Walt Whitman Rostow (October 7, 1916 – February 13, 2003) was an American

economist An economist is a professional and practitioner in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy. Within this field there are ...

, professor and political theorist who served as

National Security Advisor A national security advisor serves as the chief advisor to a national government on matters of security. The advisor is not usually a member of the government's cabinet but is usually a member of various military or security councils. National sec ...

to President of the United States

Lyndon B. Johnson Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908January 22, 1973), often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He had previously served as the 37th vice ...

from 1966 to 1969. Rostow worked in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and later was a foreign policy adviser and speechwriter for presidential candidate and then President

John F. Kennedy John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK and the nickname Jack, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination i ...

; he is often credited with writing Kennedy's famous " New Frontier" speech.Walt Rostow obituary

Daily Telegraph Daily or The Daily may refer to: Journalism * Daily newspaper, newspaper issued on five to seven day of most weeks * ''The Daily'' (podcast), a podcast by ''The New York Times'' * ''The Daily'' (News Corporation), a defunct US-based iPad new ...

, 24 February 2003 Prominent for his role in shaping US foreign policy in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, he was a staunch

anti-communist Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when the United States and the ...

, noted for a belief in the efficacy of

capitalism Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private pr ...

and

free enterprise In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any o ...

, and strongly supported US involvement in the Vietnam War. Rostow is known for his book '' The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto'' (1960), which was used in several fields of social science. Rostow's theories were embraced by many officials in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as a possible counter to the increasing popularity of communism in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Rostow never regretted or apologized over his actions in Vietnam, and this stance effectively

ostracized Ostracism ( el, ὀστρακισμός, ''ostrakismos'') was an Athenian democratic procedure in which any citizen could be expelled from the city-state of Athens for ten years. While some instances clearly expressed popular anger at the cit ...

him from work in top American universities after his retirement from government service. His elder brother

Eugene Rostow Eugene Victor Rostow (August 25, 1913 – November 25, 2002) was an American legal scholar and public servant. He was Dean of Yale Law School and served as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs under President Lyndon B. Johnson. In th ...

also held a number of high government foreign policy posts.

Early life

Rostow was born in

Manhattan, New York City Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. His parents, Lillian (Helman) and Victor Rostow, were active socialists, and named Walt after the poet

Walt Whitman Walter Whitman (; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among ...

. Rostow's father, Victor Rostowsky, was born in the town of Orekhov near

Odessa Odesa (also spelled Odessa) is the third most populous city and municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. The city is also the administrativ ...

in 1886, and was involved in the Russian socialist movement as a teenager, publishing a left-wing newspaper in the basement of his parents' house calling for the overthrow of the Emperor Nicholas II. In 1904, at the age of 18, Victor Rostowsky boarded a ship that took him from Odessa to Glasgow and another ship that took him to New York. Upon arriving in the United States, Rostowsky "Americanized" his surname to Rostow. On 22 October 1912, he married Lillian Helman, the intellectually gifted daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants who longed go to college, but as her family was too poor to afford higher education, she instead encouraged her sons to attain the higher education she wanted for herself. Like the Rostowskys, the Helmans were ''Ashkenazim'' (Yiddish-speaking Jews). The Rostows were described as being very "idealistic" immigrants who deeply loved their adopted country and named their three sons after the three men they considered to be the greatest Americans, namely

Eugene V. Debs Eugene Victor "Gene" Debs (November 5, 1855 – October 20, 1926) was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and five times the candidate of the Soc ...

and

Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champ ...

. Unlike many other

Ashkenazi Jewish Ashkenazi Jews ( ; he, יְהוּדֵי אַשְׁכְּנַז, translit=Yehudei Ashkenaz, ; yi, אַשכּנזישע ייִדן, Ashkenazishe Yidn), also known as Ashkenazic Jews or ''Ashkenazim'',, Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation: , singu ...

immigrants, Victor Rostow always spoke to his children in

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...

rather than

Yiddish Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...

as he felt this was would improve their chances in life. Rostow's brother Eugene, who was named for Socialist Party of America leader Eugene V. Debs, became a legal scholar, and his brother Ralph, a department store manager. The American journalist

Stanley Karnow Stanley Abram Karnow (February 4, 1925 – January 27, 2013) was an American journalist and historian. He is best known for his writings on the Vietnam War. Education and career After serving with the United States Army Air Forces in the China B ...

described Rostow as extremely intelligent with a "brilliant" academic record that saw him graduate from high school at the age of 15. Rostow described his childhood as mostly happy with the only dark spots being that sometimes his classmates called him and his brothers "dirty Jews". Rostow's parents closely followed events in Russia and Rostow later recalled a defining moment of his life occurred as a teenager when his parents invited over for a dinner a group of fellow

Jewish socialists The Jewish left consists of Jews who identify with, or support, left-wing or left-liberal causes, consciously as Jews, either as individuals or through organizations. There is no one organization or movement which constitutes the Jewish left, ho ...

together with a man who was serving as a purchasing agent for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. After the dinner, Rostow remembered that his father said: "These

communists Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a so ...

took over the Tsarist police and made them worse. The Tsarist police persecuted the political opposition but never touched their families. These people touch families too. Nothing good will come of it". Rostow entered Yale University at the age of 15 on a full scholarship and graduated at 19. He then won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at

Balliol College, Oxford Balliol College () is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. One of Oxford's oldest colleges, it was founded around 1263 by John I de Balliol, a landowner from Barnard Castle in County Durham, who provided the f ...

, where he completed a B.Litt. degree. At Oxford, Rostow became friends with future British politicians

Edward Heath Sir Edward Richard George Heath (9 July 191617 July 2005), often known as Ted Heath, was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1965 to 1975. Heath a ...

and Roy Jenkins, being especially close to the latter. In 1936, during the Edward VIII abdication crisis, he assisted broadcaster

Alistair Cooke Alistair Cooke (born Alfred Cooke; 20 November 1908 – 30 March 2004) was a British-American writer whose work as a journalist, television personality and radio broadcaster was done primarily in the United States.NBC Radio Network. After returning to Yale University, completing his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

in 1940, he started teaching economics at Columbia University.

Professional and academic career

During World War II, Rostow served in the Office of Strategic Services under

William Joseph Donovan William Joseph "Wild Bill" Donovan (January 1, 1883 – February 8, 1959) was an American soldier, lawyer, intelligence officer and diplomat, best known for serving as the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Bur ...

. Among other tasks, he participated in selecting targets for US bombardment. Nicholas Katzenbach later joked: "I finally understand the difference between Walt and me ..I was the navigator who was shot down and spent two years in a German prison camp, and Walt was the guy picking my targets." In September 1942, Rostow arrived in London to serve as an intelligence analyst with the Enemy Objectives Unit, serving until the spring of 1945. In January 1943, Rostow was given the task of identifying the key industries that supported the German war economy. As an intelligence analyst, Rostow became convinced in 1943 that oil was Germany's Achilles heel, and if the

United States Army Air Force The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) was the major land-based aerial warfare service component of the United States Army and ''de facto'' aerial warfare service branch of the United States during and immediately after World War I ...

were to target the Romanian oil fields together with the plants for making artificial oil and oil shortage facilities within Germany itself, then the war would be won, a strategy known as the "

Oil Plan The ''Plan for Completion of '' he' Combined Bomber Offensive'' was a strategic bombing recommendation made by HQ USSTAF for the Allies of World War II to target Axis petroleum/oil/lubrication (POL) targets prior to the Normandy Landings. The Pl ...

". By early 1944, Rostow had finally won over General

Carl Spaatz Carl Andrew Spaatz (born Spatz; June 28, 1891 – July 14, 1974), nicknamed "Tooey", was an American World War II general. As commander of Strategic Air Forces in Europe in 1944, he successfully pressed for the bombing of the enemy's oil produc ...

to the merits of the "Oil Plan". In early 1944, there was much debate about the merits of the "Oil Plan" vs. the "Transportation Plan" of targeting the

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

and French railroad system. The "Transportation Plan" was implemented first as part of the run-up to Operation Overlord. The "Oil Plan" began to be implemented as a strategy by the Army Air Force in May 1944, which Rostow later called a disastrous error, claiming if the "Oil Plan" had been adopted earlier, the war would have been won far earlier. He also claimed that the United States would have entered into the Cold War in a far stronger position as he always maintained that if "Oil Plan" had been adopted earlier it would have allowed the

U.S. Armed Forces The United States Armed Forces are the military forces of the United States. The armed forces consists of six service branches: the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. The president of the United States is the ...

to push deeper into

Central Europe Central Europe is an area of Europe between Western Europe and Eastern Europe, based on a common historical, social and cultural identity. The Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) between Catholicism and Protestantism significantly shaped the ar ...

and even into Eastern Europe. Based on his World War II experiences, Rostow became a convinced advocate of strategical bombing, arguing that it was the bombing campaign against Germany's cities that had won the war. For his work with the Enemy Objectives Unit during the war, Rostow was awarded an OBE. In 1945, immediately after the war, Rostow became assistant chief of the German-Austrian Economic Division in the United States Department of State in Washington, D.C. Rostow was invited to part in the

United States Strategic Bombing Survey The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) was a written report created by a board of experts assembled to produce an impartial assessment of the effects of the Anglo-American strategic bombing of Nazi Germany during the European theatre o ...

(USSBS), an assessment of the effects of the strategical bombing campaign on Germany's economy, but he declined. Several of Rostow's future foes in the 1960s such as George Ball, John Kenneth Galbraith and

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. (; born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; October 15, 1917 – February 28, 2007) was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a sp ...

did take part in the USSBS, and came away convinced that the strategical bombing campaign did not cripple the German economy as its advocates had promised, an experience that led these men to doubt the efficacy of bombing North Vietnam. Through the "Oil Plan" did indeed work as Rostow had promised, those taking part in the USSBS also noted that German industrial production peaked in December 1944, which led them to doubt the effects of strategical bombing as a way of breaking a nation's economy. In 1946, he returned to Oxford as the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History. In 1947, he became the assistant to the Executive Secretary of the

Economic Commission for Europe The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE or UNECE) is one of the five regional commissions under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Economic and Social Council. It was established in order to promote economic cooperation and i ...

, and was involved in the development of the

Marshall Plan The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative enacted in 1948 to provide foreign aid to Western Europe. The United States transferred over $13 billion (equivalent of about $ in ) in economic re ...

. One of Rostow's colleagues recalled: "In early 1946, Walt Rostow had a revelation that the unity of Germany could not be achieved without the unity of Europe, and that the unity of Europe could best be approached crabwise through technical cooperation in economic matters, rather than bluntly in diplomatic negotiations". Rostow's writings on the subject of European economic unity attracted the attention of Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, and ultimately

Jean Monnet Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet (; 9 November 1888 – 16 March 1979) was a French civil servant, entrepreneur, diplomat, financier, administrator, and political visionary. An influential supporter of European unity, he is considered one of the ...

