Walt Whitman Rostow (; October 7, 1916 – February 13, 2003)The University of Texas at Austin, In Memoriam: Walt Whitman Rostow, archived on 6 February 2005, accessed on 21 May 2025 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.
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; he is often credited with writing Kennedy's famous "New Frontier" speech. Prominent for his role in shaping 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, 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.
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. His elder brother Eugene also held a number of high government foreign policy posts.
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 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 to 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, 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 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 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, which occurred when, as a teenager, his parents invited for dinner a group of fellow Jewish socialists, 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 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, where he completed a B.Litt. degree. At Oxford, Rostow became friends with future British 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 returning to Yale University, completing his PhD 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. Among other tasks, he participated in selecting targets for US bombardment. Attorney General 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 storage 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 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 to push deeper into Central Europe and even into Eastern Europe. Based on his World War II experiences, Rostow became a convinced advocate of strategic 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.
Postwar 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 strategic 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 strategic 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. Though 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 strategic 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. 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, the French diplomat regarded as the "father" of the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 that became the European Economic Community in 1957.
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 at the Center for International Studies (CIS) at the MIT 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 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 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 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 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". 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. 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 with tactical nuclear weapons. 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.