Walt Rostow

Walt Rostow
7th United States National Security Advisor
In office April 1, 1966 – January 20, 1969
President	Lyndon Johnson
Deputy	Francis Bator
Preceded by	Mac Bundy
Succeeded by	Henry Kissinger
Counselor of the United States Department of State
In office December 4, 1961 – March 31, 1966
President	John F. Kennedy Lyndon Johnson
Preceded by	George McGhee
Succeeded by	Robert Bowie
Director of Policy Planning
In office December 4, 1961 – March 31, 1966
President	John F. Kennedy Lyndon Johnson
Preceded by	George McGhee
Succeeded by	Henry Owen
Deputy National Security Advisor
In office January 20, 1961 – December 4, 1961
President	John F. Kennedy
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Carl Kaysen
Personal details
Born	(1916-10-07)October 7, 1916 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	February 13, 2003(2003-02-13) (aged 86) Austin, Texas, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Elspeth Davies
Children	2
Alma mater	Yale University (BA, MA, PhD) Balliol College, Oxford (BLitt)

Walt Whitman Rostow (also known as Walt Rostow or W.W. Rostow) OBE (October 7, 1916 – February 13, 2003) was an American economist and political theorist who served as Special Assistant for National Security Affairs to US President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1969.

Prominent for his role in the shaping of US foreign policy in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, he was a staunch anti-communist, noted for a belief in the efficacy of capitalism and free enterprise, strongly supporting 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.

His older brother Eugene Rostow also held a number of high government foreign policy posts.

Early life

Rostow was born in Manhattan, New York City, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. His parents, Lillian (Helman) and Victor Rostow, were active socialists, and named Walt after the poet Walt Whitman. Rostow's father, Victor Rostowsky, was born in the town of Orekhov near Odessa in 1886, and was involved in the Russian socialist movement as a teenager, publishing a left-wing newspaper critical of the Russian government in the basement of his parents' house. 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. 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, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Unlike many other Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants, Victor Rostow always spoke to his children in English rather than Yiddish as he felt this was would improve their chances in life. Rostow's brother Eugene, who was named for Eugene V. Debs, became a legal scholar, and his brother Ralph, a department store manager. The American journalist Stanley Karnow 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 together with a man who was serving as a purchasing agent for the Soviet government. After the dinner, Rostow remembered that his father said: "These communists 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 will come of it". Rostow entered Yale University at the age of 15 on a full scholarship, graduated at 19, and completed his Ph.D. there in 1940. He also won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he completed a B.Litt. degree. At Oxford, Rostow became friends with future politicians Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins, being especially close to the latter. In 1936, during the Edward VIII abdication crisis, he assisted broadcaster Alistair Cooke, who reported on the events for the NBC radio network. After completing his education, 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. 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 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". By early 1944, Rostow had finally won over General Carl Spaatz 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 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 had been won far earlier. He also claimed that the United States would had entered into the Cold War in a far stronger position as he always maintained that if "Oil Plan" had been adopted earlier it would had allowed the U.S. Army to push deeper into Central Europe 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 (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. 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, and was involved in the development of the Marshall Plan.

Rostow spent a year at Cambridge University 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 of the Center for International Studies (CIS) at MIT from 1951 to 1961. The outbreak of the Korean War decisively altered Rostow's thinking about the Soviet Union. Until the Korean War, Rostow had believed that ultimately the Soviet system would "mellow" on its own accord and he had viewed the Cold War as largely a diplomatic 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 in a speech in the fall of 1950 for greater defense spending so that a "larger full mobilization could be carried out quickly". To pay for the higher defense spending, Rostow urged the American people to accept the need for a "very high level of taxation appropriated equally".

From late 1951 to August 1952, Rostow headed the Soviet Vulnerabilities Project. The project, which was sponsored by CIS and received significant support from the U.S. government, sought to identify Soviet vulnerabilities to political/psychological warfare, and received contributions from top Sovietologist and psychological warfare specialists. In June 1955, Rostow headed a group of stalwart cold warriors called the Quantico Vulnerabilities Panel which issued a report advocating nuclear coercion toward 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 on economic and foreign policy, and in 1958 he became a speechwriter for him. In August 1954, Rostow and fellow CIA-connected MIT economics professor Max F. Millikan convinced Eisenhower to massively increase US foreign aid for development as part of a policy of spreading American-style capitalist economic growth in Asia and elsewhere, backed by the military.

The Stages of Economic Growth

Main article: Rostow's stages of 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. This became one of the important concepts in the theory of modernization in social evolutionism. 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 capitalist growth. Rostow's thesis was criticized at the time and subsequently as universalizing a model of Western development that could not be replicated in places like Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa.

