15] It thus contributed to the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and to growing doubts in U.S. government circles about the usefulness of the Diem regime.^[14]

In March 1963, the White House announced that Hilsman would become Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, replacing Averell Harriman, who was promoted to an undersecretary position.^[16] Hilsman assumed the new positions in May 1963. That same month, the Buddhist crisis began in South Vietnam, which featured a series of repressive acts by the South Vietnamese government and a campaign of civil resistance led mainly by Buddhist monks. On August 24, 1963, in the wake of government raids against Buddhist pagodas across the country, Hilsman, along with Forrestal and Harriman, drafted and sent Cable 243, an important message from the State Department to Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. It declared that Washington would no longer tolerate Nhu remaining in a position of power and ordered Lodge to pressure Diem to remove his brother, and that if Diem refused, the Americans would explore the possibility for alternative leadership in South Vietnam. The cable had the overall effect of giving tacit U.S. approval for a coup against the Diem regime.^[2]

Indeed, within the administration, Hilsman became the most outspoken proponent of a coup.^[17] On November 1, the 1963 South Vietnamese coup came; although conducted by South Vietnamese generals, they had been encouraged by the U.S., which thus shared responsibility.^[18] U.S. decision-makers did not want the coup to involve assassination of the current leaders,^[18][17] but by the next day, the arrest and assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother had taken place. Reaction to the 1963 South Vietnamese coup

Hilsman was one of academics and intellectuals in the Kennedy administration whom author David Halberstam later grouped together in his book as The Best and the Brightest, for the erroneous foreign policy they crafted and the disastrous consequences of those policies in Vietnam. And Hilsman's role has been variously interpreted. Mark Moyar's 2006 book Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 paints Hilsman as one of the key Americans who short-sightedly and arrogantly pushed out Diem when, Moyar says, the struggle against the Communists was being won.^[19] Guenter Lewy portrays Hilsman as , while scholar Howard Jones views the coup against Diem that Hilsman acted in favor of as "a tragically misguided move."^[17]

Johnson administration

Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, Hilsman stayed in his position under the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson. But by this time, in the words of Halberstam, "He had probably made more enemies than anyone else in the upper levels of government."^[20] Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff disliked Hilsman for his constant questioning of military estimates and forthrightness, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had been angered Hilsman's tendency to go circumvent proper channels and by the friction Hilsman caused with the military, and as vice president, Johnson had not liked Hilsman's brashness or his policies.^[20] Kennedy as Hilsman's protector was gone, and Johnson determined that he wanted Hilsman out.^[20]

At the same time, Hilsman disagreed with Johnson's approach to the Vietnam conflict, viewing the new president as primarily seeking a military solution there rather than a political one.^[21] Not liking anyone to quit outright, the president offered the position of U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines, but Hilsman declined.^[20][22] And while Hilsman would later say that he had initiated the resignation, Secretary of State Rusk later presented a different picture – "I fired him".^[23]

In any case, on February 25, 1964, the White House announced that Hilsman had resigned; the statement was front-page news in The New York Times with Hilsman claiming he had no policy quarrels with the current administration.^[1] To the end of his tenure, Hilsman argued against increased military action against North Vietnam, saying that until the counter-insurgency efforts had demonstrated effect in the South, it would have no effect on the Communists.^[18] His stance lost out within the administration to those who advocated the virtues of air power.^[18] Hilsman's last day in office was March 15, 1964. He was replaced at the Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs by William Bundy.

