Modernizing a Friendly Tyrant: US Public Diplomacy and Sociopolitical Change in Francoist Spain
The United States’ attitude toward the Franco regime gradually shifted, from rejection and impelling of the international condemnation of the Spanish dictatorship during the immediate post-World War II period, to a rather wary acceptance. As the United States’ differences from the Soviet Union began being accentuated, some American policymakers—especially in the Pentagon—began to appreciate the value of the strategic enclave in the Iberian Peninsula and the dictatorship’s anticommunism. Thus, the gradual advance toward the Cold War facilitated the creation of closer ties—which only months before would have seemed totally contra natura—between the democratic regime in Washington and the Franco dictatorship. The bilateral accords signed in 1953 allowed the implantation of U.S military bases in Spain in exchange for economic aid, military hardware and technical assistance.1 The goal was to bring Spain in to the security system constructed in Europe to serve as a bulwark against any possible communist offensive. The Spanish authorities agreed to this foreign presence in exchange for international legitimization and financing for their crippled economy. They even went so far as to fantasize that the American aid would be the equivalent of what the Marshall Plan was for other European countries. However, neither the timing nor the objectives were equivalent: in the American power’s initial calculations, the aim was neither the modernization of the Iberian country nor a hypothetical democratizing process.
The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order
List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations xv INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: The Rise of an American Style of Development, 1914-1937 14 CHAPTER 2: The Only Road for Mankind: "Modernisation" to Meet the Challenge of Totalitarianism, 1933-1944 40 CHAPTER 3: A Gospel of Liberalism: Point Four and Modernization as National Policy, 1943-1952 77 CHAPTER 4: "The Proving Ground": Modernization and U.S. Policy in Northeast Asia, 1945-1960 114 CHAPTER 5: "The Great American Mission": Modernization and the United States in the World, 1952-1960 153 CHAPTER 6: A TVA on the Mekong: Modernization at War in Southeast Asia, 1960-1973 190 CHAPTER 7: "Everything Is Going Wrong": The Crisis of Development and the End of the Postwar Consensus 226 CHAPTER 8: New Developments: From the Cold War to the "War on Terror" 257 Notes 275 Bibliography 337 Index 373
Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century
In the 20th - the American - Century, no visionary stands taller than Vannevar Bush. As the inventor and public entrepreneur who launched the Manhattan Project, helped to create the military-industrial complex, conceived of a permanent system of government support for science and engineering and anticipated the personal computer and the Internet, Bush is our century's reincarnation of Ben Franklin. Beginning with his boyhood as a turn-of-the-century tinkerer in his father's basement in Massachusetts, Bush went on to study and teach electrical engineering at Tufts and MIT. An early academic entrepreneur, he cofounded Raytheon, a highly successful electronics company, in his spare time. At MIT, during the Depression, he built what were then the most powerful computers in the world. During World War II, he was Roosevelt's adviser and chief contact on all matters of military technology, including the atomic bomb. He launched the Manhattan Project and oversaw a collection of 6,000 civilian scientists who designed scores of new weapons. When an Allied victory seemed inevitable, his attention turned to the future. In July 1945 he published his legendary essay, "As We May Think, " widely cited as the inspiration for the personal computer and the World Wide Web. In his landmark "Endless Frontier" report, published only weeks later, he boldly equated national security with research strength, outlining a system of permanent federal funding for university research that endures to this day.