, the French diplomat regarded as the "father" of the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 that became the

European Economic Community The European Economic Community (EEC) was a regional organization created by the Treaty of Rome of 1957,Today the largely rewritten treaty continues in force as the ''Treaty on the functioning of the European Union'', as renamed by the Lisbo ...

in 1957. Rostow spent a year at

Cambridge University , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions. He was professor of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1950 to 1961, and a staff member at the Center for International Studies (CIS) at the

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

from 1951 to 1961. The North Korean invasion of South Korea decisively altered Rostow's thinking about the Soviet Union. Until the Korean War, Rostow had believed that the Soviet system would ultimately "mellow" on its own accord and he had also viewed the Cold War as a largely diplomatic conflict as opposed to a military struggle. The North Korean aggression against South Korea convinced him that the Cold War required a more militarized foreign policy as he called for greater defense spending in a speech in the fall of 1950 so a "larger full mobilization could be carried out quickly." To pay for the higher amount of defense spending, Rostow urged the American people to accept the need for a "very high level of

taxation A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a governmental organization in order to fund government spending and various public expenditures (regional, local, or ...

appropriated equally". From late 1951 to August 1952, Rostow headed the Soviet Vulnerabilities Project. The project, which was sponsored by the CIS and received significant support from the U.S. government, sought to identify Soviet vulnerabilities with regard to political/ psychological warfare, and it received contributions from top

Sovietologist Kremlinology is the study and analysis of the politics and policies of the Soviet Union while Sovietology is the study of politics and policies of both the Soviet Union and former communist states more generally. These two terms were synonymous unt ...

and psychological warfare specialists. In June 1955, Rostow headed a group of stalwart cold warriors who were called the '' Quantico Vulnerabilities Panel'' which issued a report that advocated nuclear coercion of the Soviet Union. Although the experts were invited by Nelson Rockefeller, their proposal ran contrary to the policy of the Eisenhower administration. In 1954, Rostow advised President

Dwight Eisenhower Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (born David Dwight Eisenhower; ; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was an American military officer and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, ...

on economic and foreign policy, and in 1958 he became a speechwriter for him. In May 1954, Rostow was deeply shocked when he heard of the

French Union The French Union () was a political entity created by the French Fourth Republic to replace the old French colonial empire system, colloquially known as the " French Empire" (). It was the formal end of the "indigenous" () status of French subje ...

defeat at the

Battle of Dien Bien Phu The Battle of Dien Bien Phu (french: Bataille de Diên Biên Phu ; vi, Chiến dịch Điện Biên Phủ, ) was a climactic confrontation of the First Indochina War that took place between 13 March and 7 May 1954. It was fought between the ...

, expressing his disgust that French leaders had failed to create a political alignment which would "effectively rally the Vietnamese against the Communists". Rostow believed the Communist Viet Minh fighting for independence from France were a small, radical terrorist minority entirely unrepresentative of the

Vietnamese people The Vietnamese people ( vi, người Việt, lit=Viet people) or Kinh people ( vi, người Kinh) are a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to modern-day Northern Vietnam and Southern China (Jing Islands, Dongxing, Guangxi). The native lang ...

, the majority of whom he believed supported the French-dominated, but nominally independent

State of Vietnam The State of Vietnam ( vi, Quốc gia Việt Nam; Chữ Nôm: 國家越南; french: État du Viêt-Nam) was a governmental entity in Southeast Asia that existed from 1949 until 1955, first as a member of the French Union and later as a country ...

created in 1950. At the same time, he lashed out at Eisenhower for "refusing to involve American units in combat" as a plan had been drafted code-named Operation Vulture calling for the American intervention in the

First Indochina War The First Indochina War (generally known as the Indochina War in France, and as the Anti-French Resistance War in Vietnam) began in French Indochina from 19 December 1946 to 20 July 1954 between France and Việt Minh ( Democratic Republic of ...

with

tactical nuclear weapons A tactical nuclear weapon (TNW) or non-strategic nuclear weapon (NSNW) is a nuclear weapon that is designed to be used on a battlefield in military situations, mostly with friendly forces in proximity and perhaps even on contested friendly territo ...

. Eisenhower had Operation Vulture contingent upon British involvement, and when the British predictably refused to become involved, used that as an excuse not to execute Operation Vulture. In August 1954, Rostow and fellow

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

-connected MIT economics professor Max F. Millikan convinced Eisenhower to massively increase US foreign aid for development as part of a policy of spreading what he saw as "American-style"

economic growth Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of ...

in Asia and elsewhere, backed by the military. Unlike many of the first generation of "Cold Warriors" who saw the Cold War in essentially Euro-centric terms, Rostow viewed the Cold War as a global struggle in which the

Third World The term "Third World" arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Western European nations and their allies represented the "First W ...

was its most important battlefield. Rostow often accused people such as

George F. Kennan George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly hist ...

and Dean Acheson of being

racists Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism ...

because they viewed Europe as being far more important than

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an area ...

. On 26 February 1958, Rostow first met Senator

, who was impressed with the academic who understood power. On 27 February 1958, Rostow appeared as a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where as prearranged, Kennedy asked him a question about American economic aid to India, which led to the reply the "present aid program, which amounts to about $290 million this year, is grossly inadequate". The purpose of the testimony was to embarrass Eisenhower whom both men believed was neglecting the Third World. Rostow wrote two speeches for Kennedy, which he delivered on the Senate floor, attacking the Eisenhower administration for ignoring India, while the Soviet Union was not, and led ultimately India being granted $150 million in exchange credits from the Import-Export Bank later that year. In September 1958, Rostow left to take a professorship at Cambridge University, where he started writing his ''magnum opus'', a book intended to debunk Marxism as a theory that became ''The Stages of Economic Growth''. At a time when Nikita Khrushchev was boasting that the Soviet Union with its Five Year Plans would soon surpass the United States as the world's dominant economic power because what he interpreted as Marxist theory explained both the past and the future, there was much desire in the American political and intellectual establishments to assess its ideological dimensions.

''The Stages of Economic Growth''

In 1960, Rostow published ''The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto'', which proposed the Rostovian take-off model of economic growth, one of the major historical models of economic growth, which argues that economic modernization occurs in five basic stages of varying length: traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, and high

mass consumption Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. With the Industrial Revolution, but particularly in the 20th century, mass production led to overproduction—the su ...

. This became one of the important concepts in the theory of modernization in

social evolutionism Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or social evolution are theories of sociobiology and cultural evolution that describe how societies and culture change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend ...

. A product of its time and place, the book argued that one of the central problems of the Cold War as understood by American decision-makers, namely that there were millions of people living in poverty in the Third World whom Communism appealed to, could be solved by a policy of modernization to be fostered by American economic aid and growth. Rostow began the book with the question about where the world was going, asking "Is it taking us to Communism, or the affluent suburbs, nicely rounded out with social overhead capital; to destruction; to the moon; or where?" Using the Industrial Revolution in Britain as his case study, Rostow sought to rebut Karl Marx's construction of history, arguing that Marx's reading of British history, which he based much of his theories upon, was defective. The book was essentially a call for greater American involvement in the Third World as Rostow wrote that much of the Third World was struck in the "traditional stage" or "preconditions for take-off" stage, but with a little help from the US could reach the "take-off" stage. ''The Stages'' concluded: "We must demonstrate that the underdeveloped nations ... can move successfully through the preconditions into a well established take-off within the orbit of the democratic world, resisting the blandishments and temptations of Communism. This is, I believe, the most important item on the Western agenda.". Guy Ortolano argues that as an alternative to Marxist class-oriented analysis Rostow replaced class with nation as the agent of history.

British history The British Isles have witnessed intermittent periods of competition and cooperation between the people that occupy the various parts of Great Britain, the Isle of Man, Ireland, the Bailiwick of Guernsey, the Bailiwick of Jersey and the ...

then became the base for comparisons. However Rostow never explicitly offered the British case as the ideal model for nations to copy. Many commentators assumed that was his goal and attention turned to issues of

American exceptionalism American exceptionalism is the belief that the United States is inherently different from other nations.Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa. Another line of criticism was his thesis that societies based upon "mass production" and "mass consumption" like those of the West were the ideal society that everyone in the world wanted to emulate. At the time, critical reception was extremely favourable with a book review by Harry Schwarz in '' The New York Times'' speaking of Rostow's "impressive achievement" of writing "one of the most influential economic books of the twentieth century". In a review in '' The Christian Science Monitor'' wrote: "There is a sharp intelligence at work, producing paragraphs and pages which seem to distill events to an almost unbearable simplicity. This is the special quality of the writer and the book".

Adlai E. Stevenson II Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (; February 5, 1900 – July 14, 1965) was an American politician and diplomat who was twice the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. He was the grandson of Adlai Stevenson I, the 23rd vice president of ...

wrote in a letter to Rostow: "Is the future Rostowism vs. Marxism? If so, I am ready to vote now". Much of the success of ''The Stages'' at the time was due to the fact that it addressed seminal issues in a style that was easy to understand but was sufficiently intellectual enough not to be dismissed as facile and shallow. Like the various theories of Marxism that he had hoped to debunk, Rostow offered up a

grand theory Grand may refer to: People with the name * Grand (surname) * Grand L. Bush (born 1955), American actor * Grand Mixer DXT, American turntablist * Grand Puba (born 1966), American rapper Places * Grand, Oklahoma * Grand, Vosges, village and comm ...

, in this case, the "modernization theory" that explained the past and predicted the future. The Swiss scholar

Gilbert Rist Gilbert Rist (born 16 July 1938), is a Swiss honorary professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. He is best known for his study, ''The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith'', w ...

wrote of "Rostow's marvelous fresco of humanity marching towards greater happiness" and his theories as "Marxism without Marx" as Rostow asserted that capitalism was inevitably destined to triumph because, in his view, it was the superior system. The American historian Michael Shafer wrote about the

modernization theory Modernization theory is used to explain the process of modernization within societies. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and a partial reading of Max Weber, ...

as "a logical construct, deduced from a set of universal axioms abstracted from the realm of human and temporal contingencies". In South Korea, at the time a Third World nation, much interest in Rostow's book was expressed by both economists and policy-makers. Rostow's concept of "economic take-off" especially appealed to the South Korean president, General

Park Chung-hee Park Chung-hee (, ; 14 November 1917 – 26 October 1979) was a South Korean politician and army general who served as the dictator of South Korea from 1961 until his assassination in 1979; ruling as an unelected military strongman from 1961 ...

, who often used that phrase in his speeches calling for South Koreans to work harder so that their nation could rise up to a First World economy. Park, who seized power in a 1961 coup d'état, starting in 1962 inaugurated a policy of five year plans under which the South Korean '' chaebol'' had to meet certain targets set by the government as part of the push to reach the "economic take-off" stage. A 1969 book ''Theory and Condition of Korean Economic Development'' published by the government had 17 essays by leading economists, of which half described sought to apply the theories set out in ''The Stages of Economic Growth'' to South Korea.

Service under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations

''The Stages of Economic Growth'' impressed presidential candidate

, who appointed Rostow as one of his political advisers, and sought his advice. After attempting unsuccessfully to be appointed to a major post under the Eisenhower administration, Rostow decided to try his luck with Kennedy in 1960. During the 1960 presidential election, Rostow served as a speech-writer and adviser for the Kennedy campaign, where he became known as an "effervescent idea man". Rostow wrote the speech calling for a " New Frontier", which Kennedy gave at the

1960 Democratic National Convention The 1960 Democratic National Convention was held in Los Angeles, California, on July 11–15, 1960. It nominated Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts for president and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas for vice president. ...

. The favorable reception to the "New Frontier" speech led Kennedy to promise Rostow a senior position if he won the election. Rostow also coined the slogan of Kennedy's 1960 campaign "Let's Get the Country Moving Again". Initially, Kennedy wanted to give Rostow a major post in his administration. After Rostow wrote a policy paper in December 1960 to outline the incoming Kennedy administration's "

flexible response Flexible response was a defense strategy implemented by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to address the Kennedy administration's skepticism of Dwight Eisenhower's New Look and its policy of massive retaliation. Flexible response calls for mutual deterre ...

" nuclear posture to replace the Eisenhower administration's " massive retaliation" nuclear doctrine, in which he stressed that the United States should be willing to use nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia to counter a "possible breakout" by China, the man whom Kennedy nominated to serve as his secretary of state Dean Rusk, vetoed Rostow's appointment. When Kennedy became president in 1961, he appointed Rostow as deputy to his national security assistant

McGeorge Bundy McGeorge "Mac" Bundy (March 30, 1919 – September 16, 1996) was an American academic who served as the U.S. National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 through 1966. He was president of the Ford Foun ...

. Though Rostow was just Bundy's deputy, in practice he served as an equal as initially Kennedy was greatly influenced by the advice he received from the renowned, world famous economist. Just before Kennedy was inaugurated as president on 20 January 1961, on 6 January 1961, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech in Moscow declaring that the Soviet Union was allegedly able and willing to support any "

war of national liberation Wars of national liberation or national liberation revolutions are conflicts fought by nations to gain independence. The term is used in conjunction with wars against foreign powers (or at least those perceived as foreign) to establish separat ...