Service under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations

The Stages of Economic Growth impressed presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, 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 election, Rostow served as a speech-writer and adviser for the Kennedy campaign, where he become known as an "effervescent idea man". Rostow wrote the speech calling for a "New Frontier", which Kennedy gave when he won the Democratic nomination. 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" 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. 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 also complained that Rostow was too fixated on Vietnam, charging he seemed to have an obsession with that country as he spent much time talking about Vietnam. 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 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 with the Soviet Union. Later that year, Rostow became Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff.

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, Rostow complained that: "I am going from being a priest in Rome to being a bishop in the provinces." In October 1961, Rostow went on a fact-finding mission with General Maxwell Taylor 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, 000-8,000 U.S Army troops to fight in South Vietnam under the guise of being "flood relief workers". Kennedy rejected the Rostow-Taylor 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 about.

During the Cuba Missile Crisis, 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 Cuba Missile Crisis as a triumph, which proved the superior power of the United States. Inspired by the Cuba 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 Ambassador-at-Large 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 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 sent Rostow back to his perch in academia, saying that Rostow was far too blasé about the possibility of a nuclear war with China. After Kennedy's assassination, his successor Lyndon B. Johnson promoted Rostow to Bundy's job after he wrote Johnson's first State of the Union speech. In 1964, Rostow championed the idea of Congress 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' 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 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 that led to the resolution, Rostow later said: "We don't know what happened, but it had the desired effect". 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 [the Vietnamese Communists] will 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 Adviser

As national security adviser, 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 Adviser 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 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" 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.

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. 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.

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 favorite 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. 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 was "the woman I really loved" while the Vietnam conflict 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 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 in an "off-the-record" conversation in 1965 that Truman "ceased to be effective" the moment when China was "lost" in 1949, and he had no intention of allowing himself to likewise rendered ineffective by "losing" South Vietnam.. 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, 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 favor 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 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 first crisis that confronted Johnson and Rostow was the Buddhist Uprising in South Vietnam where an attempt by Air Marshal Nguyễn Cao Kỳ to dismiss General Nguyễn Chánh Thi led to a civil war within the civil war as units of the South Vietnamese Army 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...He spent a great deal of time creating a kind of fantasy for the president".

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, 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. Every since 1960, Mao Zedong had been accusing the Soviet Union of "selling out" to capitalism and abandoning true communism, and a Sino-Soviet competition had broken out about which Communist state 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. By December 1966, American 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 February 1967, the Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin visited London, and the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson tried to act as a mediator to end the Vietnam war, offering to serve as a honest broker. Wilson had been asked in 1965 to sent 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 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 while informing the hotel staff that he was 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 had exposed him to criticism within the Politburo and certainly would had 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.

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, the Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, reported to the president in the summer of 1967 that even through American bombers by destroying hydroelectric plants 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 Potomatc Electric Power Company's plant in Alexandria, Virginia. 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. 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 1965-67 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.

While working as national security advisor, Rostow became involved in setting the United States' posture towards Israel. 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. 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.

Concerns about Israel's nuclear program were tabled by the United States during the build-up to the Six-Day War and its aftermath. 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. When the nuclear issue resurfaced in January 1968, just prior to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol's visit to the United States, Rostow recommended that the president make it clear that the United States expected Israel to sign the NPT.

During the siege of Khe Sanh 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.. 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 before deploying their units". 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. In the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, Rostow argued that now was the time to finish off the Vietnamese Communists and urged Johnson to sent 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 Robert McNamara, 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 became 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.

Johnson was badly spooked by his near-defeat in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, 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 upon to seek a political as opposed to a military solution to the Vietnam war. 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. Rostow changed his opinions to suit the president's changed mood 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 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 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.

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 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.

He wrote extensively in defense of free enterprise economics, 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" whose support for the Vietnam War ruined his reputation with the liberal American intelligentsia and led him teaching at the University of Texas, which was regarded as a second-rate university, a fate that Kissinger was keen to avoid. Kissinger wanted to resume his professorship at Harvard as he did not 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 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 1969-2003 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 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 Southeast 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 through it failed to save South Vietnam in the end, gave an extra ten years to allow the rest of Southeast 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 Southeast 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". In June 1995 in The Times Literacy 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 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).

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, 1953 ISBN 0-06-492344-4
• 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

See also

• The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
• Hearts and Minds (film)

Further reading

• Template:Cite article
• Karnow, Stanley (1983). Vietnam: A History. New York: Viking. ISBN 0140265473.
• Template:Cite article
• Milne, David (2008). America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War. New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 978-0-374-10386-6.
• Young, Marilyn (1991). Vietnam Wars 1945-1990. New York: Harper. ISBN 0060921072.

External links

• Rostow's obituary
• Hodgson, Godfrey. "Walt Rostow: Obituary", in The Guardian, February 17, 2003.
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• "Walt Rostow: Obituary", in The Times, February 19, 2003.
• In Memoriam, 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.
• "W. W. Rostow". JSTOR.