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23 JUNE 1932 * 30 MAY 2008
WILLIAM ODOM, known as "Bill" to his friends and associates, was one of the most scholarly American military officers of his generation. A native of Middle Tennessee - whose characteristic speech patterns he never lost - he received his undergraduate education at the United States Military Academy in West Point and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in 1954. He developed a special interest in the Soviet Union early in his career, learned Russian, and subsequently undertook graduate studies at Columbia University, earning an M. A. in Soviet area studies in 1962, and a Ph.D. in political science in 1970. He was assigned to infantry and armor divisions in West Germany in the late 1950s and to Vietnam in 1970-71; his work there was on "Vietnamization" projects. Otherwise, before he was appointed to senior management and policy-making positions in Washington, his career was devoted to teaching at West Point, and to stints as an intelligence officer assigned to the Soviet Group of Forces in Potsdam, East Germany, and to the army attaché staff at the American Embassy in Moscow.
Bill's interests always went well beyond the traditional military intelligence preoccupations with hardware capabilities, military doctrine, and command structures. He delved deep in Russian history, Marxist ideology, and questions of the Soviet economy and social structure. While most of his professional output was classified, he found time to write articles and at least one book based on his research in open literature. One of these, The Soviet Volunteers: Modernization and Bureaucracy in a Public Mass Organization, was published by Princeton University Press in 1974.
While at Columbia, Bill met and studied under Zbigniew Brzezinski, who subsequently became President Jimmy Carter's assistant for national security. Brzezinski brought him onto the National Security Council staff as his military adviser. Bill had doubted the wisdom of the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente with the USSR and thus welcomed news of...