Professor and political candidate

In his resignation letter, Hilsman had said that he considered university teaching his "basic profession".^[1] Hilsman became a professor of government at Columbia University in 1964.^[12] The course he taught there on foreign policy decision-making became known for the anecdotes he told about the famous figures in the Kennedy administration and for the political theory he introduced in explanation.^[24][25] Indeed, Hilsman became known as one of the expansive "Kennedy network",^[26] and his office at Columbia was adorned with Kennedy-era momentos.^[27]

He also became part of the university's Institute of War and Peace Studies,^[12] where his former professor William T. R. Fox was director.^[11] Hilsman became one of the longest-serving professors in the institute.^[11] He also regularly lectured at the various U.S. war colleges.^[11] Hilsman lived in Morningside Heights, Manhattan,^[28] but he and his family also became longtime residents of the Hamburg Cove area of Lyme, Connecticut, for weekends and summers.^[4][29][9]

Hilsman was also one of the institute's most prolific book authors.^[11] Of particular note was his 1967 work To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy, which combined a theoretical political science approach with a personal memoir.^[21] It was the first book by a U.S. maker of policy to dissent on the course of the Vietnam War.^[22] The New York Times Book Review called it a "highly informative study of the internal and external forces that shaped much of American foreign policy" and said that "Hilsman makes many wise and perceptive comments on the politics of policy-making."^[21] To Move a Nation became a National Book Award finalist.^[30]

Hilsman was an ardent supporter of Robert F. Kennedy and his 1968 presidential campaign, serving as one of the experts advising the younger brother.^[31] He was part of a large "brain trust" of advisers to Kennedy during the crucial Democratic California primary in June 1968;^[32] that eventual campaign victory ended with another assassination.

Hilsman then tried his own hand at electoral politics: In the 1972 Congressional elections, he ran for election to the United States House of Representatives as the Democratic Party nominee for Connecticut's 2nd congressional district.^[29] He secured the Democratic nomination in a race where few Democrats wanted to run or thought the party had much of a chance of winning.^[33] He campaigned on domestic issues as well as those of foreign policy, presenting a five-point plan for increasing employment in eastern Connecticut.^[27] He predicted his chances of winning were directly linked to Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern's performance in the state against Richard Nixon, the incumbent whom Hilsman termed a threat to civil liberties.^[27] McGovern lost in a landslide, and Hilsman lost the congressional general election to the Republican Party incumbent, Robert H. Steele, by a wide margin^[34] (66 to 34 percent).

Hilsman retired from Columbia in 1990 upon reaching the then-mandatory retirement age of 70.^[25] Reflecting upon his life, he said, "I've been doing the same thing in the military, on Capital Hill, and at Columbia. The content is the same. ... Of all my careers, I think university teaching is the most satisfying."^[25] He and his course, "The Politics of Policy Making", were not directly replaced.^[25]

In 1994, President Bill Clinton named Hilsman as a member of the National Security Education Board.^[2] As of 2014, Hilsman was still listed as a professor emeritus at Columbia.^[35]

Books

Hilsman has written at least 11 books about 20th century American foreign policy. They include:

• Strategic Intelligence and National Decisions (1956)
• Military Policy and National Security (1956) [co-author with W. W. Kaufman]
• Alliance Policy in the Cold War (1959) [co-author with Arnold Wolfers]
• NATO and American Security (1965) [co-author with Klaus Knorr]
• Foreign Policy in the Sixties: The Issues and the Instruments (1965) [co-author with Robert Good]
• To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (1967)
• Politics Of Policy Making in Defense and Foreign Affairs: Conceptual Models and Bureaucratic Politics (1971)
• The Crouching Future: International Politics and U.S. Foreign Policy – A Forecast (1975)
• To Govern America (1979)
• Strategic Intelligence and National Decisions (1981)
• The Politics of Governing America (1985)
• American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines (1990)
• George Bush vs. Saddam Hussein: Military Success! Political Failure? (1992)
• The Cuban Missile Crisis: The Struggle Over Policy (1996)
• From Nuclear Military Strategy to a World Without War (1999)

See also

• Krulak Mendenhall mission
• McNamara Taylor mission

References

External links

• Hilsman–Forrestal Report of January 25, 1963
• Interview with Roger Hilsman on the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, 1981
• Roger Hilsman Personal Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
• Roger Hilsman interview part of Frontline Diplomacy: The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, a site at the Library of Congress