Paying Up: The Price of the Vietnam War

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 8, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 166-179

  Galambos, Louis ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 85022735567     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898030600005078     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. An earlier version of this article was presented to the Fourteenth Military History Symposium, United States Air Force Academy, Vietnam, 1964–1973: An American Dilemma (17–19 October, 1990).
2. See Dennis E. Showalter and John G. Albert, An American Dilemma: Vietnam, 1964–1973 (Chicago, 1993). I would like to thank Julie Kimmel for her assistance with this paper and Brian Balogh, Jane Eliot Sewell, Donald Critchlow, and David Robertson for their editorial comments.
3. Robert S. McNamara, with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York, 1995).
4. See, for instance, the roundup in Paul A. Gigot, “McNamara Reopens the Liberals' War,” Wall Street Journal, 21 April 1995.
5. Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect, 321–323.
6. Retrospect, xv-xvi, 169–206, 216–25, 234, 243–44, 265–71, 280, 307, 319, 333.
7. Louis Galambos, America at Middle Age: A New History of the U. S. in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1982), 120.
8. These figures and those that follow are available in Historical Statistics of the United States (1970)
9. in Statistical Abstract of the United States (1989).
10. I say informal to distinguish them from the elaborate and formal counterfactual analysis of the sort offered in Robert William Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (Baltimore, 1964).
11. See the perceptive analysis in Norman A. Graebner, “The Scholar's View of Vietnam, 1964–1992,” in Showalter and Albert, An American Dilemma, 13–52.
12. Simon Kuznets, “Notes on the Pattern of U.S. Economic Growth,” in Edgar O. Edwards, ed., The Nation's Economic Objectives (Chicago, 1964), 15–34.
13. John W. Kendrick, Productivity Trends in the United States (Princeton, 1961).
14. Leonard S. Reich, The Making of American Industrial Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell, 1876–1926 (New York, 1985).
15. Michael A. Bernstein, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929–1939 (New York, 1987).
16. Louis Galambos and Joseph Pratt, The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth: U.S. Business and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1988), esp. 127–183.
17. Edward F. Denison, Accounting for United States Economic Growth, 1929–1969 (Washington, D.C., 1974).
18. Alfred D. Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
19. Margaret B. W. Graham and Bettye H. Pruitt, R&D for Industry: A Century of Technical Innovation at Alcoa (New York, 1990).
20. David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D, 1902–1980 (New York, 1988).
21. Raymond Vernon, Sovereignty at Bay: The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprises (New York, 1971).
22. Mira Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).
23. Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Shaped (New York, 1975).
24. Robert M. Solow, “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function,” Review of Economics and Statistics 39 (August 1957): 312–320.
25. Simon S. Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven, 1966).
26. Moses Abramovitz and Paul A. David, “Reinterpreting Economic Growth: Parables and Realities,” American Economic Review 63 (May 1973): 428–439.
27. See the figures in Louis Galambos and Joseph Pratt, The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth, esp. 208.
28. Thomas McCraw, ed., America Versus Japan (Boston, 1986).
29. David Teece, ed., The Competitive Challenge: Strategies for Industrial Innovation and Renewal (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
30. Paul R. Lawrence and Davis Dyer, Renewing American Industry: Organizing for Efficiency and Innovation (New York, 1983).
31. Angus Maddison, Phases of Capitalist Development (New York, 1982), 38–42, 96–125.
32. Leslie Hannah, “Delusions of Durable Dominance or The Invisible Hand Strikes Back” (draft manuscript, courtesy of the author).
33. Robert Gallman, “The Pace and Pattern of American Economic Growth,” in Lance E. Davis et al., American Economic Growth: An Economists' History of the United States (New York, 1972), 15–60.
34. Richard K. Vietor, Energy Policy in America Since 1945 (New York, 1984).
35. Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 1984), esp. 153–179.
36. Hugh Rockoff, Drastic Measures: A History of Wage and Price Controk in the United States (New York, 1984), 200–233.
37. I explore this subject at greater length in “The Authority and Responsibility of the Chief Executive Officer: Shifting Patterns in Large U.S. Enterprises in the Twentieth Century,” Industrial and Corporate Change 4, no. 1 (1975): 187–203.
38. Donald F. Kettl, “The Economic Education of Lyndon Johnson: Guns, Butter, and Taxes,” in Robert A. Divine, ed., The Johnson Years: Vietnam, the Environment, and Science, vol. 2 (Lawrence, Kan., 1987), 54–78.
39. William Bowen, “The Auto Industry's Road Ahead,” Fortune, June 1965, 137–39, 280–82, 284.
40. “The Willing Hands on Japanese Watches,” Fortune, July 1965, 144–148.
41. See also “The Coming Battle for the Color-TV Market,” Fortune, January 1966, 144–47, 188–91.
42. “A Decade of Dazzling Growth in the ‘World of the 200,’” Fortune, 15 September 1967, 128–35, 202.
43. Lawrence A. Mayer, “The Troubling Shift in the Trade Winds,” Fortune, 1 June 1968, 76–79, 140–44.
44. Arthur M. Louis, “What Business Thinks,” Fortune, September 1969, 93–96, 208.
45. “Business Around the Globe,” Fortune, May 1966, 69–70.
46. Max Ways, “Why Japan's Growth Is Different,” Fortune, November 1967, 127–29, 246, 248, 250, 252, 257–58, 260, 262, 266
47. “The ‘Living Treasures’ of Japan,” 130–35. I am indebted to Julie Kimmel for noting the importance of this sequence.
48. The followup piece (103–8) was entitled “A 1,600-Year Memory in a Nation's Art,” and it referred to the Japanese as “insular.” Fortune, August 1969, 101–2, 116–19, 120; and 103–8.
49. Business Week, 1 February 1970, 23.
50. On “smallsville,” see William S. Rukeyser, “Detroit's Reluctant Ride into Smallsville,” Fortune, March 1969, 110–13, 164, 167–68. Rukeyser was already gloomy: “The notion that there may be a legitimate, permanent demand in the U.S. for really small, really cheap automobilies is taking longer to establish itself in Detroit than the disk brake.”
51. Business Week, 31 January 1970, 83; and 3 October 1970, 86–87. See also 19 September 1970, 42.
52. Louis Kraar, “How the Japanese Mount that Export Blitz,” Fortune, September 1970, 127–31, 170–71.
53. “Studying the Competition,” Fortune, January 1971, 54.
54. Lawrence Lessing, “Why the U.S. Lags in Technology,” Fortune, April 1972, 69–72, 148–50
55. Carol J. Loomis, “The New Questions About the U.S. Economy,” January 1974, 69–73, 163–64, 166–67
56. Lawrence A. Mayer, “Oil, Trade, and the Dollar,” June 1974, 193–199.
57. Alvin T. Nagao, “Rigid Institutions: Wages, Worker Loyalty, and the Downsizing of Corporate America” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1995).
58. See, for instance, Lewis Beman, “How to Tell Where the U.S. Is Competitive,” Fortune, July 1972, 54–59, 98, 102.
59. Ira C. Magaziner and Robert B. Reich, Minding America's Business: The Decline and Rise of the American Economy (New York, 1983).
60. Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford, 1982).
61. Thomas K. McCraw, Prophets of Regulation (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).
62. Martha Derthick and Paul J. Quirk, The Politics of Deregulation (Washington, D.C., 1985).
63. McNamara, In Retrospect, xv-xvi.