119 Facts About Walt Rostow

Walt Whitman Rostow was an American economist, professor and political theorist who served as national security advisor to president of the United States Lyndon B Johnson from 1966 to 1969.

Walt 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.

Walt Rostow never regretted or apologized over his actions in Vietnam, and this stance effectively ostracized him from work in top American universities after his retirement from government service.

Walt Rostow was born in Manhattan, New York City, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family.

Unlike many other Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants, Victor Walt Rostow always spoke to his children in English rather than Yiddish as he felt this was would improve their chances in life.

Walt Rostow described his childhood as mostly happy with the only dark spots being that sometimes his classmates called him and his brothers "dirty Jews".

Walt Rostow entered Yale University at the age of 15 on a full scholarship and graduated at 19.

At Oxford, Walt Rostow became friends with future British politicians Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins, being especially close to the latter.

In January 1943, Walt Rostow was given the task of identifying the key industries that supported the German war economy.

The "Oil Plan" began to be implemented as a strategy by the Army Air Force in May 1944, which Walt Rostow later called a disastrous error, claiming if the "Oil Plan" had been adopted earlier, the war would have been won far earlier.

Walt Rostow 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 US Armed Forces to push deeper into Central Europe and even into Eastern Europe.

In 1945, immediately after the war, Walt Rostow became assistant chief of the German-Austrian Economic Division in the United States Department of State in Washington, DC Walt Rostow was invited to part in the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, an assessment of the effects of the strategic bombing campaign on Germany's economy, but he declined.

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".

Walt Rostow spent a year at Cambridge University as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions.

Walt Rostow was professor of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1950 to 1961, and a staff member at the Center for International Studies at the MIT from 1951 to 1961.

The North Korean invasion of South Korea decisively altered Walt Rostow's thinking about the Soviet Union.

Until the Korean War, Walt Rostow had believed that the Soviet system would ultimately "mellow" on its own accord and he had viewed the Cold War as a largely diplomatic conflict as opposed to a military struggle.

From late 1951 to August 1952, Walt Rostow headed the Soviet Vulnerabilities Project.

In June 1955, Walt 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.

In 1954, Walt Rostow advised President Dwight Eisenhower on economic and foreign policy, and in 1958 he became a speechwriter for him.

In May 1954, Walt Rostow was deeply shocked when he heard of the French Union defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, expressing his disgust that French leaders had failed to create a political alignment which would "effectively rally the Vietnamese against the Communists".

Walt Rostow believed the Communist Viet Minh fighting for independence from France were a small, radical terrorist minority entirely unrepresentative of the Vietnamese people, the majority of whom he believed supported the French-dominated, but nominally independent State of Vietnam created in 1950.

Unlike many of the first generation of "Cold Warriors" who saw the Cold War in essentially Euro-centric terms, Walt Rostow viewed the Cold War as a global struggle in which the Third World was its most important battlefield.

On 26 February 1958, Rostow first met Senator John F Kennedy, who was impressed with the academic who understood power.

On 27 February 1958, Walt 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".

Walt 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, Walt 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.

In 1960, Walt 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.

Guy Ortolano argues that as an alternative to Marxist class-oriented analysis Walt Rostow replaced class with nation as the agent of history.

Walt 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.

In South Korea, at the time a Third World nation, much interest in Walt Rostow's book was expressed by both economists and policy-makers.

Walt Rostow wrote the speech calling for a "New Frontier", which Kennedy gave at the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

Walt Rostow coined the slogan of Kennedy's 1960 campaign "Let's Get the Country Moving Again".

Walt Rostow supported the Bay of Pigs invasion, 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.

Walt Rostow was 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.

Just after the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy rejected advice from Walt Rostow to send US troops to intervene in the Laotian Civil War.

Kennedy charged that Walt Rostow was too fixated on Vietnam, saying he seemed to have an obsession with that country as he spent much time talking about Vietnam.

Walt Rostow believed in the "Domino Theory", predicating that if South Vietnam fell, the rest of Southeast Asia would fall like so many dominoes, and ultimately India would fall as well.

Later that year, Walt Rostow became Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff.

The report that Taylor and Walt Rostow wrote advocated that Kennedy send between 6,000 and 8,000 USArmy troops to fight in South Vietnam under the guise of being "flood relief workers".

Walt Rostow had served in World War II as an intelligence analyst 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.

Walt Rostow remained baffled as to why the strategic hamlets were so unpopular with South Vietnamese peasants.

In 1962, Walt Rostow drafted the statement of Basic National Security Policy, a 284-page document meant to outline the foreign policy of the Kennedy administration.

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 Walt Rostow to accuse Kennan with some justification of racism.

Unaware that Kennedy had promised not to invade Cuba and to pull American missiles out of Turkey as part of the resolution, Walt Rostow saw the Cuban Missile Crisis as a triumph, which proved the superior power of the United States.

In 1962, Walt Rostow started to advocate what became known in Washington as the "Walt 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, Walt 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.

Walt Rostow underlined this consideration in a paper written in July 1963, stating it would be best to invade North Vietnam before the Chinese "blow a nuclear device".

The idea that Communism had an appeal to least some of South Vietnam's people was anathema to Walt Rostow, who insisted that there was no civil war in South Vietnam and there was only a struggle between North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

The papers Walt 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, Walt 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, leading to a long series of Vietnamese-Chinese wars as successive Vietnamese emperors fought off attempts by the emperors of China to incorporate Vietnam into the middle kingdom.