" anywhere in the Third World. Khrushchev's speech was largely a response to the Sino-Soviet split of 1960 as Mao Zedong had accused Khrushchev of " revisionism" and denounced the Soviet Union for not supporting Third World anti-colonial and nationalist movements. As such, Mao announced that he regarded himself as the proper leader of the world Communist movement, causing Khrushchev to strike back with his speech in Moscow announcing his willingness to support "wars of national liberation". Missing the context of Sino-Soviet rivalry, Kennedy and his advisers regarded Khrushchev's speech as a bold new Soviet gambit for world domination, making the subject of the Third World a key concern for him. The first meeting of the National Security Council under Kennedy on 28 January 1961 was entirely devoted to the subject of the Third World with the president reading out excerpts of Khrushchev's "wars of national liberation speech" to underline the danger. Rostow, who always saw the Third World as the main "battlefield" of the Cold War, enjoyed much influence with the new president at first. As the apostle of the modernization theory, Rostow laid out policies to counter Communism in the Third World. Rostow supported the

Bay of Pigs invasion The Bay of Pigs Invasion (, sometimes called ''Invasión de Playa Girón'' or ''Batalla de Playa Girón'' after the Playa Girón) was a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in 1961 by Cuban exiles, covertly f ...

, albeit with reservations, arguing the existence of a Communist government in Cuba was unacceptable as otherwise the rest of Latin America might be "infected" with Communism. Along the same lines, Rostow was the main inspiration for the

Alliance for Progress The Alliance for Progress ( es, Alianza para el Progreso, links=no), initiated by U.S. President John F. Kennedy on March 13, 1961, ostensibly aimed to establish economic cooperation between the U.S. and Latin America. Governor Luis Muñoz Mar� ...

, a $20 billion aid program for Latin America launched with great fanfare by Kennedy in 1961 who in a speech written by Rostow spoke of how the Alliance for Progress would allow Latin America to reach the "economic take-off" stage of growth by having an annual growth rate of 2.5% (a target chosen by Rostow), which would end the appeal of Communism in Latin America forever. Rostow was also instrumental in persuading Kennedy that the best way to fight Communism in the Third World in general, not just Latin America, was to increase aid, and in 1961 American aid to the rest of the Third World went up to $4.5 billion from $2.5 billion in 1960. In a speech written by Rostow, Kennedy announced that the 1960s would be the "Decade of Development", saying that the United States was willing and able to furnish sufficient foreign aid to allow the Third World nations to reach the "economic take-off" stage. Rostow annoyed Kennedy as an "idea-a-minute man", causing him to complain that Rostow had too many ideas for his own good and was unable to focus on what was really important. Kennedy's main complaint was that Rostow would in a rapid-fire fashion offer up a deluge of ideas, which made him hard to follow. Kennedy had come into the White House in January 1961 as a confirmed hawk, who during the 1960 election had criticized Eisenhower as "soft on Communism" for not overthrowing Fidel Castro, but the disaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April had cooled his martial ardor. After the Bay of Pigs invasion, he came to distrust the hawkish advice he received from the

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

and the

Joint Chiefs of Staff The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) is the body of the most senior uniformed leaders within the United States Department of Defense, that advises the president of the United States, the secretary of defense, the Homeland Security Council and the ...

. As a result, Kennedy also rejected the hawkish advice he received from Rostow, charging the experts had all told him that the Bay of Pigs invasion could not possibly fail. Just after the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy rejected advice from Rostow to send U.S. troops to intervene in the Laotian Civil War. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith advised his friend Kennedy that Laos was not worth a war, and Kennedy himself noted to supply forces in Laos would present severe logistical problems. Finally remembering how the approach of American forces upon the Yalu river led to Chinese intervention in the Korean War, the president was concerned that intervening in Laos would cause a war with China that he did not want. Instead, Kennedy sent the diplomat W. Averell Harriman to negotiate an agreement to "neutralize" Laos, which marked the beginning of the feud between Rostow and Harriman as the former started to see the latter as an appeaser. Kennedy also charged that Rostow was too fixated on Vietnam, saying he seemed to have an obsession with that country as he spent much time talking about Vietnam. Rostow believed in the " Domino Theory", predicating that if South Vietnam fell, the rest of Southeast Asia would also fall like so many dominoes, and ultimately India would fall as well. As early as June 1961, Rostow was advising Kennedy to bomb North Vietnam. During the Berlin crisis of 1961, Rostow advised Kennedy: "We must find ways of putting pressure on Khrushchev's side of the line with conventional forces or other means...We must begin now to present Khrushchev with the risk that if he heightens the Berlin crisis, we and the

West Germans West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 ...

may take action that will cause East Germany to come unstruck". The particular action that Rostow advised Kennedy to take was to "take and hold a piece of territory in East Germany that Khrushchev may not wish to lose (for example, Magdeburg)". Kennedy rejected this advice as too dangerous, stating that having U.S forces seize part of East Germany would almost certainly cause a

nuclear war Nuclear warfare, also known as atomic warfare, is a theoretical military conflict or prepared political strategy that deploys nuclear weaponry. Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction; in contrast to conventional warfare, nuclear ...

with the Soviet Union. Later that year, Rostow became Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. At the time, Kennedy commented: "Walt is a fountain of ideas; perhaps one in ten of them is absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately six or seven are not merely unsound, but dangerously so. I admire his creativity, but it will be more comfortable to have him creating at some remove from the White House". Kennedy told Rostow that his being demoted from the White House to the State Department was because: "Over here in the White House we have to play with a very narrow range of choices...We can't do long-range planning; it has to be done over there. I want you to go over there and catch hold of the process at the level where it counts". Appealing to Kennedy's

Catholicism The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...

, Rostow complained that: "I am going from being a priest in Rome to being a

bishop A bishop is an ordained clergy member who is entrusted with a position of authority and oversight in a religious institution. In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance of dioceses. The role or office of bishop is ca ...

in the

provinces A province is almost always an administrative division within a country or state. The term derives from the ancient Roman ''provincia'', which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire's territorial possessions outsi ...

." In October 1961, Rostow went on a fact-finding mission with General

Maxwell Taylor Maxwell Davenport Taylor (August 26, 1901 – April 19, 1987) was a senior United States Army officer and diplomat of the mid-20th century. He served with distinction in World War II, most notably as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, ni ...

to South Vietnam and he returned full of enthusiasm for greater American involvement in what he stated "might be the last great confrontation" with Communism. The report that Taylor and Rostow wrote advocated that Kennedy sent between 6,000 and 8,000

U.S Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cla ...

troops to fight in South Vietnam under the guise of being "flood relief workers". Kennedy rejected the Taylor-Rostow report's recommendation that he sent troops to fight in South Vietnam, but accepted the report's other recommendations calling for more military and economic aid to South Vietnam. Karnow described Rostow as a man who "seemed to revel in the war" as it appeared that he wanted to prove that a short, bald, bespectacled New York intellectual could be just as hard, tough and macho as the idealized World War II veteran that Hollywood kept portraying in action films at the time. Rostow had served in World War II as an intelligence analysis with the task of selecting bombing targets in Germany, an important, but comfortable "desk job" that ensured he never saw combat, a point about which he was very sensitive. In February 1962, President Ngo Dinh Diem introduced the strategic hamlet program of forcibly relocating peasants to strategic hamlets as a way of severing the population from the

Viet Cong , , war = the Vietnam War , image = FNL Flag.svg , caption = The flag of the Viet Cong, adopted in 1960, is a variation on the flag of North Vietnam. Sometimes the lower stripe was green. , active ...

guerrillas. Though impetus for the

Strategic Hamlet Program The Strategic Hamlet Program (SHP; vi, Ấp Chiến lược, link=no ) was a plan by the government of South Vietnam in conjunction with the US government and ARPA during the Vietnam War to combat the communist insurgency by pacifying the coun ...

came from Diem, Rostow supported the program as a way of breaking down the "traditional person", arguing that the strategic hamlets would be agents of modernization. He remained baffled as to why the strategic hamlets were so unpopular with South Vietnamese peasants. In 1962, Rostow drafted the statement of Basic National Security Policy (BNSP), a 284-page document meant to outline the foreign policy of the Kennedy administration. Reflecting his interest in the modernization theory, Rostow identified the Third World, especially "the arc from Iran to Korea" as the most important "battlefield" of the Cold War. Through to some extent based upon the theory of "

containment Containment was a geopolitical strategic foreign policy pursued by the United States during the Cold War to prevent the spread of communism after the end of World War II. The name was loosely related to the term '' cordon sanitaire'', which ...

" as argued by

in the 1940s, Rostow's BNSP argued for the United States to promote economic growth in the Third World and for the creation of "a wider community of free nations, embracing Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East". Kennan who was serving as the US ambassador in Belgrade at the time reviewed the BNSP vigorously criticized the document. Kennan attacked Rostow's advocacy of a winnable nuclear war, writing he would "rather see my children dead" than live in a world devastated by nuclear war. Kennan also criticized Rostow's optimism about process in the Third World, writing that the Third World was hopelessly backward and might be a danger to the US if allowed to process. However, some of the statements in Kennan's critique, where he argued that a First World standard of living was "peculiar to peoples who have had their origins on or near the shores of the North Sea" or to nations descended from such peoples like the United States allowed Rostow to accuse Kennan with some justification of racism. During the

Cuban Missile Crisis The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis (of 1962) ( es, Crisis de Octubre) in Cuba, the Caribbean Crisis () in Russia, or the Missile Scare, was a 35-day (16 October – 20 November 1962) confrontation between the United ...

, Rostow was mostly excluded from the decision-making process, having only meeting with Kennedy during the crisis where he advised him to stop Soviet ships carrying oil to Cuba, advice that was not taken. Unaware that Kennedy had promised not to invade Cuba and to pull American missiles out of Turkey as part of the resolution, Rostow saw the Cuban Missile Crisis as a triumph, which proved the superior power of the United States. Inspired by the Cuban Missile crisis, Rostow on 28 November 1962 called in a memo for the bombing of North Vietnam, writing: "The whole lesson of the Cold War including the recent Cuba crisis is that Communists do not escalate in response to our actions". In 1962, Rostow started to advocate what became known in Washington as the "Rostow Thesis", namely if the United States bombed North Vietnam along the same lines that Germany and Japan were bombed in World War II, then the North Vietnamese would have to cease trying to overthrow the government of South Vietnam. In 1963, Rostow first advocated invading North Vietnam, arguing for American and South Vietnamese landings on the coast of North Vietnam as the prelude for reuniting Vietnam under the Saigon government. In a policy paper addressed to the Assistant Secretary of State for Asian Affairs, W. Averell Harriman, dated 2 February 1963, that began with the sentence: "Before you decide your old and respectful friend has gone off his rocker...", Rostow advocated invading North Vietnam. As the approach of U.S. troops to the

Yalu river The Yalu River, known by Koreans as the Amrok River or Amnok River, is a river on the border between North Korea and China. Together with the Tumen River to its east, and a small portion of Paektu Mountain, the Yalu forms the border between ...

in 1950 led to the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, it was generally accepted within Washington that invading North Vietnam would likewise lead to a war with China. For this reason, Harriman was not impressed with Rostow's paper and advised Kennedy to send Rostow back to his perch in academia, saying that Rostow was far too blasé about the possibility of a nuclear war with China. The Chinese nuclear program was well advanced by 1963, and in 1964 China exploded its first atomic bomb, followed by its first hydrogen bomb in 1967. Rostow underlined this consideration in paper addressed in July 1963, stating it would be best to invade North Vietnam before the Chinese "blow a nuclear device". Harriman was one of the richest men in the United States, who was very generous in donating to the Democratic Party, and as such served as a friend and adviser to every Democratic president from Roosevelt to Johnson. The persistence which Rostow advocated invading North Vietnam even after the first Chinese nuclear test in 1964 worried Harriman, and he consistently sought to club Rostow's influence, making him into one of Rostow's main enemies in Washington. After

Kennedy's assassination John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. CST in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was in the vehicle with ...

