DZ
DefZone.Net

Kien thuc cong nghe & giai tri

Wiki Article

Rufus Phillips

Nguồn dữ liệu từ Wikipedia, hiển thị bởi DefZone.Net

Xem trên WikipediaBài ngẫu nhiên khác

Rufus Colfax Phillips III
Phillips in Qui Nhon, Binh Dinh Province, 1955
Born(1929-08-10)August 10, 1929
Middletown, Ohio, U.S.
DiedDecember 29, 2021(2021-12-29) (aged 92)
Arlington, Virginia, U.S.
Alma mater
OccupationsIntelligence officer, USAID official, author

Rufus Colfax Phillips III (August 10, 1929 – December 29, 2021[1]) was an American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) official who served in South Vietnam during the 1950s and early 1960s. Described by historian Max Boot as a protégé of Edward Lansdale,[2] Phillips directed civic action and counterinsurgency programs in rural South Vietnam. His testimony at a September 1963 White House meeting, in which he contradicted optimistic military assessments, placed him at odds with senior military and intelligence officials and made him a prominent critic of large-scale U.S. military escalation.[3]

After leaving government service, Phillips served on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, ran for Congress, and wrote three books on counterinsurgency and state-building. These include the memoir Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned (Naval Institute Press, 2008) and the posthumously published Stabilizing Fragile States (University Press of Kansas, 2022). He monitored the 2009 Afghan elections and appeared in Ken Burns' 2017 documentary series The Vietnam War. Phillips died in Arlington, Virginia, from complications of pneumonia.[1]

Early life and education

[edit]

Phillips was born in Middletown, Ohio, and raised in rural Charlotte County, Virginia.[4] He attended Woodberry Forest School and graduated from Yale College in 1951.[5]

CIA and Army service (1952–1959)

[edit]
Phillips crossing a bridge built by the Vietnamese army near Long My, November 1954

Phillips joined the CIA in 1952.[6][7] In 1953, he received a commission in the United States Army, completed Airborne School, and served briefly in South Korea.[8]

In 1954, he was assigned to South Vietnam as a military adviser under Colonel Edward Lansdale, working on civic action programs in rural areas.[9][2] Both served in the joint American–French Training Relations and Instruction Mission (TRIM).[9]

Conflict with French military authorities

[edit]

In 1955, a bombing campaign targeted American vehicles and a United States Information Agency library in Saigon. Phillips' housemate, CIA officer Lucien Conein, discovered that the French chief of staff of TRIM had orchestrated the attacks. According to Phillips' memoir, he came home to find Conein slicing blocks of C-3 plastic explosive and attaching detonating cords; Conein then drove around Saigon at night and threw the devices into the yards of leading French officials. That same night, Vietnamese police arrested French officers in a jeep carrying explosives and a list of American targets. The bombings stopped.[10]

At a French social gathering where anti-American sentiments were voiced, Phillips replied: "We don't pretend to know everything there is to know about Vietnam or that we are always right, but we do listen to the Vietnamese."[11]

Assessment of early counterinsurgency efforts

[edit]

In later writings Phillips credited civic action programs with weakening Viet Minh influence across much of rural South Vietnam by 1956.[12] He attributed subsequent setbacks to a shift toward conventional force structure, centralized administration, and American-style policing models he considered poorly suited to guerrilla warfare.[12]

The U.S. also failed, in Phillips' view, by tolerating the rise of authoritarianism under President Ngô Đình Diệm's brother Ngô Đình Nhu, whose policies alienated many anti-communist Vietnamese.[12]

Laos and CIA headquarters

[edit]

Phillips left active Army service in 1956 and was reassigned to Laos in April 1957.[13] After departing the CIA in 1959, he wrote that he preferred field-level development work to headquarters culture, where he observed what he characterized as institutional arrogance toward the Vietnamese.[14]

Business career (1959–1962)

[edit]

Between late 1959 and mid-1962, Phillips worked with his father's company, Airways Engineering, which specialized in airport design.[15]

Return to Vietnam (1962–1963)

[edit]
Phillips (center) inspecting strategic hamlet defenses with the Quang Ngai Province chief, June 1962

