Roger Hilsman Jr. (November 23, 1919 – February 23, 2014) was an American soldier, government official, political scientist, and author. He saw action in the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II, first with Merrill's Marauders, getting wounded in combat, and then as a guerilla leader for the Office of Strategic Services. He later became an aide and adviser to President John F. Kennedy, and briefly to President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the U.S. State Department while he served as Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 1961 to 1963 and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1963 to 1964.
There, Hilsman was a key and controversial figure in the development of U.S. policies in South Vietnam during the early stages of American involvement in the Vietnam War. He was an advocate of a strategy that emphasized the political nature of the conflict as much as the military aspect and was a proponent of the removal from power of South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm. Hilsman left government in 1964 to teach at Columbia University and retired in 1990. He wrote many books about American foreign policy and international relations. He was a Democratic Party nominee for election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972 but lost in the general election.
Early life Hilsman was born on November 23, 1919, in Waco, Texas, the son of Roger Hilsman Sr., a career officer with the United States Army, and Emma Prendergast Hilsman. He lived in Waco only briefly, growing up on a series of military posts. He attended public schools for a while in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 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. His father was a distant figure whom the young Hilsman endeavored to gain the approval of, such as by choosing a military career. Back in the United States, Hilsman attended Sacramento High School in Sacramento, California, where he was a leader in a Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program and graduated in 1937.
After spending a year at Millard's Preparatory School in Washington, DC, and another traveling around Europe, including a visit to Nazi Germany, Hilsman attended the United States Military Academy and graduated in 1943 with a B.S. degree and as a second lieutenant.
World War II Following U.S. entry into World War II, Hilsman's father, a colonel, fought under General Douglas MacArthur during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. Two weeks into the conflict, newspaper reports described Colonel Hilsman as still holding Davao on the island of Mindanao. Later reports reflected his retreat to Malaybalay after he had faced overwhelming Japanese forces, followed by another move onto the island of Negros and he was captured by the Japanese once all the islands had surrendered in 1942.
After leaving West Point the younger Hilsman was immediately posted to the South-East Asian Theatre and joined the Merrill's Marauders long-range penetration jungle warfare unit, which fought the Japanese during the Burma Campaign. There, he found morale to be poor due to typhus outbreaks and unhappiness with the generals leading the unit. 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.
After recovering in army field hospitals, Hilsman joined the Office of Strategic Services. Now a lieutenant, he at first served as a liaison officer to the British Army in Burma. He then volunteered to be put in command of a guerrilla warfare battalion, organized and supplied by OSS Detachment 101, of some 300 local partisans, mercenaries, and irregulars of varying ethnicities, operating behind the lines of the Japanese in Burma.
There, he developed an interest in guerrilla tactics and personally found them to be preferable to being part of infantry assaults. By early 1945, Hilsman was considered, as Detachment 101 commander William R. Peers later stated, to be one of a number of the guerillas' "good... junior officers, every one outstanding and experienced." 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, all while waging its own battle with the ever-present leeches and other insects and various diseases. In one particular engagement in May 1945, Hilsman led a mixed company of Kachins, Burmese, and Karens in staging successful raids in the area between Lawksawk and Taunggyi that culminated in a carefully-orchestrated ambush that caused a hundred casualties among the Japanese at no cost to the guerillas. Hilsman wanted to deploy his unit farther south into the Inle Lake area but was constrained by orders to help hold the road between Taunggyi and Kengtung.
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 camp near Mukden. There, he found his father, who became one of the first prisoners to be freed. His father asked as they hugged, "What took you so long?" At some point, Hilsman was promoted to captain. (Decades later, Hilsman related his wartime experiences in his 1990 memoir American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines.)
Returning from the war, Hilsman served in the OSS as assistant chief of Far East intelligence operations in 1945 to 1946, and once the Central Intelligence Agency had been created, he served in it in the role of special assistant to executive officer in 1946 to 1947 (he belonged to the Central Intelligence Group during the interim period between the two organizations).
Student, lecturer and researcher Hilsman married Eleanor Willis Hoyt in 1946. They raised four children together. Sponsored by the Army, Hilsman attended Yale University, earning a master's degree in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1951 in political science. He specialized in international relations and he studied under noted professors Arnold Wolfers and William T. R. Fox.
By 1951, Hilsman had risen to the rank of major. He worked on planning for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe with the Joint American Military Advance Group in London in 1950 to 1952 and as part of the International Policies Division of the United States European Command in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1952 to 1953. Waiting for the end of hostilities in the Korean War, he resigned from the Army in 1953 but kept reserve status.
Hilsman turned to academia and became a research associate and lecturer in international politics at the Center of International Studies at Princeton University from 1953 to 1956 and a part-time lecturer and research associate at the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research, which was affiliated with the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, from 1957 to 1961. In 1956, he published the book Strategic Intelligence and National Decisions. Based upon an expanded version of his dissertation, it became well thought of in government circles and entered the permanent White House collection. He was also a Rockefeller Fellow and a lecturer on international relations at Columbia University in 1958.
He was the chief of the foreign affairs division of the Congressional Research Service within the Library of Congress in 1956 to 1958 and then deputy director for research for them in 1958 to 1961. There, he met Senator John F. Kennedy and other members of Congress interested in foreign affairs.
Kennedy administration During staffing of the incoming Kennedy administration, the nominee for Under Secretary of State, Chester Bowles, aggressively sought academics and journalists who would be committed to the ideals of the New Frontier. In line with this, Hilsman was selected to be the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research for the U.S. Department of State, assuming the position in February 1961. His duty was to analyze foreign events and trends as part of the department's long-range planning. Hilsman soon became a key planner within the administration's foreign policy circles. Like many of the "New Frontiersmen," he had fought with distinction as a junior officer in World War II. Hilsman was particularly effective at talking to members of the U.S. Congress because that military background and war record appealed to hardliners and his academic history and intellectual leanings appealed to those more of that bent.
His background in guerrilla warfare led him in 1961, together with Walt Rostow, to push for the American armed forces and the State Department to emphasize counterguerrilla training. Hilsman was involved for more than two months in the U.S. responses to Soviet actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, including developing informal communications with Soviet officials and the briefing of congressional leaders. He was also involved in the State Department's analysis of the Sino-Soviet split and the possible conditions for future warming in Sino-American relations.
Hilsman became one of the main architects of American policy in Vietnam during the early 1960s and in January 1962 presented the plan "A Strategic Concept for South Vietnam." 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. It also recommended for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to start using guerrilla tactics. Out of the report came Kennedy's approval of American 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. The implementation of the program by the South Vietnamese government became problematic, however, and Hilsman later stated that its execution was a "total misunderstanding of what the [Strategic Hamlet] program should try to do."Hilsman, Roger, To Move a Nation, p. 440.
In 1962, reports from American journalists in South Vietnam about the progress of the conflict with the Viet Cong, and the characteristics of the South Vietnamese government under President Ngô Đình Diệm, differed from the picture that the American military was portraying. Kennedy became alarmed, and in December 1962, Hilsman, together with Michael Forrestal of the U.S. National Security Council staff, were sent by Kennedy on a fact-finding mission to South Vietnam. The Hilsman–Forrestal Report was delivered to Kennedy on January 25, 1963. It described weaknesses in the South Vietnamese government; the corruption of Diệm, his brother Ngô Đình Nhu, and their cohorts; and the increasing isolation of and lack of support for the Diệm regime from the South Vietnamese people. Overall, however, the report came to some optimistic conclusions: "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...." The report thus contributed to the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam and to growing doubts in U.S. government circles about the usefulness of the Diệm regime.