, his successor

promoted Rostow to

's job after he wrote Johnson's first State of the Union speech. Kennedy had generally ignored Rostow's advice, but Johnson started to pay attention to him after he wrote a paper in February 1964 stating a strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam would be enough to win the war. When the American ambassador to Laos,

William H. Sullivan William Healy Sullivan (October 12, 1922 – October 11, 2013) was an American Foreign Service career officer who served as ambassador to Laos from 1964 to 1969, the Philippines from 1973 to 1977, and Iran from 1977 to 1979. Early life and care ...

, wrote in February 1964 he did not believe a

strategic bombing Strategic bombing is a military strategy used in total war with the goal of defeating the enemy by destroying its morale, its economic ability to produce and transport materiel to the theatres of military operations, or both. It is a systematica ...

would be decisive as the Viet Cong had a "sustaining strength of their own", Rostow was ferocious, arguing the Viet Cong had no real basis of support in South Vietnam and only existed because North Vietnam was supporting them. The idea that Communism had an appeal to least some of South Vietnam's people was anathema to Rostow, who insisted that there was no civil war in South Vietnam and there was only a struggle between North Vietnam vs. South Vietnam. The papers Rostow wrote urged a policy of "graduated" pressure as the United States would steadily increase the level of bombing to such a point that it would ultimately lead to the destruction of North Vietnam's nascent industry. Unlike most American decision-makers, who knew nothing of Vietnam's history, Rostow had done much reading on the subject, and had learned that over the centuries that Chinese elites considered Vietnam a lost province which they would one day reclaim (Vietnam had been a Chinese province from 111 BC to 938 AD), leading to a long series of Vietnamese-Chinese wars as successive Vietnamese emperors fought off attempts by the

emperors of China ''Huangdi'' (), translated into English as Emperor, was the superlative title held by monarchs of China who ruled various imperial regimes in Chinese history. In traditional Chinese political theory, the emperor was considered the Son of Heave ...

to incorporate Vietnam into the middle kingdom. Knowing of the full depth of the Sino-Vietnamese enmity, Rostow reached the conclusion that Ho Chi Minh would not want his nation to draw too close to China, and as such, could not risk the destruction of North Vietnam's industry, which would leave North Vietnam entirely dependent upon China. One of Rostow's opponents, George Ball, argued that Ho's

Vietnamese nationalism Vietnamese nationalism ( vi, chủ nghĩa dân tộc Việt Nam / chủ nghĩa quốc gia Việt Nam, Chữ Hán: 主義民族越南 / 主義國家越南) is a form of nationalism that asserts the Vietnamese people are an independent nation and ...

would make him an Asian version of Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, a communist leader who wanted his nation to be independent of both Moscow and Beijing. Ball argued that South Vietnam was a poor and politically unstable ally that contributed little to American national security, and allowing Ho to reunify Vietnam would pose no danger to the United States. Rostow, by contrast, argued that South Vietnam was the crucial to American national security and to allow the first "domino" to fall would cause the other "dominoes" in Southeast Asia; in his mind, losing any nation to communism, even it was of the

Titoist Titoism is a political philosophy most closely associated with Josip Broz Tito during the Cold War. It is characterized by a broad Yugoslav identity, workers' self-management, a political separation from the Soviet Union, and leadership in th ...

type was unacceptable. Starting in February 1964, Rostow championed the idea of

Congress A congress is a formal meeting of the representatives of different countries, constituent states, organizations, trade unions, political parties, or other groups. The term originated in Late Middle English to denote an encounter (meeting of ...

giving President Johnson the power to wage war in Southeast Asia, an idea that he first suggested in February 1964. Rostow pointed out in a memo to the president that the degree of escalation in the Vietnam war envisioned by the administration would pose constitutional and legal problems as the constitution gave Congress, not the president, the right to declare war and the level of escalation envisioned would be a war in everything, but name. Rostow's solution to this problem was for Congress to pass a resolution giving the president the legal power to essentially wage a war in Vietnam. When Congress passed the

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the Southeast Asia Resolution, , was a joint resolution that the United States Congress passed on August 7, 1964, in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It is of historic significance because it gave U.S. pre ...

on 10 August 1964, which was the closest thing to a declaration of war that the United States had in Vietnam, Rostow was well pleased. About the

Gulf of Tonkin incident The Gulf of Tonkin incident ( vi, Sự kiện Vịnh Bắc Bộ) was an international confrontation that led to the United States engaging more directly in the Vietnam War. It involved both a proven confrontation on August 2, 1964, carried out b ...

that led to the resolution, Rostow later said: "We don't know what happened, but it had the desired effect". In the context of the 1964 election, Johnson found the idea of a gradual process of escalating American involvement in Vietnam appealing as it allowed him to present both as a "tough" president while also less extreme than the Republican opponent, Senator

Barry Goldwater Barry Morris Goldwater (January 2, 1909 – May 29, 1998) was an American politician and United States Air Force officer who was a five-term U.S. Senator from Arizona (1953–1965, 1969–1987) and the Republican Party nominee for presid ...

. Rostow's consistent advocacy of a strategic bombing against North Vietnam as the decisive way to win the war endeared him to Johnson as it promised a "cheap" victory that would not cost too many American lives. In November 1964, Rostow advised Johnson to commit U.S. ground forces to Vietnam to prove that "we are prepared to face down any form of escalation" and to send "massive" naval and air forces to strike North Vietnam and if necessary, China as well. In a memo to Johnson, Rostow wrote: "They he Vietnamese Communistswill not actually accept a setback until they are sure that we mean it" and needed to know that "they now confront a LBJ who has made up his mind".

National Security Advisor

As national security advisor, Rostow was responsible for developing the government's policy in Vietnam, and was convinced that the war could be won, becoming Johnson's main war hawk and playing an important role in bringing Johnson's presidency to an end. Rostow was extremely close to Johnson, later recalling::

Johnson took me into his house as well as his staff, into his family; took my family in as well. It was an open-hearted, human relationship. I came to hold the greatest possible affection for him, love for him, as well as respect for the job. I had an enormous compassion for what he was bearing during those years, for what the family was bearing.

At the time the appointment of Rostow as National Security Advisor was well received with almost all of the American media praising Johnson for appointing such an eminent economist and historian to advise him. In an editorial ''The New York Times'' wrote that Rostow was:

a scholar with an original mind as well as an experienced official and policy planner ... one of the architects of John F. Kennedy's foreign policy ... Mr. Rostow, of course, will be only one of the President's principal advisers, and Mr. Johnson will make his own decisions. But the appointment places beside the President an independent and cultivated mind that, as in the Bundy era, should assure comprehension both of the intricacies of world problems and of the options among which the White House must choose. No President could ask for more.

Johnson stated at the time that: "I'm getting Walt Rostow as my intellectual. He's not your intellectual. He's not Bundy's intellectual. He's not Schlesinger's intellectual. He's not Galbraith's intellectual. He's going to be my Goddamn intellectual!" Johnson because of his origins as a man from the impoverished, harsh world of Texas who spoke his English with a heavy Texas twang and who had rather crude manners always felt a certain sense of inferiority when dealing with patrician

Ivy League The Ivy League is an American collegiate athletic conference comprising eight private research universities in the Northeastern United States. The term ''Ivy League'' is typically used beyond the sports context to refer to the eight schools ...

intellectuals like McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith, who all served under Kennedy. Kennedy and his closest advisers always regarded Johnson as "

white trash White trash is a derogatory racial and class-related slur used in American English to refer to poor white people, especially in the rural southern United States. The label signifies a social class inside the white population and especially a ...

" from Texas, a vulgar man whose company had to be endured rather than enjoyed. Johnson felt that Rostow's status as a Jewish intellectual from New York who likewise worked his way up from poverty made him into a kindred soul in a way that "Kennedy's intellectuals" never could be for him. One of Johnson's favorite advisers,

Jack Valenti Jack Joseph Valenti (September 5, 1921 – April 26, 2007) was an American political advisor and lobbyist who served as a Special Assistant to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was also the longtime president of the Motion Picture Associatio ...

, recommended Rostow to the president. Johnson's background growing up poor on a farm in Texas left him with a sympathy for the underprivileged, and he was very interested in Rostow's plans for Third World development. Rostow later recalled about Johnson: "he was always for the underdog". Through Johnson believed that Africa was a hopeless disaster, he had great hopes for developing Latin America and Asia, remembering how the New Deal infrastructure projects of the 1930s had transformed Texas, until then a very backward state. As Rostow's specialization was the subject of the economic modernization of the Third World, his area of expertise appealed to the president, who often talked grandly of his plans to bring electricity to the rural areas of South Vietnam as the necessary prelude to ending poverty in South Vietnam. Finally, Rostow's consistently optimistic appraisal of the Vietnam war appealed to Johnson while his reputation as a hardliner was meant to signal that Johnson was prepared to do whatever it took to win the war. The abrasive Johnson, who was notorious within Washington for mistreating his staff, "initiated" Rostow by humiliating him by first leaking news of his appointment to the press, and then calling up to accuse him of being the leak. After unleashing a torrent of obscurities and screaming at him, the president hung up the phone without giving Rostow a chance to reply. Johnson always "initiated" his staff by humiliating them in some way to assert his dominance, and Rostow seems not to have taken it personally. Rostow consistently argued to Johnson that any effort at a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War would be "capitulation". In his reports to Johnson, Rostow always put the emphasis on information that portrayed the United States as winning, becoming Johnson's favourite adviser on foreign affairs. The optimistic reports that the hawkish Rostow wrote were much preferred by the president to the more pessimistic reports written by the "doves" in the administration. A typical memo from Rostow on 25 June 1966 read: "Mr. President, you can smell it all over. Hanoi's operation, backed by the Chicoms hinese Communists is no longer being regarded as the wave of the future out there. U.S. power is beginning to be felt". The Ambassador-At-Large W. Averell Harriman called Rostow "America's Rasputin" as he considered him to have a sinister power over Johnson's mind, as he always pressed the president to take a harder line on Vietnam against the advice of his more dovish staff, Harriman included. Johnson was not enthusiastic about the Vietnam War, later telling his biographer Doris Kearns in a very gendered language that the

Great Society The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964–65. The term was first coined during a 1964 commencement address by President Lyndon B. Johnson at the University ...

was "the woman I really loved" while the Vietnam War was "that bitch of a war on the other side of the world". As a president, Johnson had often in private complained that he much rather focus on his "Great Society" program intended to end poverty and

racism in America Racism in the United States comprises negative attitudes and views on race or ethnicity which are related to each other, are held by various people and groups in the United States, and have been reflected in discriminatory laws, practices and ...

and that the Vietnam War was an unwanted distraction. Given these views, Harriman found it mystifying that Johnson should shun his advice about finding a way for the United States to gracefully exit Vietnam while accepting the counsel of Rostow. Johnson remembered how the " Loss of China" in 1949 had badly damaged the Democratic administration of Harry S. Truman who was excoriated by the Republicans as "soft on communism" and criminally negligent in allowing the "loss of China", attacks that resonated with the American people at the time. Johnson once told a reporter Joseph Kraft, in an "off-the-record" conversation:

I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day the Communists took over China. I believe that the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of
Joe McCarthy Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a Republican United States Senate, U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarth ...
. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam ... I don't give a damn about these little pinkos on the campuses, they're just waving their diapers and bellyaching because they don't want to fight. The great black beast for us is the right wing. If we don't give this war over soon they'll put enormous pressure on us to turn it into an Armageddon and wreck all our other programs.