Phillips participated in the April 1962 RAND Corporation Counterinsurgency Symposium alongside Wendell Fertig, David Galula, Frank Kitson, Edward Lansdale, and Samuel V. Wilson.[16][17]

By mid-1962 Phillips was back in Vietnam as head of the USAID Office of Rural Affairs, with Albert Fraleigh as deputy.[18][19] USIA officer Frank Scotton and USAID officer Douglas Ramsey served alongside him. Richard Holbrooke, then a junior Foreign Service officer, joined the office in 1963.[2]

Phillips and C. R. Bohannan, drawing on their experience with the Philippine Economic Development Corps resettlement program, helped develop the Chieu Hoi program to encourage Viet Cong defections.[20] Formally inaugurated in April 1963, the program produced over 194,000 defections by 1971; a RAND study subsequently described it as one of the most cost-effective programs in the pacification effort.[20]

Phillips presents a carbine to a hamlet militiaman in Phu Yen Province, June 1962

Krulak–Mendenhall mission

[edit]
Main article: Krulak-Mendenhall mission

In September 1963, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara dispatched Major General Victor H. Krulak, USMC, and State Department official Joseph A. Mendenhall on a four-day fact-finding mission to Vietnam. Their divergent reports led President John F. Kennedy to ask: "You two did visit the same country, didn't you?"[21]

Phillips, who had returned to Washington due to his father's terminal illness, was invited to attend the White House debrief.[2][22][a] He testified that 60 hamlets in the Mekong Delta had recently been overrun by Viet Cong forces. According to Phillips, McNamara and Krulak challenged his account; McNamara later claimed Phillips had reported that 60 percent of hamlets—rather than 60 individual hamlets—had been overrun.[24]

Now, coming before the President, he was admitting the failures of his own program, in itself a remarkable moment in the American bureaucracy, a moment of intellectual honesty.

— David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972)[25]

Of the officials present, Phillips wrote, only Kennedy seemed genuinely interested in conditions on the ground; the others struck him as defending institutional positions.[24]

Mission aftermath

[edit]

When Phillips returned to Saigon to move his family home, his testimony had generated reprisals within the U.S. mission. Military advisers were ordered not to speak with his USAID subordinates. The adviser who had confirmed the 60-hamlet account was reprimanded. General Paul D. Harkins, commander of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, said publicly that he would "get" Phillips. CIA station chief John H. Richardson attempted to intimidate Phillips' wife Barbara with a claim that she had overheard classified information; days later the wife of one of Richardson's subordinates made a similar approach.[26]

Former Ambassador Frederick Nolting confronted Phillips: "You just ruined it." Phillips replied: "No, you ruined it by not getting Lansdale out there when it would have done some good." In his memoir Phillips wrote that Nolting had not grasped that he had wanted to save Diệm while also telling the truth.[27]

1963 coup and departure

[edit]

Phillips met with President Ngô Đình Diệm two days before the 1963 South Vietnamese coup d'état; Diệm asked whether there was to be a coup and Phillips informed him of the rumors.[28]

After the assassination of Diệm and Nhu, Phillips met with Conein, who had served as liaison between Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the South Vietnamese generals. Phillips found him "ashen," "sick," and in a "towering rage" over the killings.[28]

Post-government career

[edit]

After leaving USAID in November 1963, Phillips returned to Vietnam periodically as a consultant through 1968.[29] He favored South Vietnamese independence but opposed the large U.S. troop commitment, which he believed undercut the counterinsurgency effort. Before the platform committee of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he argued against abandoning South Vietnam.[30]

After earning a Master of Science in City and Regional Planning from Catholic University in 1971,[31] he won election to the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors.[31] A Democrat, he ran for the United States House of Representatives in Virginia's 10th congressional district in 1974, finishing second in the Democratic primary with 30.3 percent of the vote behind Joseph L. Fisher.[32][6][33]

Phillips was a contributor to Prelude to Tragedy: Vietnam, 1960–1965 (2000) and the author of Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned (2008).[34] He monitored the 2009 Afghan elections and advised the U.S. embassy in Kabul on counterinsurgency. He appeared in Ken Burns' 2017 documentary series The Vietnam War.[35]

Personal life

[edit]

