Edward L. Rowny
with atomic bombs. With a foot in the other camp, I tried to influence future
strategy in the Pentagon. It was a fascinating time and I was in the center of most
of the finest intellectual activity going on at the time.
Always thinking ahead, General Norstad was responsible for getting Goodpaster,
and later me, into NATO. When I came to NATO in 1955, Colonel Goodpaster
had already served a tour under Norstad and had gone off to commanda division
in Europe. General Norstad was then a deputy to General Gruenther and later took
over from Gruenther and became the Supreme Commander. For the first 18
months of my tour I served as the secretary of the general staff to General
Gruenther. I kept the same job under General Norstad when he became SACEUR
[Supreme Allied Commander, Europe]. What had started out as a number of ideas
at dream sessions turned into opportunities to carry out those ideas in practice in
NATO.
Q ..
You said that at Yale you studied international relations and nuclear strategy. Did
you study in other fields?
A ..
At Yale I took the standard courses in international relations such as diplomatic
history, international law, and political science. The international relations course
was largely devoted to the role nuclear weapons would play in the future. Our
principal teacher in this area was Bernard Brodie who was then writing his book,
Weapon. Brodie had cut his eyeteeth in the Navy, writing a book on
the influence of steam power on naval strategy.
Yale was a particularly interesting place at that time. Of the 20 or so people in the
country who were experts on the future of nuclear strategy, probably a dozen were
at Yale. In addition to Brodie, who later went to RAND, there was Klaus Knorr,
who later went to Princeton; J. T. R. Fox, who went to Columbia; and Bill
Kaufman, who went to MIT. Another professor, Arnold Wolfers, started the
strategic studies branch of Johns Hopkins in Washington. Wolfers had written a
definitive work on French and United Kingdom policies after World War I. Others
at Yale were Gabe Almond, Fred Barghom, and several others. Probably one of
the reasons I didn't get to stay on for my Ph.D. at Yale was that the professors all
went in different directions. There were so many talented and high-spirited
professors in one place that there was an explosion of personalities-they exceeded
the critical mass. All went their separate ways with only a few staying behind.
Among those who stayed behind were Gabriel Almond, who worked on public
diplomacy, and Fred Barghom, who was a leading Sovietologist. Once the others
scattered and went their separate ways, Yale was no longer the exciting place to
study as it was when I first went there.
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