Walt Rostow, Adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, Dies at 86
Walt W.Rostow, an economic historian who became one of the principal architects andpassionate defenders of the Vietnam War as an adviser to Presidents John F.Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, died on Thursday night at a hospital in Austin,Tex., where he lived. He was 86.
The son of a Socialist immigrant who named him for thepoet Walt Whitman, Mr. Rostow graduated from Yale at 19, won a Rhodesscholarship, served as a major in the Army's covert Office of StrategicServices in World War II, then pursued a brilliant career as a scholar ofeconomic modernization and an adviser to politicians. He coined Kennedy's 1960campaign slogan, "Let's Get This Country Moving Again."
But it was hisrelentless support of American military intervention in Southeast Asia, firstas a White House and State Department official in the Kennedy administrationand then as Johnson's national security adviser at the height of the VietnamWar, that marked him for life.
"Hebecame the president's national security adviser at a time when criticism andopposition to the war were beginning to crystallize, and he eventually servedthe purpose of shielding the president from criticism and from reality,"wrote David Halberstam in "The Best and the Brightest," his 1972study of the war's origins. "He deflected others' pessimism and rewardedthose who were optimistic. It was not contrived; it was the way he was."
Friends andfoes alike described Mr. Rostow as a perpetual optimist, easygoing andebullient, unfailingly polite, a "sheep in wolf's clothing," as thewriter Townsend Hoopes once put it. Scorned by much of the academic world afterhis White House service, he taught at the newly established Lyndon B. JohnsonSchool of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, where he was an emeritusprofessor of political economy. The author of more than 30 books, Mr. Rostowremained active in school and civic affairs until his death.
Kennedy, in anot entirely flattering comment, once declared, "Walt can write fasterthan I can read."
Mr. Rostow wasalso, colleagues recalled, a whirlwind of supreme self-confidence, talkative tothe point of verbosity, certain of the moral rectitude of his positions andunwavering in the face of criticism, even as doubts about the wisdom of theVietnam War grew in Johnson's inner circle.
"Ifinally understand the difference between Walt and me," Nicholas deB.Katzenbach, who was Johnson's under secretary of state and attorney general,once remarked after an argument about bombing. "I was the navigator whowas shot down and spent two years in a German prison camp, and Walt was the guypicking my targets."
But in thebeginning, Mr. Rostow's optimism about Vietnam was widely shared. He came to itby way of his academic work, mostly at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, on economic development. In his best-known book, "The Stagesof Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto" (1960), he argued thateconomic growth was a multistaged process, stimulated by desire for improvementof life, as well as profits. He said modernization was characterized by acrucial "takeoff" period of rapid growth stimulated by expansion in afew crucial segments of the economy.
He argued thatthe United States should speed this process of modernization in places likeSoutheast Asia, and that until such takeoff could be achieved, it should makeefforts by all diplomatic or military means to stop guerrilla infiltration thatthreatened Communist takeover.
In amemorandum to Kennedy on April 12, 1961, Mr. Rostow, alarmed at the Communistinsurgency in Southeast Asia, urged "gearing up the whole Vietnamoperation," by appointing a fulltime policy coordinator, increasing aidand sending Special Forces advisers. Many of the recommendations wereeventually accepted.
Later, Mr.Rostow was among the first officials to urge the bombing of North Vietnam, andhe was the principal author of a November 1961 report recommending an increasein United States military aid and advisers at all levels to the SouthVietnamese government, shifting the relationship from purely advisory to one of"limited partnership."
In December1963, Mr. Rostow, by then chairman of the State Department's Policy PlanningCouncil, wrote what later became known as the Rostow thesis. First circulatedin the summer of 1964, it held that externally supported insurgencies could bestopped only by military action against the sources of external support,through a series of escalating measures intended to impart maximumpsychological blows.
In 1964 and1965, Mr. Rostow argued for a broad American troop presence in the Pacificregion, some ground forces in Laos and South Vietnam and an intensive navalblockade of North Vietnam. Though the initial White House response was milder,Johnson eventually adopted all of those measures.
At almostevery turn, Mr. Rostow argued for an escalation of the war. Sustained Americanbombing of North Vietnam began in March 1965, but on limited targets. By May1966, he was advocating "systemic and sustained bombing" intended todestroy petroleum installations in Hanoi and Haiphong as a way to cut offsupplies to forces in South Vietnam.