Phillips married Barbara Hubner in May 1960. Their two children were born in 1961 and 1962.[15] He died on December 29, 2021, in Arlington, Virginia, from complications of pneumonia.[1]

Historical assessment

[edit]

Andrew Gawthorpe, writing in the Journal of Cold War Studies in 2021, situated the Office of Rural Affairs within the broader pattern of U.S. rural advisory programs in South Vietnam and concluded that village-level programs of the kind Phillips directed failed to take hold without consistent political commitment from the South Vietnamese government.[18] The United States Institute of Peace described Phillips as "one of [America's] most creative foreign policy thinkers," citing his six decades of engagement with state fragility from Vietnam through Afghanistan.[36]

Roger Myerson, reviewing the posthumous Stabilizing Fragile States in 2022, called Phillips' 1962 Office of Rural Affairs "no better model for a stabilization-assistance team" and praised his emphasis on "decentralized political engagement." Myerson described the book as a "great final treatise," arguing that the centralized structures adopted in later U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan repeated the mistakes Phillips had identified in Vietnam.[37]

Awards and honors

[edit]

Works

[edit]
  • Phillips, Rufus (2008). Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned. Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1-68247-310-8. OCLC 992225373.
  • Neese, Harvey C.; Phillips, Rufus C. (2000). Prelude to Tragedy: Vietnam, 1960–1965. Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1-55750-491-3.
  • Phillips, Rufus (2022). Stabilizing Fragile States: Why It Matters and What to Do about It. University Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0-7006-3304-3. (posthumous)

See also

[edit]

References

[edit]

Footnotes

[edit]
  1. ^ David Halberstam's account of Phillips' return in The Best and the Brightest contained errors; see The Best and the Brightest § Errata.[23]

Citations

[edit]
  1. ^ a b c Boot 2022.
  2. ^ a b c d Boot 2018.
  3. ^ "Rufus C. Phillips III". The Washington Post. December 2021. Retrieved September 11, 2023.
  4. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 27–29.
  5. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 29–31.
  6. ^ a b Ringle 1977.
  7. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 31.
  8. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 32–33.
  9. ^ a b Phillips 2008, p. 108,177–190.
  10. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 183–185.
  11. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 140–142.
  12. ^ a b c Phillips 2008, p. 197–204,226.
  13. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 217.
  14. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 221–222.
  15. ^ a b Phillips 2008, p. 234–235.
  16. ^ Hosmer & Crane 2006.
  17. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 236.
  18. ^ a b Gawthorpe 2021.
  19. ^ "Document 139". Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume II. Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. Retrieved February 16, 2026.
  20. ^ a b Koch 1973.
  21. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 374–383.
  22. ^ "Memorandum of a Conference with the President, September 10, 1963". Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume IV. Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. Retrieved February 16, 2026.
  23. ^ Halberstam 1972, p. 313.
  24. ^ a b Phillips 2008, p. 386–397.
  25. ^ Halberstam 1972, p. 316.
  26. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 402.
  27. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 397.
  28. ^ a b Phillips 2008, p. 421–429.
  29. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 396,538.
  30. ^ Phillips 2008, p. 618–621.
  31. ^ a b c d e "House Joint Resolution No. 212". Virginia General Assembly. 2022. Retrieved February 16, 2026.
  32. ^ "1974 U.S. House Democratic Primary, District 10". Virginia Department of Elections. Retrieved February 16, 2026.
  33. ^ "Candidate – Rufus Phillips". Our Campaigns. Retrieved April 10, 2018.
  34. ^ "Books: Vietnam, Allied invasion of Italy". The Washington Times. February 22, 2009. Retrieved August 1, 2010.
  35. ^ "Rufus Phillips". United States Naval Institute. Retrieved February 16, 2026.
  36. ^ "Stabilizing Fragile States: The Legacy of Rufus Phillips III". United States Institute of Peace. May 10, 2022. Retrieved February 16, 2026.
  37. ^ Myerson, Roger (2022). "An Appreciation of Rufus Phillips III and Stabilizing Fragile States" (PDF). University of Chicago. Retrieved February 16, 2026.
  38. ^ "Why Vietnam Matters". Leadership Studies. Williams College. April 14, 2009. Retrieved February 2, 2026.

Sources

[edit]
[edit]