| This dissertation explores the evolving worldview of U.S. four-star military officers who served during the period 1968-2000, an era of dramatic change. The four-star officers who led the United States military during this era had to deal with and then absorb the Vietnam experience, and adapt to postwar domestic realities as they oversaw the rebuilding of the military in the context of the evolving Cold War.; Failure in Vietnam left four-stars embittered, convinced that the military was both the victim of, and the scapegoat for, civilian mismanagement of the war. From the 1970s on, the military leadership concluded that officers had to be more active and outspoken in confronting civilian leadership on important issues in order to avoid a repeat of the Vietnam debacle.; Although Vietnam was the most potent influence on military leaders in this era, its effects played out against the background of the Cold War. The centrality of the military establishment in Cold War America coupled with the expanded scope and complexity of military problems and their inextricability from "civilian" matters of economics, diplomacy, society, and partisan politics favored the development of a military leadership that increasingly embraced the "pragmatic" view of international affairs. Consequently, four-stars proved quite responsive to the decline of Cold War tensions. At the same time, however, the legacies of Vietnam strengthened officers' determination to preserve the military's traditional warrior culture and increase its institutional voice even as they accommodated to the new realities.; Following the end of the Cold War, the senior military leadership retained and even increased its influence in the foreign policy arena. Officers were discomfited, however, as civilians sought to cut military budgets, institute social change in the services, and employ force in the sort of precisely metered, judicious manner that military leaders had abhorred in Vietnam. The consequence was a rise in civil-military tensions and an increasing number of four-stars expressing the traditional personal conservatism of the American officer corps in more partisan terms. |