Johnson was fearful that if he allowed the "loss of Vietnam", it would cause a similar right-wing backlash that would allow a "reactionary" Republican to win the presidency and for the GOP to take control of Congress, and together they would end his Great Society program along with the rest of Johnson's civil rights legislation. Much of Rostow's influence on Johnson was due to his insistence that to protect his domestic achievements that Johnson had to fight the Vietnam war, and moreover that the war was eminently winnable provided that the correct policies were followed. For Johnson, Rostow offered him a way out of an unpleasant situation of fighting a war in Vietnam that he rather not fight to protect the Great Society by promising him what Rostow insisted was a path to victory, as Rostow noted that presidents who win wars were usually also popular presidents. In particular, Rostow persistently argued to the president that a programme of sustained bombing would force North Vietnam to cease its support of the Viet Cong and thus win the war. Rostow believed that strategic bombing alone would be enough to force North Vietnam to capitulate, and became the main advocate in the White House of

Operation Rolling Thunder Operation Rolling Thunder was a gradual and sustained aerial bombardment campaign conducted by the United States (U.S.) 2nd Air Division (later Seventh Air Force), U.S. Navy, and Republic of Vietnam Air Force (RVNAF) against the Democratic Rep ...

, the bombing offensive launched against North Vietnam in February 1965. Initially, Rostow believed in only bombing certain targets as a way of warning Hanoi to cease supporting the Viet Cong, but he changed his mind, coming to favour an all-out bombing offensive that would completely destroy the economy of North Vietnam. Reflecting the lessons of the Oil Plan, Rostow in particular believed that the destruction of the North Vietnamese oil shortage facilities and the hydroelectric grid would so economically cripple North Vietnam that the war would be won, and he pressed Johnson to end the restrictions on bombing oil shortage tanks and hydro plants. Rostow was opposed by Harriman, who like him had spent much of World War II living in England; however, Harriman had first-hand observed how German bombing of British cities had hardened the will of the British public, and he now argued that American bombing on North Vietnam was having the same effect on the North Vietnamese public. The fact that Rostow had arrived in London in fall of 1942, when the worse of the German bombing was over, while Harriman as a special envoy for President

Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As th ...

had witnessed first-hand the "Blitz" against London and other British cities in the winter of 1940–41 contributed to their differing assessments of the effects of bombing. Based on his experiences in wartime, Harriman called the Rostow Thesis "the stick without the carrot". The first crisis that confronted Johnson and Rostow was the

Buddhist Uprising The Buddhist Uprising of 1966 (), or more widely known in Vietnam as the Crisis in Central Vietnam (), was a period of civil and military unrest in South Vietnam, largely focused in the I Corps area in the north of the country in central Vietnam. ...

in South Vietnam where an attempt by Air Marshal Nguyễn Cao Kỳ to dismiss General

Nguyễn Chánh Thi Nguyễn Chánh Thi (; 23 February 1923 – 23 June 2007) was an officer in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). He is best known for being involved in frequent coups in the 1960s and wielding substantial influence as a key member of ...

led to a civil war within the civil war as units of the

Army of the Republic of Vietnam The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN; ; french: Armée de la république du Viêt Nam) composed the ground forces of the South Vietnamese military from its inception in 1955 to the Fall of Saigon in April 1975. It is estimated to have suffe ...

fought one another, much to the consternation of Johnson who could not believe that America's allies in South Vietnam were fighting each other. Rostow for his part advised the president to fully support Kỳ, charging that the Buddhist Struggle Movement which had rallied behind Thi was being used by the Communists. Rostow told Johnson: "We are faced with the classic revolutionary situation-like Paris in 1789 and St. Petersburg in 1917". Rostow claimed that the Buddhists were just being used by the Viet Cong just as Lenin used Kerensky to take power in 1917, but fortunately American forces were there to save the day. Rostow concluded: "In the face of defeat in the field and Kerensky's weaknesses, Lenin took over in November. This is about what would happen in Saigon if we were not there, but we are there". As the civil war within the civil war between Kỳ and Thi greatly disturbed Johnson, Rostow's advice to side with Kỳ was decisive. The fact that Kỳ expressed much admiration for Hitler, who in his own words was his "only hero" apparently did not offend Rostow. One of Rostow's aides later wrote "Rostow was like Rasputin to a tsar under siege". Rostow's opponent, George Ball wrote about Rostow's influence: "He played to Johnson's weaker side, always creating an image of Johnson standing against the forces of evil. He used to tell him how Lincoln was abused by everybody when he was at a certain stage of the

Civil War A civil war or intrastate war is a war between organized groups within the same state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policie ...

...He spent a great deal of time creating a kind of fantasy for the president". In August 1966, Harriman warned Rostow against escalating the war to the brink of a nuclear war with China to best preserve life on plant Earth, only to be told "it is only in extreme crises that such settlements will come". At one point in 1966–67, the hawkish Rostow advocated that the United States invade North Vietnam, even if it meant war with China, a course of action that McNamara rejected as likely to cause a nuclear war. Rostow always maintained that had his advice to the president to invade North Vietnam been taken in 1966 or 1967, the war would have been won, telling Karnow in an interview in 1981 that he was disappointed that Johnson rejected his advice to invade North Vietnam. Johnson remembered how the approach of American forces upon the Yalu river in 1950 to China intervening in the Korean War, and he was very fearful that an American invasion of North Vietnam would once again led to a war with China, which now had nuclear weapons. For this reason, Johnson was always against invading North Vietnam as the risks of a nuclear war with China were too awful for him to consider. Through Rostow was disappointed that Johnson rejected his advice to invade North Vietnam, he knew better than to stridently press that idea as that would annoy the president, and instead he brought up the idea of invading North Vietnam every so often a couple of months after Johnson last rejected it. Rostow also chaired a secret "psychological strategy committee" whose purpose was to supply "correct facts" about the Vietnam war to Congress, the media and the American people in general. In June 1966,

Janusz Lewandowski Janusz Antoni Lewandowski (; born 13 June 1951) is a Polish politician and economist belonging to the Gdańsk liberals group, and a former member of the European Parliament (elected on 13 June 2004), Chairman of the Committee on Budgets. On 27 ...

, the Polish delegate to the International Control Commission, which was supposed to police the Geneva Accords of 1954, contacted Giovanni D'Orlandi, the Italian ambassador to South Vietnam with a peace offer. Lewandowski stated he just spoken with Ho Chi Minh, whom he claimed wanted a "political compromise" to end the war and would go "quite a long way" for such a settlement. Lewandowski reported that Ho was willing to drop his demand that the government of South Vietnam be overthrown, though he preferred that somebody else other than Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky serve as premier; asked only the National Liberation Front (better known as the Viet Cong) "take part" in negotiations, instead of serving in the government; and were willing to accept a "reasonable calendar" for the withdrawal of American forces instead demanding their immediate pull-out. The Ambassador-at-Large Harriman and his deputy, the former CIA agent Chester Cooper, were intrigued by the Polish offer, which was backed by the Soviet Union. Ever since 1960, Mao Zedong had been accusing the Soviet Union of capitulating to capitalism and abandoning its principles, and a Sino-Soviet competition had broken out about which of the two states was most willing to support North Vietnam. Lewandowski stated that the Soviets were tired of this economically exhausting competition because every time China increased its support for North Vietnam, the Soviets had to increase their support on an even greater scale just to rebut the Chinese claim that they were "selling out". D'Orlandi was able to arrange for Lewandowski to meet Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, and the talks went well. By November 1966, it was arranged that John Gronouski, the American ambassador in Warsaw, would meet with North Vietnamese diplomats the next month for peace talks in what was code-named

Operation Marigold Marigold was an American codename for a failed secret attempt to reach a compromise solution to the Vietnam War that was carried out by the Polish diplomat Janusz Lewandowski, a member of the International Control Commission, and the Italian ambass ...

. By December 1966, United States Air Force aircraft bombed oil facilities and railroad yards in Hanoi, which led the Poles to warn if the U.S. continued to bomb Hanoi, the talks would be aborted. Rostow told the president that he believed that Operation Marigold was a "trap" and the North Vietnamese demand that Hanoi not be bombed anymore showed the bombing campaign was indeed working as he promised it would. On December 6, 1966, Johnson refused Harriman's request to cease bombing Hanoi and a week later, the planned talks in Warsaw were cancelled as the North Vietnamese announced that there would be no peace talks as long as North Vietnam was being bombed. In January 1967, Rostow reported to Johnson that the Viet Cong were "disintegrating" under the American pressure, writing optimistically that the major problem for the Americans in the coming year would be to find the best way to integrate those Viet Cong guerrillas who had surrendered back into civilian life. In a further hopeful sign he reported to the president in the same month that the bloody chaos of the Cultural Revolution had pushed China to the brink of civil war as "Mao's own prestige has been seriously, perhaps irretrievably, tarnished in this yet unavailing fracas". With China collapsing into chaos, he believed that the Chinese would be limited in their ability to support North Vietnam for some time to come. In fact, Mao continued to support North Vietnam during the war with the war serving as a foreign policy counterpart to the Cultural Revolution as the "Great Helmsman" believed that extreme violence was necessary to maintain Communist "purity". The fact that some of Mao's targets in the Cultural Revolution such as

Liu Shaoqi Liu Shaoqi ( ; 24 November 189812 November 1969) was a Chinese revolutionary, politician, and theorist. He was Chairman of the NPC Standing Committee from 1954 to 1959, First Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1956 to 1966 and ...

and

Deng Xiaoping Deng Xiaoping (22 August 1904 – 19 February 1997) was a Chinese revolutionary leader, military commander and statesman who served as the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from December 1978 to November 1989. After CCP ...

were opposed to increased aid to North Vietnam, preferring that the money be spent on Chinese development instead, gave him an additional reason to support North Vietnam. In November 1966, the

Israeli Defense Force The Israel Defense Forces (IDF; he, צְבָא הַהֲגָנָה לְיִשְׂרָאֵל , ), alternatively referred to by the Hebrew-language acronym (), is the national military of the State of Israel. It consists of three service branch ...

raided the village of Samu' in the Jordanian-occupied West Bank, a move which angered Rostow as he told the Israeli ambassador

Abba Eban Abba Solomon Meir Eban (; he, אבא אבן ; born Aubrey Solomon Meir Eban; 2 February 1915 – 17 November 2002) was an Israeli diplomat and politician, and a scholar of the Arabic and Hebrew languages. During his career, he served as Fo ...

that King

Hussein of Jordan Hussein bin Talal ( ar, الحسين بن طلال, ''Al-Ḥusayn ibn Ṭalāl''; 14 November 1935 – 7 February 1999) was King of Jordan from 11 August 1952 until his death in 1999. As a member of the Hashemite dynasty, the royal family of ...

was an American ally and Johnson very strongly disapproved of the raid. Rostow stated: "Israel for some Machiavellian reason, wanted a leftist regime on the Left bank

f Jordan F, or f, is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ef'' (pronounced ), and the plural is ''efs''. Hist ...

so that it could then have a polarized situation in which the Russians would be backing the Arabs and the U.S. backing Israel, and that Israel would not be in an embarrassing position where one of its friends among the Great Power would also be a friend of an Arab country". In February 1967, the Soviet Premier

Alexei Kosygin Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin ( rus, Алексе́й Никола́евич Косы́гин, p=ɐlʲɪkˈsʲej nʲɪkɐˈla(j)ɪvʲɪtɕ kɐˈsɨɡʲɪn; – 18 December 1980) was a Soviet statesman during the Cold War. He served as the Premi ...

visited London, and the British Prime Minister

Harold Wilson James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, (11 March 1916 – 24 May 1995) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from October 1964 to June 1970, and again from March 1974 to April 1976. He ...

tried to act as a mediator to end the Vietnam war, offering to serve as an honest broker. Wilson had been asked in 1965 to send a British contingent to fight in Vietnam, but as his Labour Party was stoutly opposed to Britain fighting in Vietnam, he had refused, a move that the normally Anglophile Secretary of State Dean Rusk called a "betrayal". To end a running sore in

Anglo-American relations Anglo-Americans are people who are English-speaking inhabitants of Anglo-America. It typically refers to the nations and ethnic groups in the Americas that speak English as a native language, making up the majority of people in the world who spe ...

