Odom, William E. 1932–2008

(William Odom, William Eldridge Odom)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 23, 1932, in Cookeville, TN; died of an apparent heart attack, May 30, 2008, in Lincoln, VT. Professional military officer, intelligence administrator, political scientist, educator, and author. Odom was both a distinguished military officer and a serious scholar of international relations. A 1954 graduate of West Point, he served as a U.S. Army officer for more than thirty years, retiring in 1985 as a lieutenant general. He had served as a military liaison in East Germany, an officer in Vietnam, and a military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. In retirement he worked for the National Security Council and as director of the National Security Agency. In 1988 he became a director of national security studies at the Hudson Institute. Odom was also a scholar and an academic. He learned to speak Russian, taught government courses at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, studied at the Research Institute on Communist Affairs at Columbia University, and taught political science at Yale University. Odom's tour of duty in Vietnam convinced him that the United States had little to gain and much to lose from engaging in foreign wars. He maintained a hard line against the Soviet Union in the 1980s and promoted a substantial reorganization and reinforcement of U.S. security and intelligence operations, especially after 2001, but he stopped short of advocating war. In fact, Odom was one of the few military leaders who warned, long before 2003, that war in Iraq would be a dangerous aggression that could not be won by military means. He argued that such an incursion would also provoke increasing hostility to the United States in the Arab world and would encourage terrorist activity in that region. At the time of his death, it seemed that his predictions had been disturbingly accurate. Just prior to his death, Odom had issued similar warnings about the possibility of future U.S. military action against Iran. Odom was an outspoken critic of military action, both in print and as a frequent guest on television and radio broadcasts, but he continued to believe in America's potential as a world power, so long as the country's leaders act with prudence and an appropriate amount of restraint. Odom received many awards for his service to America and the international community, including the Distinguished Service Medal with oak leaf cluster, the Legion of Merit, the National Security Medal, the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, and similar decorations from the governments of Germany, Korea, and France. He also won the Marshall Shulman Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University for his book The Collapse of the Soviet Military (1998). Odom wrote several other books, including America's Military Revolution: Strategy and Structure after the Cold War (1993), Commonwealth or Empire: Russia, Central Asia, and the Transcaucasus (1995), Fixing Intelligence: For a More Secure America (2003), and America's Inadvertent Empire (2004).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, June 4, 2008, sec. 2, p. 9.

Los Angeles Times, June 6, 2008, p. B9.

Washington Post, June 1, 2008, p. C8.