26 December 1969 issue of Time Magazine - The President's Guerrilla Expert (Hat Tip Tom Ricks via Warlord Loop).

Though Viet Nam has been his specialty since 1961, Sir Robert Thompson was never influential with either John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson. It was Richard Nixon who embraced his views wholeheartedly—most likely because they coincide with his own.

Suave, controlled and bearing a striking resemblance to the late actor Herbert Marshall, the Cambridge-educated Thompson, 53, was knighted for devising the strategy that ultimately defeated local Chinese Communist terrorists in Malaya in the 1950s. He was then Britain's secretary for defense of the Federation of Malaya; later (1961-65), he served as head of the British advisory mission in Viet Nam. Now retired from government, he is an occasional consultant for the Rand Corp., the noted U.S. think tank. His experience in Malaya convinced Thompson that counterinsurgency does not require massive forces, large-scale bombing or continual pursuit of the enemy. He contends that such tactics play into the hands of guerrillas by increasing casualties and enlarging the scope of the combat. Thompson emphasizes localized "police" actions to protect the population against guerrilla attacks and to ferret out subversives. That proved easier in Malaya, where the terrorists were often ethnically different from the local population, than in Viet Nam, where friend and foe may be indistinguishable. The Malaya guerrillas also had no handy sanctuaries across nearby borders...