as Wilson was caught between the Americans who were pressuring him to send British forces to Vietnam and his own party who were pressuring not to, the prime minister was keen to end the Vietnam war. Kosygin told Wilson that Soviet influence in North Vietnam was limited as the North Vietnamese sought to play the Soviet Union off against China, but if the Americans were willing to cease their bombing of North Vietnam, the Soviet government would indeed pressure Ho Chi Minh to open peace talks. Speaking on what he thought was a secure telephone line from the Soviet embassy in London to the Kremlin, Kosygin told the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev that there was a "great opportunity for peace", through in the same call he admitted that the militant, ultra-leftwing line taken by China would pose problems. Unknown to Kosygin, MI5 had tapped the telephone line and a translated transcript of his call to Brezhnev was forwarded to Wilson. The transcript convinced Wilson that Kosygin was negotiating in good faith, and the prime minister then contracted the Americans. American decision-makers tended to exaggerate Soviet influence over North Vietnam, and Wilson's message that Kosygin was willing to apply pressure on North Vietnam was seen by Johnson as potentially opening the door for peace. Johnson directed David K. E. Bruce, the U.S. ambassador to the court of St. James together with Harriman's deputy Chester Cooper to work alongside Wilson in what was code-named Operation Sunflower. Rostow reminded Johnson of Wilson's "betrayal" in not sending British forces to Vietnam and advised the president not to trust him. Rostow was extremely negative about Operation Sunflower, called Wilson a vain and dishonest man who was working to end the Vietnam war on terms unfavorable to the United States, and did his best to fan Johnson's already strong dislike of Wilson. Johnson only approved of Operation Sunflower because it would be too politically embarrassing to turn an opportunity outright. Working closely with Bruce and Cooper, Wilson presented a ceasefire offer to Kosygin on 11 February 1967 on behalf of the United States, which Kosygin promised would be passed on to Ho. A few hours later, Cooper left his hotel to attend a performance of ''

Fiddler on the Roof ''Fiddler on the Roof'' is a musical with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Joseph Stein, set in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia in or around 1905. It is based on ''Tevye and his Daughters'' (or ''Tevye the D ...

'' while informing the hotel staff that he would be at the theater if any phone calls came in for him. Cooper was at the theater when he an usherette told him that there was an urgent call from Washington, saying that a Mr. Rostow wanted to speak with him at once. In his telephone call, Rostow attacked Cooper for the conciliatory tone of Wilson's letter, which he called appeasement, and demanding it be rewritten to make it much tougher, a gesture that Cooper felt was meant to sabotage Operation Sunflower. As demanded by Rostow, a new letter with considerably more confrontational tone was given to Kosygin, which led him to accuse the British and Americans of negotiating in bad faith. Wilson in a telephone call to Johnson complained that the letter as rewritten by Rostow had ruined the peace talks and caused "a hell of a situation". Wilson charged that Kosygin had taken a major risk for peace in Vietnam that could have exposed him to criticism within the Politburo and certainly would have exposed him to criticism from the Chinese who constantly accused the Soviets of not doing enough to support North Vietnam, and he felt an opportunity for peace had been gratuitously squandered. Anxious to salvage something from Operation Sunflower, Wilson, Bruce and Cooper put forward a new offer to Kosygin on 12 February that the United States would cease the bombing of North Vietnam in exchange for no more North Vietnamese troops going down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Johnson added in the condition that North Vietnam had to respond to the offer by noon the next day, a deadline that Bruce called "ridiculous" and Kosygin left London the next day with nothing to show for his peace-making efforts. Wilson blamed Rostow for the failure of Operation Sunflower, telling his Foreign Secretary George Brown: "I suspect that Rostow himself was largely responsible for the misunderstandings during the Kosygin visit and may well have reported to the president in the light of responsibility". Karnow wrote it is no means certain that Wilson's claim that a "historic opportunity" to end the war in Vietnam in 1967 had been squandered as all Kosygin was promising was to pressure Ho to accept a ceasefire and as he himself noted that when the Soviets pressured the North Vietnamese to do something that they did not want to do, they just drew closer to China. Soviet pressure on North Vietnam tended to most effective in conjugation with China, and in 1967 the Chinese were attacking the Soviets in the most violent terms, accusing them of abandoning true communism, making any possibility of Sino-Soviet pressure on North Vietnam most unlikely. Karnow wrote at most Operation Sunflower offered was a chance to begin negotiations to end the war, and Johnson and Rostow shunned that chance. On 27 April 1967, General William Westmoreland asked for another 200,000 troops for South Vietnam, a request that was supported by Rostow. Rostow went further than Westmoreland by asking Johnson to invade North Vietnam, saying that the American people wanted their president "do something big and hopefully decisive rather than small". At the meeting of the National Security Council, Rostow paced back and forth before a map of Vietnam with a pointer, showing the best way to invade while the Defense Secretary,

Robert McNamara Robert Strange McNamara (; June 9, 1916 – July 6, 2009) was an American business executive and the eighth United States Secretary of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He remains the ...

, countered him point by point, stating that the dangers of Chinese intervention were far too great. Rostow was so disappointed that Johnson was more influenced by McNamara than himself that he almost resigned in protest, before deciding as he put it to "stay with Johnson until the last day, while steadily, but quietly opposed to the way the war was being fought". In April 1967, the civil rights leader

Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968 ...

came out against the Vietnam War with a speech in New York denouncing the "immoral war" whose burden he charged fall disproportionately heavily on

black Black is a color which results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without hue, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness. Black and white have of ...

men who more likely to be drafted to fight in Vietnam. King's speech increased the sense of siege in the White House, and hence Rostow's influence. In July 1967, allegations of

police brutality Police brutality is the excessive and unwarranted use of force by law enforcement against an individual or a group. It is an extreme form of police misconduct and is a civil rights violation. Police brutality includes, but is not limited to, ...

led to race riots in Detroit and Newark. In response to the

race riots An ethnic conflict is a conflict between two or more contending ethnic groups. While the source of the conflict may be political, social, economic or religious, the individuals in conflict must expressly fight for their ethnic group's positio ...

, conservative Republicans and Democrats accused the Johnson administration's civil rights reforms as being the root reason for the riots. Johnson ordered Rostow to collect "such evidence as there is on external involvement in the violent radical community of the Negro community in the U.S". Johnson was apparently hoping that Rostow would find evidence that the Soviet Union and/or China were behind the riots in Detroit and Newark, but his national security adviser was unable to produce any such evidence. The fact that Rostow was ordered to investigate an essentially domestic matter showed that the president thought very highly of him. As the

anti-war protests An anti-war movement (also ''antiwar'') is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term anti-war can also refer to pa ...

increased, Rostow was able to reassure Johnson that history will vindicate him, leading the president to remark he was "a man of conviction who doesn't try to play president". Rostow was finally able to persuade Johnson in June 1967 to bomb North Vietnamese oil shortage facilities and hydroelectric plants, predicating this would cause the collapse of North Vietnam's economy and win the war. By contrast, McNamara reported to the president in the summer of 1967 that even though American bombers by destroying

hydroelectric plants Hydroelectricity, or hydroelectric power, is electricity generated from hydropower (water power). Hydropower supplies one sixth of the world's electricity, almost 4500 TWh in 2020, which is more than all other renewable sources combined and ...

had reduced North Vietnam's capacity to generate electricity by 85%, it had failed to impact meaningfully on the war. McNamara argued to Johnson that Rostow did not understand the differences between Germany, an advanced, industrialized First World nation vs. North Vietnam, a backward, rural Third Nation nation, and that paradoxically that North Vietnam's very backwardness was a form of strength. McNamara noted that even before the American bombing, the total annual hydroelectric production of North Vietnam amounted only to a fifth of the annual hydroelectric production produced by the

Potomac Electric Power Company The Potomac Electric Power Company (PEPCO) is an American utility company that supplies electric power to the city of Washington, D.C. and to surrounding communities in Maryland. It is owned by Exelon. The company's current trademarked slogan i ...

's plant in

Alexandria, Virginia Alexandria is an independent city in the northern region of the Commonwealth of Virginia, United States. It lies on the western bank of the Potomac River approximately south of downtown Washington, D.C. In 2020, the population was 159,467. Th ...

. For this reason, McNamara stated that knocking out North Vietnam's hydroelectric plants did not have the same catastrophic effect on the North Vietnamese economy that knocking out America's hydroelectric plants would have had on the

American economy The United States is a highly developed mixed-market economy and has the world's largest nominal GDP and net wealth. It has the second-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP) behind China. It has the world's seventh-highest per capita GD ...

. Likewise, North Vietnam imported all of its oil from the Soviet Union, and the North Vietnamese loaded drums of oil from Soviet tankers at sea to sampans, which then entered North Vietnam via that country's intricate network of rivers and canals. For this reason, the destruction of North Vietnam's oil shortage tanks by American bombers in 1967 did not affect North Vietnam's capacity to wage war. The North Vietnamese developed a system of hiding the oil drums underground all across the country. Despite all of the devastation caused by the American bombing between 1965 and 1967 with ports destroyed and oil shortage tanks left burning, North Vietnam doubled its imports of Soviet oil, reaching an annual total of 1.4 million tons by 1967. The North Vietnamese built some 30, 000 miles of tunnels and underground storage areas during the war to escape the bombing. Rostow believed that the bombing tied down North Vietnamese men who might otherwise fight in the war by forcing them to engage in reconstruction work, but the North Vietnamese government had proclaimed a "total war", mobilized the entire population for the war, and put women to work reconstructing the damage done by American bombers. Additionally, some 320,000 Chinese People's Liberation Army soldiers served in North Vietnam between 1965–68 to operate

anti-aircraft guns Anti-aircraft warfare, counter-air or air defence forces is the battlespace response to aerial warfare, defined by NATO as "all measures designed to nullify or reduce the effectiveness of hostile air action".AAP-6 It includes surface based, ...

and the SAMs (surface to air missiles) while rebuilding roads and bridges. While working as national security advisor, Rostow became involved in setting the United States' posture towards Israel. Concerns about Israel's nuclear program were tabled by the United States during the build-up to the Six-Day War and its aftermath. Although he supported military and economic assistance to Israel, Rostow believed that increased public alignment between the two states could run counter to US diplomatic and oil interests in the region. Rostow considered President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt to be a moderating force who through he talked belligerently of war, in fact kept the Arab-Israeli dispute "in the icebox". Rostow wrote in a memo advocating American economic aid to Egypt: "While no one likes the idea of paying off a bully,

Nasser Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, . (15 January 1918 – 28 September 1970) was an Egyptian politician who served as the second president of Egypt from 1954 until his death in 1970. Nasser led the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and introduced far-re ...

is still the most powerful figure in the Middle East...and has restrained wilder Arabs who have for a disastrous Arab-Israeli showdown". After reviewing the May 1967 report from the Atomic Energy Commission team that had inspected Dimona along with other intelligence, Rostow informed President Johnson that, though the team found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program, "there are enough unanswered questions to make us want to avoid getting locked in too closely with Israel. When Egypt remilitarized the Sinai in May 1967, Rostow did not support an Israeli strike against Egypt, instead writing "We sympathize with Eshkol's need to stop these alestinianraids and reluctantly admit that a limited attack on Syria may be his only answer". About the Egyptian remilitarization, Rostow wrote that goals of American policy must be "(a) prevent Israel from being destroyed (b) stop aggression, and (c) to keep U Thant out in front and stiffen his spine". In this regard, Rostow wrote it was essential to persuade the Israeli Prime Minister

Levi Eshkol Levi Eshkol ( he, לֵוִי אֶשְׁכּוֹל ;‎ 25 October 1895 – 26 February 1969), born Levi Yitzhak Shkolnik ( he, לוי יצחק שקולניק, links=no), was an Israeli statesman who served as the third Prime Minister of Israe ...