Walt 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.

Walt 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.

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, Walt Rostow was well pleased.

About the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the resolution, Walt Rostow later said: "We don't know what happened, but it had the desired effect".

In November 1964, Walt Rostow advised Johnson to commit US 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.

Walt Rostow later recalled about Johnson: "he was always for the underdog".

Johnson always "initiated" his staff by humiliating them in some way to assert his dominance, and Walt Rostow seems not to have taken it personally.

Walt Rostow consistently argued to Johnson that any effort at a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War would be "capitulation".

The optimistic reports that the hawkish Walt Rostow wrote were much preferred by the president to the more pessimistic reports written by the "doves" in the administration.

In particular, Walt 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.

Walt 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.

Walt 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 first crisis that confronted Johnson and Walt Rostow was the Buddhist Uprising in South Vietnam where an attempt by Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky to dismiss General Nguyen Chanh Thi led to a civil war within the civil war as units of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam fought one another, much to the consternation of Johnson who could not believe that America's allies in South Vietnam were fighting each other.

Walt Rostow told Johnson: "We are faced with the classic revolutionary situation-like Paris in 1789 and St Petersburg in 1917".

Walt 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.

Walt Rostow used to tell him how Lincoln was abused by everybody when he was at a certain stage of the Civil War.

Walt 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.

Walt Rostow 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.

Walt 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.

In January 1967, Walt 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 November 1966, the Israeli Defense Force raided the village of Samu' in the Jordanian-occupied West Bank, a move which angered Walt Rostow as he told the Israeli ambassador Abba Eban that King Hussein of Jordan was an American ally and Johnson very strongly disapproved of the raid.

Walt Rostow stated: "Israel for some Machiavellian reason, wanted a leftist regime on the Left bank [of Jordan] so that it could then have a polarized situation in which the Russians would be backing the Arabs and the US backing Israel, and that Israel would not be in an embarrassing position where one of its friends among the Great Power would be a friend of an Arab country".

Walt Rostow reminded Johnson of Wilson's "betrayal" in not sending British forces to Vietnam and advised the president not to trust him.

Walt 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.

Cooper was at the theater when he an usherette told him that there was an urgent call from Washington, saying that a Mr Walt Rostow wanted to speak with him at once.

Wilson in a telephone call to Johnson complained that the letter as rewritten by Walt Rostow had ruined the peace talks and caused "a hell of a situation".

Karnow wrote at most Operation Sunflower offered was a chance to begin negotiations to end the war, and Johnson and Walt Rostow shunned that chance.

Walt 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, Walt 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, countered him point by point, stating that the dangers of Chinese intervention were far too great.

Walt 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".

The fact that Walt Rostow was ordered to investigate an essentially domestic matter showed that the president thought very highly of him.

Walt 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.

McNamara argued to Johnson that Walt 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.

Walt 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.

Walt 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".

When Egypt remilitarized the Sinai in May 1967, Walt Rostow did not support an Israeli strike against Egypt, instead writing "We sympathize with Eshkol's need to stop these [Palestinian] raids and reluctantly admit that a limited attack on Syria may be his only answer".

About the Egyptian remilitarization, Walt Rostow wrote that goals of American policy must be " prevent Israel from being destroyed stop aggression, and to keep U Thant out in front and stiffen his spine".

Walt 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.

Walt 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.

Walt 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.

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 Walt Rostow to make that point clear to the Israelis.

Walt 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.

Walt 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 Walt Rostow that were "about ten days" of peace left.

Walt Rostow added that Israel had been given a similar "friendly warning" not to escalate.

At about 4:35 am on 6 June 1967, Walt Rostow phoned Johnson to tell him that Israel had just attacked Egypt with the Israeli Air Force striking Egyptian Air Force bases all over Egypt.

Once the war began, Walt 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".

Walt 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.

Walt Rostow favored having a peace plan calling for "land for peace" deal to be issued by the United Nations, with the negotiations to be mediated by the United States.

Walt Rostow made it clear that he did not envision Israel permanently occupying the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the Sinai, believing that an occupation would ensure that the Arab-Israeli conflict would never end.

In October 1967, Walt 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".

Walt Rostow was opposed to Operation Pennsylvania plan, and turn his best to turn Johnson against it.

In February 1968, Walt 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.

Walt Rostow urged Johnson that "it is time for a war leader speech instead of a peace-seeker speech".

Walt 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".

Walt 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.

When Humphrey asked for Walt Rostow's help with campaign slogans, Walt 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".

On 29 October 1968, Walt Rostow told Johnson he now had information "on how certain Republicans may have inflamed the South Vietnamese to behave as they have been behaving".

Walt Rostow 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.

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.

Walt Rostow wrote extensively in defense of neoliberal economics, particularly in developing nations.

Walt 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, Walt Rostow served as one of the ghostwriters on Johnson's memoir, The Vantage Point, writing all of the chapters dealing with foreign affairs.

The main villain in The Diffusion of Power was McNamara, who Walt 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 1998, Walt 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 Walt Rostow's ideas.

Walt 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.

Walt Rostow received the Order of the British Empire, the Legion of Merit, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Walt Rostow was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.