John Rooney/AP Images
Robert Oppenheimer and Walt Rostow

Early in 1966 the historian Fritz Stern traveled to Washington to solicit support for an appeal of academics against the Vietnam War. At the airport, returning home, he ran into a colleague--MIT political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool. Professor Pool did not share Stern's misgivings about the war. "Vietnam," he told Stern enthusiastically, "is the greatest social-science laboratory we have ever had!"

Such was the mind-set among some of the scholars at MIT's Center for International Studies, where Pool's international communications project was bringing behavioral science to bear on the study of international relations. His colleague, the economist Walt Rostow, had left the center for a new career as a presidential policy adviser, which culminated, in April 1966, in a position as Lyndon Johnson's national security adviser. There were like-minded men in other well-funded think tanks across the country. Over the previous two decades, cold war presidents had successfully enlisted academia in the search for usable knowledge about the world they hoped to lead. Ample funding, entrepreneurial professors and policy-makers thirsting for anything that looked like technical expertise provided a combustible mix.

How this happened, and what the effects were--on the world of policy and on ideas--is a complex and still highly pertinent story. Vietnam, as the books considered here show, bankrupted the world-molding optimism of modernization theorists like Rostow and Pool, but it certainly didn't put an end to academic theorizing about global affairs or to the desire of American academics to demonstrate the usefulness of their theories to their political masters. Indonesia--the often neglected counterpart to Vietnam--was the more typical model, as Bradley Simpson shows: a playground for "economists with guns." The politics were often ugly, and the intellectual output was unedifying and deeply compromised.

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