"not to put a match to this fuse". On 22 May 1967, Nasser further escalated the crisis by closing the

Straits of Tiran The straits of Tiran ( ar, مضيق تيران ') are the narrow sea passages between the Sinai and Arabian peninsulas that connect the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea. The distance between the two peninsulas is about . The Multinational Force a ...

to Israeli shipping, which was a provocation as Israel had always stated that they would go to war to keep the Straits of Tiran open. When the Israelis claimed that Eisenhower had given Israel a security "guarantee" in 1957 to keep open the Straits of Tiran, a claim that mystified the Americans who had never heard of this "guarantee", Rostow was tasked by Johnson to investigate. The answer was soon found; Eisenhower had written a letter to the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in 1957 committing the United States to "guarantee" that the Straits of Tiran would be kept open to Israeli shipping by the United States. Rostow had to inform the Israelis that only treaties ratified by Congress are binding on the United States, and presidential promises represent only a moral, not a legal commitment on the part of the United States. However, he was later to state: "From the moment Eisenhower made clear that a commitment had been made, Johnson had no doubt that he had to reopen the Straits". Rostow backed the Regatta plan under which a group of various nations would sail their ships through the Strait of Tiran as a show of support for Israel. Rostow believed that the free passage of Israeli ships via the Straits of Tiran was a "naked principle" the United States should uphold even it meant a war with Egypt. As more and more nations backed out of the Regatta plan, Rostow came to take a more hawkish stance, saying to Johnson that Israel should move "like a sheriff in ''

High Noon ''High Noon'' is a 1952 American Western film produced by Stanley Kramer from a screenplay by Carl Foreman, directed by Fred Zinnemann, and starring Gary Cooper. The plot, which occurs in real time, centers on a town marshal whose sense of ...

''", using violence "necessary to achieve not merely self-respect, but respect in the region". However, Johnson did not favor war to resolve the crisis, but as he appeared to be backtracking from the Regatta plan, Eshkol wrote Johnson a letter noting that he had not invaded Egypt per American requests, but still the Straits of Tiran were closed to Israeli shipping. Johnson in his reply stated he only promised to use all of his constitutional powers to reopen the Straits of Tiran, noting that because of the Vietnam war, he could not risk getting involving in another war at present, telling Rostow to make that point clear to the Israelis. Rostow told the Israeli envoy Ephraim Evron sent to Washington that Johnson disliked the Israeli "pressure tactics" and needed more time to study the issues. Rostow informed Evron: "You have known President Johnson for a long time and have a right to make your own assessment". Evron predicated that Israel would probably go to war if nothing was done to reopen the Straits of Tiran, telling Rostow that were "about ten days" of peace left. Though Rostow, Johnson, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk tried to convince Israel not to resort to military force, they supported Israel once the war began. Rostow told the Egyptian ambassador, Mustafa Kamel just before the war: "Your adversaries believe that a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria is imminent. We know this is unthinkable. We cannot believe the government of the UAR nited Arab Republicwould be so reckless. Such a course would obviously have the most serious possible consequences". Rostow added that Israel had also been given a similar "friendly warning" not to escalate. Shortly before the war began, Johnson asked Rostow what he thought Israel was going to do, leading Rostow to reply "they're going to hit". At about 4:35 am on 6 June 1967, Rostow phoned Johnson to tell him that Israel had just attacked Egypt with the

Israeli Air Force The Israeli Air Force (IAF; he, זְרוֹעַ הָאֲוִיר וְהֶחָלָל, Zroa HaAvir VeHahalal, tl, "Air and Space Arm", commonly known as , ''Kheil HaAvir'', "Air Corps") operates as the aerial warfare branch of the Israel Defense ...

striking Egyptian Air Force bases all over Egypt. On the first day of the Six Day War, Rostow submitted a report to Johnson about the destruction of the Egyptian Air Force that began: "Herewith the account, with a map, of the first day's turkey shoot". Later that day, Rostow in a memo to the president wrote "we should begin...talking with the Russians and, if possible, with others about the terms of a settlement....A ceasefire will not answer the fundamental questions in the minds of Israelis until they have acquired so much real estate and destroyed so many Egyptian planes and tanks that they are absolutely sure of their bargaining position". Once the war began, Rostow saw an opportunity for the United States, writing that the issue "was whether the settlement of this war shall be on the basis of armistice agreements, which leave the Arabs in the posture of hostilities towards Israel, keeping alive the Israeli issue in Arab political life as a unifying force, and affording the Soviet Union a handle on the Arab world; or whether a settlement emerges in which Israel is accepted as a Middle Eastern state". Rostow believed that the possibility of Israel gaining territory would allow a "land for peace" deal which might finally end the Arab-Israeli dispute, which led him to advocate no ceasefire to end the war until Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria as he maintained the Syrians would never make peace until an initiative was provided. Rostow favored having a peace plan calling for "

land for peace Land for peace is a legalistic interpretation of UN Security Council Resolution 242 which has been used as the basis of subsequent Arab-Israeli peace making. The name ''Land for Peace'' is derived from the wording of the resolution's first operativ ...

" deal to be issued by the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmonizi ...

, with the negotiations to be mediated by the United States. Rostow made it clear that he did not envision Israel permanently occupying the Gaza Strip, the West Bank,

East Jerusalem East Jerusalem (, ; , ) is the sector of Jerusalem that was held by Jordan during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, as opposed to the western sector of the city, West Jerusalem, which was held by Israel. Jerusalem was envisaged as a separat ...

, the Golan Heights and the Sinai, believing that an occupation would ensure that the Arab-Israeli conflict would never end. By the third day of the Six Day War, Israeli officials were starting to hint that they were not willing to give up some of their recent territorial gains, especially East Jerusalem. In October 1967, Rostow advised Johnson that with Israel "we lean against them just enough to keep their thinking from becoming too quickly set in the concrete of their current extended territorial possessions". When the nuclear issue resurfaced in January 1968, just prior to Prime Minister

's visit to the United States, Rostow recommended that the president make it clear that the United States expected Israel to sign the NPT. In September–October 1967, Operation Pennsylvania peace initiative was launched, when a professor of political science at Harvard, Henry Kissinger, got into contact with a French biologist, Herbert Marcovich, who in turns was friends with the French Resistance hero,

Raymond Aubrac Raymond Aubrac (31 July 1914 – 10 April 2012) was a leader of the French Resistance during the Second World War and a civil engineer after the Second World War. Early life Aubrac was born Raymond Samuel into a middle-class Jewish family in Ves ...

who was a friend of Ho Chi Minh. Aubrac and Marchovich visited Hanoi to meet Ho to discuss peace. Rostow was opposed to Operation Pennsylvania plan, and turn his best to turn Johnson against it. Under Rostow's influence, Johnson sent a message to Kissinger: "I'm going to give it one more try and if it doesn't work I'm going to come up to Cambridge and cut off your balls!" Kissinger contacted Rostow to urge that the U.S pause the bombing to give Operation Pennsylvania a chance, only to be rebuffed. Kissinger was later to call Rostow a "fool". During the

siege of Khe Sanh The Battle of Khe Sanh (21 January – 9 July 1968) was conducted in the Khe Sanh area of northwestern Quảng Trị Province, Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), during the Vietnam War. The main US forces defending Khe Sanh Combat Base (KSCB) ...

in January 1968, Rostow reported to President Johnson that the North Vietnamese were sending their forces to "re-enact a new Dienbienphu", predicating that Khe Sanh would be the decisive battle in 1968 and the United States must commit all of its forces to prevent the fall of Khe Sahn. In this, Rostow was playing into North Vietnamese hands as the intention by Hanoi was to draw away American forces from the main cities of South Vietnam as the prelude for the

Tet Offensive The Tet Offensive was a major escalation and one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War. It was launched on January 30, 1968 by forces of the Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) against the forces o ...

. During the Tet Offensive in 1968, Rostow in a report stated that a Vietcong attack against a remote village in South Vietnam had been timed to coincide with a debate in Congress about appropriations for the war, leading Karnow to sarcastically write "as if tacticians in Hanoi consulted the ''

Congressional Record The ''Congressional Record'' is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress, published by the United States Government Publishing Office and issued when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record Inde ...

'' before deploying their units". During the Tet offensive, Rostow urged Johnson to give a "war leader speech" in preference to a "peace leader speech". In February 1968, Rostow clashed repeatedly with the CIA director, Richard Helms, who accused him of distorting intelligence to present a more optimistic picture of the war than was warranted. During the debate in Washington in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive about whatever to send more troops to South Vietnam or not, Rostow argued that firmness in Vietnam was needed to deter "aggression...in the Middle East, elsewhere in Asia and perhaps even in Europe" and recommended that U.S ground forces enter North Vietnam and Laos to sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Rostow urged Johnson that "it is time for a war leader speech instead of a peace-seeker speech". In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, Rostow argued that now was the time to finish off the Vietnamese Communists and urged Johnson to send 206,000 more American troops to South Vietnam to join the half-million already there and to bomb North Vietnam even harder. During the debates, the out-going Defense Secretary

, who had been repeatedly bested in debates by Rostow, snapped in fury: "What then? This goddamned bombing campaign, it's worth nothing, it's done nothing, they dropped more bombs than on all of Europe in all of World War II and it hasn't done a fucking thing!" At that point, McNamara, who had become disillusioned with the war he had once supported, broke down in tears, asking Johnson plaintively to stop listening to Rostow and saying the war could not be won. Rostow had supported Johnson's decision to appoint

Clark Clifford Clark McAdams Clifford (December 25, 1906October 10, 1998) was an American lawyer who served as an important political adviser to Democratic presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. His official gover ...

as Defense Secretary as he was known to be a hawk, and was greatly dismayed when the new defense secretary turned out to be more of a dove than McNamara was. Johnson was badly spooked by his near-defeat in the

New Hampshire Democratic primary The New Hampshire presidential primary is the first in a series of nationwide party primary elections and the second party contest (the first being the Iowa caucuses) held in the United States every four years as part of the process of choosi ...

, which he won by only 300 votes against the anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy, a politician whom many people did not take seriously. Even worryingly for Johnson, inspired by this display of presidential weakness in New Hampshire, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a politician whom many people did take seriously, entered the Democratic primaries on an anti-war platform on 16 March 1968. For the Wisconsin Democratic primary scheduled for 2 April 1968, the polls in March 1968 showed Kennedy in the lead, McCarthy coming in second and Johnson humiliatingly coming in third. Faced with a situation where there was a real possibility of him losing the Democratic nomination to be his party's candidate in the 1968 election, Johnson decided to consider a political as opposed to a military solution to the Vietnam war. Clifford had despite expectations turned out to be more dovish in office, and pressed the president to find an "honorable way out" of Vietnam. Johnson sought the advice of the so-called "wise men", a group of elder statesmen who advised him to find a way to end the war. The leader of the "Wise Men", the former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, told Rostow "tell the president—and you tell him in precisely these words—that he can take Vietnam and stick it up his ass". On 25 March, when Johnson met the "Wise Men", he was informed that "we must take steps to disengage". Johnson's highest level of education had been at the Southwest Texas Teacher's College, and throughout his life, he had much respect for those with university degrees from the "

Eastern Establishment The Rockefeller Republicans were members of the Republican Party (GOP) in the 1930s–1970s who held moderate-to-liberal views on domestic issues, similar to those of Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York (1959–1973) and Vice President of ...

". Of the 14 "Wise Men", only General Omar Bradley, Supreme Court Justice

Abe Fortas Abraham Fortas (June 19, 1910 – April 5, 1982) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1965 to 1969. Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Fortas graduated from Rhod ...

