Walt Rostow, Adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, Dies at 86
By TODD S. PURDUM
WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 — Walt W. Rostow, an economic historian who became one of the principal architects and passionate 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 the poet Walt Whitman, Mr. Rostow graduated from Yale at 19, won a Rhodes scholarship, served as a major in the Army's covert Office of Strategic Services in World War II, then pursued a brilliant career as a scholar of economic modernization and an adviser to politicians. He coined Kennedy's 1960 campaign slogan, "Let's Get This Country Moving Again."
But it was his relentless support of American military intervention in Southeast Asia, first as a White House and State Department official in the Kennedy administration and then as Johnson's national security adviser at the height of the Vietnam War, that marked him for life.
... Mr. Rostow was among the first officials to urge the bombing of North Vietnam, and he was the principal author of a November 1961 report recommending an increase in United States military aid and advisers at all levels to the South Vietnamese government, shifting the relationship from purely advisory to one of "limited partnership."
At almost every turn, Mr. Rostow argued for an escalation of the war....
To the end of his life, he expressed no public regrets about his position on the war, contending in a 1986 interview that Congressional cuts in military aid had caused the fall of South Vietnam.
"I'm not obsessed with Vietnam, and I never was," he said then. "I don't spend much time worrying about that period." ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/15/obituaries/15ROST.html?pagewanted=2>
Carl
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