When Lyndon Johnson took the United States into large-scale war in Vietnam in 1965, he did so despite deep misgivings on the part of numerous close associates, including his vice president and senior Senate Democrats, as well as key allied governments. Johnson himself frequently expressed doubts about the prospects in the struggle, even with the commitment of major US combat troops and heavy air power. Yet he took the plunge, despite the fact that some part of him suspected – correctly – that the war would ultimately be his undoing. Why he did so is harder to explain than is often suggested, but it’s not inexplicable. At each step, escalation represented the path of least political resistance for him. Thus although Johnson may have been a doubting warrior, he was also a determined one, from his first day in office to his last. He stayed the course even as domestic opposition grew in 1967 and 1968, and even as his principal subordinate on the war, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, grew disillusioned. In January 1969, Johnson left Washington, a man broken by a war he didn’t want but felt compelled to wage.

Despite significant reductions in nuclear arsenals after the Cold War, the world’s nuclear nations still are pointing thousands of warheads at each other, using systems that are vulnerable to human error, miscalculation, or cyberwarfare. Over the past decades, humankind has come hair-raisingly close in several well-documented instances to unleashing full-scale nuclear war. The logic of arms races makes it very hard for nations to resist the temptation of modernizing and building up their arsenals. On the other hand, new designs for nuclear reactors – whether for fission or fusion processes – hold out the tantalizing possibility of safe, cheap, and abundant electricity. Nuclear-generated electricity does not release greenhouse gases, and therefore could play a key role in creating a sustainable energy system over the coming century.

This chapter explores the ideological roots of the non-governmental aid. It does so by framing the NGO sector’s attitude to poverty in terms of a worldview that developed in the late nineteenth century – rooted in the concepts of universalism, rational authority, progress and world citizenship. The core narrative element of this chapter focuses on the influence of ‘basic needs’, the highly influential model of rural development adopted by the World Bank in the 1970s, that facilitated the sector’s integration into the international development and emergency relief industries over the following decade. Basic needs was in many ways the perfect catalyst for NGOs. Its focus on ‘absolute poverty’ and on village-level interventions in health, education and economic development – precisely the areas where NGOs operated – transformed the territory of intervention in the Third World. But its influence can only be fully understood by reading the sector’s rapid integration into the development industry in terms of the ideological convergence that underpinned that process. This helps to explain why those organisations and their supporters were simultaneously committed to development and highly critical of the inequalities that underpinned global poverty; their criticisms were born from a genuine belief in those values, and in the need for reform, rather than in the desire for their replacement.

This chapter explores the ideological roots of the non-governmental aid. It does so by framing the NGO sector’s attitude to poverty in terms of a worldview that developed in the late nineteenth century – rooted in the concepts of universalism, rational authority, progress and world citizenship. The core narrative element of this chapter focuses on the influence of ‘basic needs’, the highly influential model of rural development adopted by the World Bank in the 1970s, that facilitated the sector’s integration into the international development and emergency relief industries over the following decade. Basic needs was in many ways the perfect catalyst for NGOs. Its focus on ‘absolute poverty’ and on village-level interventions in health, education and economic development – precisely the areas where NGOs operated – transformed the territory of intervention in the Third World. But its influence can only be fully understood by reading the sector’s rapid integration into the development industry in terms of the ideological convergence that underpinned that process. This helps to explain why those organisations and their supporters were simultaneously committed to development and highly critical of the inequalities that underpinned global poverty; their criticisms were born from a genuine belief in those values, and in the need for reform, rather than in the desire for their replacement.

Chapter 6 assesses the ambassadorship of Henry Cabot Lodge II, chosen by President John F. Kennedy to lead Embassy Saigon at the height of the 1963 "Buddhist crisis." South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem's crackdown on Buddhist demonstrators had alarmed American public opinion, and Lodge decided shortly after taking up his duties that Diem had to go. This view ran counter to that of every senior administration figure - Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, CIA Director John McCone, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy - all of whom believed that Diem, despite his flaws, was preferable to any alternative and ought to be supported. General Paul Harkins, Lodge's military counterpart in Saigon, likewise felt that Washington should stand by Diem. Lodge prevailed over this opposition through a campaign of secrecy, misinformation, and repeated disobedience. He formed ties with rebel generals and promised them U.S. backing if they overthrew Diem, a policy no one in the White House or State Department had approved. He withheld information about coup plots from his superiors. He refused to follow orders from Rusk to meet with Diem and resolve the situation diplomatically. Diem's deposal and murder were in great part Lodge's doing. However distasteful, that outcome gave America a fresh start in Vietnam.

In many respects, as he confessed later in life, McNamara’s mistakes were mistakes of omission not commission. They were mistakes nonetheless. His mistakes raise important counterfactual questions. What if McNamara had inherited another model for civil-military relations? What if the State Department had been stronger? Could a counterinsurgency strategy have worked in South Vietnam? Could different funding arrangements in Washington have produced different outcomes? What if Johnson had been less of a New Dealer? What if McNamara had defined “loyalty” differently? What would President Kennedy have done?

The book provides a reassessment of Robert S. McNamara’s decisions during the Vietnam War. It situates him at the end of a historical process for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), a young agency that was still in flux and trying to define the proper balance between civilian and military advisors. McNamara’s concern for economic issues meant he resisted international commitments, in Vietnam and elsewhere. His idiosyncratic views on loyalty led him to self-censor and adopt public positions that were at odds with his private views. He ultimately became the spokesperson for a war that he had resisted. The book has benefited from a host of new sources, including McNamara’s papers at the Library of Congress, recently declassified Defense Department materials and the private diaries of his assistant for International Security Affairs, John T. McNaughton.