, the diplomat

Robert Murphy Robert, Rob, Bob or Bobby Murphy may refer to: Sports Ice hockey * Robert Ronald Murphy or Ron Murphy (1933–2014), Canadian ice hockey player * Bob Murphy (ice hockey) (born 1951), Canadian retired professional ice hockey player * Rob Murphy (ic ...

and General

favored fighting on with the other ten favoring disengagement. During the 1968 election, Rostow did his best to sabotage the peace talks going on Paris as the American delegation led by his old enemy Harriman negotiated with the North Vietnamese in Paris. By this point, Rostow was consumed with hatred for Harriman, and he missed an opportunity to disparage to Johnson. On 3 April 1968, Rostow that Harriman should not head the American peace delegation to Paris because "he lacks—and always lacked—an understanding and sympathy with the South Vietnamese". Through Johnson was sympathetic, he argued that Harriman's record as a distinguished diplomat going back to World War II qualified him to head the delegation. Rostow attached to the peace delegation a staffer from the National Security Council, William Jorden, with orders "to keep an eye on those bastards and make sure that they didn't give away the family jewels". Rostow changed his opinions to suit the president's changed mood in the summer of 1968 and now advised Johnson to limit the bombing raids against North Vietnam. By the time of the Democratic convention in Chicago in August 1968, Rostow approved of the compromise campaign plank of the man who won the Democratic nomination, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, which called for an end of the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, as by this point he feared that the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, would win the election. By August 1968, the Democratic Party was tearing itself apart, divisions that were all too apparent at the Democratic convention where anti-war and pro-war Democrats vehemently debated on the convention floor about whatever the United States should continue fighting in Vietnam or not. Given the disarray in the Democratic ranks, it was widely felt if the party did not find a way of unifying itself, Nixon would win. When Humphrey asked for Rostow's help with campaign slogans, Rostow came up with the awkward "We're not going to let a handful of white and black punks turn this country over to Wallace, Strom Thurmond, and those who base their campaigns on their support". By this, Rostow meant that a divided Democratic Party might allow people like

George Wallace George Corley Wallace Jr. (August 25, 1919 – September 13, 1998) was an American politician who served as the 45th governor of Alabama for four terms. A member of the Democratic Party, he is best remembered for his staunch segregationist and ...

, the outspoken white supremacist former governor of Alabama who was running for president as a third-party candidate, or Senator Storm Thurmond, a Democrat who turned Republican out of his opposition to civil rights for Afro-Americans, would come to power. Based upon information provided by the National Security Agency, which broken the South Vietnamese diplomatic codes, senior Johnson administration officials learned that

Anna Chennault Anna Chennault, born Chan Sheng Mai, later spelled Chen Xiangmei (, actual birth year 1923, but reported as June 23, 1925 – March 30, 2018), also known as Anna Chan Chennault or Anna Chen Chennault, was a war correspondent and prominent Republ ...

, the chairwoman of the Republican Women for Nixon group had met the South Vietnamese ambassador,

Bùi Diễm Bùi Diễm (1 October 1923 – 24 October 2021) was South Vietnam's ambassador to the United States under President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. He played a key role in the last desperate attempt to secure US$722 million in military aid to defend Sout ...

, to tell him that South Vietnam should sabotage Paris peace talks to improve the chances of Nixon winning the election. On 29 October 1968, Rostow told Johnson he now had information "on how certain Republicans may have inflamed the South Vietnamese to behave as they have been behaving". Rostow also advised Johnson not to go public with this information, saying he should instead tell Nixon in private to keep away from Chennault, advice which was taken. By the fall of 1968, Rostow had come to feel that it was better if Nixon won the election rather than the "defeatist" Humphrey who on the campaign trail had become increasingly critical of the war. In one of his memos to Johnson, Rostow, who was still unhappy about Johnson's decision not to invade North Vietnam, wrote he should say if asked about civilian-military relations: "Generally speaking, the military has wanted us to use more power, earlier and faster. They may have been right. But the president had other considerations to think of". It was a mark of Rostow's influence that Johnson, who was well known for being abrasive towards subordinates, did not explode in rage as he would have if anyone else wrote such a memo. After the Watergate scandal, Rostow expressed regret for not outing the Nixon campaign for the Chennault Affair and expressed his belief that their success emboldened the Nixon administration to commit worse offenses during the 1972 presidential election.

Public intellectual

When Richard Nixon became president in 1969, Rostow left office, and over the next thirty years taught economics at the

Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs (or LBJ School of Public Affairs) is a graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin that was founded in 1970 to offer training in public policy analysis and administration for students that a ...

at the University of Texas at Austin with his wife Elspeth Rostow, who later became dean of the school. In 1969, he was told that because of his support for the Vietnam war that he was not welcome to resume teaching at MIT, forcing him to take up a position at the University of Texas. By 1968 the general consensus amongst the liberal American intelligentsia was that the Vietnam war was a horrific mistake of epic proportions and when Rostow left government service in January 1969, he found himself an unpopular figure with the liberal intelligentsia, making it impossible for him to return to MIT. Rostow's biographer, the British historian David Milne, wrote: "In 1969, Rostow's notoriety was such that none of America's elite universities were willing to offer him a job". For a man who had previously held professorships at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and the MIT, it was considered within academic circles to be a real comedown for him to teach at the University of Texas at Austin. He wrote extensively in defense of

neoliberal economics Neoliberalism (also neo-liberalism) is a term used to signify the late 20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following the Second World War. A prominent fa ...

, particularly in developing nations. Rostow's successor as National Security Adviser, the Harvard professor, Henry Kissinger, was obsessed with the fear of becoming "this administration's Walt Rostow". Kissinger wanted to resume his professorship at Harvard as he did not want to end up teaching at an "unacceptable" institution like the University of Texas as Rostow did. Rostow himself noted that the University of Texas campus was ultra-modern as the

Texas government The government of Texas operates under the Constitution of Texas and consists of a unitary democratic state government operating under a presidential system that uses the Dillon Rule, as well as governments at the county and municipal levels. A ...

had used its oil wealth to create a gleaming, modernistic campus, but complained that the university administration was more interested in supporting the football team, the Longhorns, than in research and teaching. From 1969 to 1971, Rostow served as one of the ghostwriters on Johnson's memoir, ''The Vantage Point'', writing all of the chapters dealing with foreign affairs. As the teaching load at the University of Texas was very light, Rostow had much time for research and between 1969 and 2003 wrote 21 books, mostly on world economic history with a particular focus on economic modernization. In his own memoir, ''The Diffusion of Power'', Rostow argued that for the justice of the Vietnam War and lashed out at Kennedy for ignoring his advice in 1962 to invade North Vietnam, writing that this "was the greatest single error of U.S foreign policy in the 1960s". Reflecting his friendship with Johnson, Rostow was less harsh towards him in his memoir, but still he charged that Johnson was too worried about the possibility of a nuclear war with China and should have taken his advice to invade North Vietnam, arguing that the risk of a nuclear war with China was acceptable. The main villain in ''The Diffusion of Power'' was McNamara, who Rostow accused of being a defeatist from 1966 onward, charging that it was his weakness and doubts about the war that caused Johnson to hold back and not invade North Vietnam. In the 1980s, Rostow visited South Korea, whose economy had greatly industrialized under the rule of General Park. During his visit, Rostow praised South Korea as the best example of the theories he set out in ''The Stages of Economic Growth'', arguing that General Park's policies had indeed pushed South Korea into an "industrial take-off". In 1998, Rostow told the South Korean economist Park Taey-Gyun that the experience of South Korea proved the correctness of ''The Stages of Economic Growth'' and expressed the wish that more Third World leaders had been like General Park; though the economist Park noted that General Park's policy of Five Year Plans did not reflect Rostow's ideas. In 1986, a book by Rostow ''The United States and the Regional Organization of Asia and the Pacific, 1965–1985'' was published. In this book, Rostow advanced the thesis that the United States had actually "won" the Vietnam war, as he contended the war had "brought time" for the rest of South-east Asia to economically advance and escape Communism. Rostow based his argument along the contention that based on the ways things were going in South Vietnam in 1965 that the country would have fallen to the Communists that year, and the American intervention, which though it failed to save South Vietnam in the end, gave an extra ten years to allow the rest of South-east Asia to economically advance, ensuring that the other "dominoes" did not fall. Rostow argued that the economic success of most of the members of the Association of South-east Asian Nations, which comprised Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Thailand and the Philippines was due to the Vietnam war "buying time" for them, as none of those nations ended up being communist and with the exception of the Philippines, all of them were " Asian tigers" (i.e. rapidly growing economies). In 1995, McNamara published his memoir ''In Retrospect'' when he famously declared about the Vietnam War "we were wrong, terribly wrong". On 9 June 1995 in '' The Times Literary Supplement'', Rostow wrote a scathing review of ''In Retrospect'' under the title "The Case for the War", where he accused McNamara of insulting all of the families of Americans who died in Vietnam and argued that the United States had in fact "won" the Vietnam War as the non-communist states of Southeast Asia "had quadrupled their real

GNP The gross national income (GNI), previously known as gross national product (GNP), is the total domestic and foreign output claimed by residents of a country, consisting of gross domestic product (GDP), plus factor incomes earned by foreign ...

between 1960 and 1981", which Rostow argued would not have happened had the United States not fought in Vietnam. The review in ''The Times Literacy Supplement'' reflected the intense feud between McNamara and Rostow; the latter made much of the fact that McNamara often suffered from depression and suggested that his "defeatism" was due to an unsound mind. Rostow believed that McNamara had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1966 and his "defeatism" about Vietnam was due to the fact he had "cracked" under the strain of war. Milne wrote that it is indeed correct that McNamara suffered from bouts of depression, but there is nothing to support Rostow's claim he had lost his mind as Defense Secretary. Milne also wrote that Rostow's assertion that high economic growth rates in Southeast Asia justified the Vietnam War was callous towards the families of all the Americans and Vietnamese who died in the war.

Honors and awards

Rostow received the Order of the British Empire (1945), the Legion of Merit (1945), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1969). He was a member of both the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

(1957) and the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

(1983).

Works

* ''Investment and the Great Depression'', 1938, Econ History Review * ''Essays on the British Economy of the Nineteenth Century'', 1948. * ''The Terms of Trade in Theory and Practice'', 1950, Econ History Review * ''The Historical Analysis of Terms of Trade'', 1951, Econ History Review * ''The Process of Economic Growth'', 1952. * ''Growth and Fluctuations in the British Economy, 1790–1850: An Historical, Statistical, and Theoretical Study of Britain's Economic Development'', with Arthur Gayer and

Anna Schwartz Anna Jacobson Schwartz (pronounced ; November 11, 1915 – June 21, 2012) was an American economist who worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City and a writer for ''The New York Times''. Paul Krugman has said that Schwar ...

, 1953 * ''The Dynamics of Soviet Society'' (with others), Norton and Co. 1953, slight update Anchor edition 1954. * ''"Trends in the Allocation of Resources in Secular Growth'', 1955, in Dupriez, editor, Economic Progress * ''An American Policy in Asia'', with R.W. Hatch, 1955. * ''The Take-Off into Self-Sustained Growth'', 1956, EJ * ''A Proposal: Key to an effective foreign policy'', with Max Millikan, 1957. * ''The Stages of Economic Growth'', 1959, Econ History Review * ''The Stages of Economic Growth: A non-communist manifesto'', 1960. * ''The United States in the World Arena: An Essay in Recent History'' (American Project Series), 1960, 568 pages. * ''Politics and the Stages of Growth'', 1971. * ''How it All Began: Origins of the modern economy'', 1975. * ''The World Economy: History and prospect'', 1978. * ''Why the Poor Get Richer and the Rich Slow Down: Essays in the Marshallian long period'', 1980. * ''Eisenhower, Kennedy, and foreign aid'', 1985. * ''Theorists of Economic Growth from David Hume to the Present'', 1990. * ''The Great Population Spike and After'', 1998

References

External links

Rostow's obituary
* Hodgson, Godfrey

in '' The Guardian'', February 17, 2003. *
"Walt Rostow: Obituary"
i
''The Times''
February 19, 2003.

The University of Texas at Austin.
Oral History Interviews with Walt Rostow, from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library

Interview with Walt Rostow by Avner Cohen at The Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.
* , - , - , - {{DEFAULTSORT:Rostow, Walter W. 1916 births 2003 deaths Academics of the University of Cambridge Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford 20th-century American economists American people of Russian-Jewish descent American political philosophers American Rhodes Scholars Columbia University faculty Directors of Policy Planning Economic historians Officers of the Order of the British Empire Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professors of American History Lyndon B. Johnson administration personnel Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty New York (state) Democrats People of the Office of Strategic Services Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Recipients of the Legion of Merit United States National Security Advisors Social Science Research Council United States Deputy National Security Advisors Members of the American Philosophical Society