On Nov. 1,1967, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, increasingly skeptical, called for"stabilizing" the war effort by re-examining American ground effortsand shifting a greater burden to the South Vietnamese and calling a bombinghalt by the end of the year. Mr. Rostow supported the first two goals, butopposed an unconditional bombing halt, and Johnson soon took a similarposition.
"Walt wasup to his elbows in raw intelligence, looking for information to support hisvery strongly held view that we were winning, that we would win over the longhaul," Richard Moose, an aide at the time, recalled today. "Themorning of the Tet offensive, in the Situation Room in the very early morninghours, Walt was sure that while all the rest of the world was looking at thepictures of the Saigon Embassy and so forth, Walt said, 'This is a great victoryfor our side.' "
"Walt wasthinking in terms of the casualties that had been inflicted on the NorthVietnamese and Vietcong," Mr. Moose added. "Years later, we learnedthat in fact their losses had been horrendous. But Lyndon Johnson's losses interms of image were very much greater."
WaltWhitman Rostow wasborn Oct. 7, 1916, in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents whogave their three sons proud and distinctive American names. Mr. Rostow's olderbrother, Eugene Victor, named for the Socialist presidential candidate EugeneV. Debs, became dean of the Yale Law School and Johnson's under secretary ofdefense for political affairs. A third brother, Ralph Waldo, was named forRalph Waldo Emerson.
Walt was astandout from the start, earning his Ph.D. from Yale in 1940 and starting hiscareer as an economics instructor at Columbia University. After his wartimeservice, for which he received the Order of the British Empire, he joined theState Department as assistant chief of the German-Austrian Economic Division,later returning to England to teach American history, first at Oxford, thenCambridge.
From 1950 to1961, he was professor of economic history at M.I.T. and also a staff member ofits C.I.A.-supported Center for International Studies. He did occasionalconsulting work for the Eisenhower administration and became a policy adviserto Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, in 1958.
He is creditedby some sources with giving the Kennedy the phrase "the NewFrontier," a theme that appeared in "Stages of Economic Growth"and was used by the candidate in his acceptance speech at the Democraticconvention in 1960.
In January1961, Kennedy named Mr. Rostow as deputy special assistant to the president fornational security affairs. That fall, in a staff shuffle, he went to the StateDepartment, returning to the White House in early 1966 as Johnson's specialassistant for national security affairs, the post now known as nationalsecurity adviser, where he remained until Richard M. Nixon was sworn in.
"He andWestmoreland were tried and true for the war to the end," said RobertDallek, the author of a two-volume biography of Johnson who came to known Mr.Rostow during his years of research at the Johnson Library in Austin. "Heargued that the war did make a positive difference, in the sense that it gavethose Southeast Asian nations time to develop and ward off the possibleconsequences of Communist takeover. It gave them space and time to develop andstabilize themselves. Whether it was true or not, he believed it and it mayhave been a kind of comfort to him and the thousands of Americans who lostrelatives in that war."
Because of hishawkish stance, Mr. Rostow was a pariah in many academic quarters, but heflourished at the University of Texas. His wife of 55 years, the former ElspethDavies, a political scientist, joined him on the faculty there. In the early1990's, Mr. Rostow became head of the Austin Project, an organization dedicatedto expanding public and private programs providing prenatal care and aid todisadvantaged children.
Besides hiswife and his brother Ralph, of Sarasota, Fla., Mr. Rostow is survived by a son,Peter, of Del Rio, Calif., a daughter, Ann, of Austin, and one grandchild. Hisother brother, Eugene, died last November.
To the end ofhis life, he expressed no public regrets about his position on the war,contending in a 1986 interview that Congressional cuts in military aid hadcaused the fall of South Vietnam.
"I'm notobsessed with Vietnam, and I never was," he said then. "I don't spendmuch time worrying about that period."
Still, he knewthat for many members of the Vietnam generation, he would forever be identifiedwith what they saw as a hugely failed policy.
"Iremember the first time I met Tom Hayden," he said, referring to theantiwar activist who later became a state senator in California. "Hecouldn't believe it. He said out loud: 'Just think of it. I'm talking to WaltRostow.' "
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