Walt Rostow, 86; Top Advisor on Vietnam

Walt W. Rostow, who served as President Johnson’s national security advisor and advocated forceful U.S. military action in Vietnam, has died. He was 86.

Rostow died Thursday night at Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas. The cause of death was not announced by the family.

Although in government service for much of the 1960s, first under President Kennedy, whom he had advised on foreign policy matters since the 1950s, Rostow exerted his greatest influence heading Johnson’s national security team from 1966 until early 1969.

While many historians cite Rostow as the architect of U.S. policy in Vietnam during those peak years of U.S. involvement, Rostow maintained that the characterization was inaccurate.

“The simple fact is that the fundamental decisions on Vietnam policy were made by President Johnson in July of 1965, when I was a planner in the State Department,” he told an interviewer some years ago.

But while in that planning post, Rostow wrote a report that outlined a course of action designed to apply to Vietnam-like situations wherever they might occur. This thesis recommended destroying external support that insurgencies such at the Viet Cong, the Communist guerrilla force fighting the South Vietnamese government, often needed to survive. This firm hand, Rostow felt, would help to eliminate the support from third parties, in this case China or North Korea.

Some of the measures that Rostow recommended, such as the large-scale introduction of U.S. ground troops in Vietnam and the start of naval blockades and bombing assaults against North Vietnam, later became part of the Johnson administration’s war strategy.

Rostow felt the best way to end the war would be to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which would cut supply lines to the south. He encouraged the U.S. to control the trail with ground forces.

He also urged an invasion by U.S. troops of neighboring Laos, a plan Johnson rejected. Over the years, critics of Rostow and the administration charged that Rostow tailored the reports that the president saw on Vietnam action to reflect only the most positive portrayal of the war effort. When Johnson decided not to run for reelection in 1968, Rostow made plans to return to academia.

Walt Whitman Rostow was born in New York City. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants, politically active and idealistic. They named their sons after the poet Walt Whitman and the socialist Eugene Debs. Eugene Rostow also served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in lesser roles than his brother Walt. He died in November at the age of 89.

Like Eugene, Walt Rostow went to Yale and graduated in 1936 with a bachelor’s degree. He received his doctorate from the same university four years later. A Rhodes scholar, Rostow attended Balliol College, Oxford, England, from 1936 to 1938.

He began his career as an educator in 1940, teaching economics at Columbia University.

During World War II, he served as a major in the OSS, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. After the war, he briefly joined the State Department as assistant chief of the German-Austrian Economic Division.

Through much of the late 1940s, he lived in England, teaching at Oxford and later Cambridge. Rostow returned to America in 1950, taking the post of professor of economic history at MIT.

He also was a staff member of the Center for International Studies at MIT from 1951 to 1961.

During the 1950s, he advised Kennedy, then a Massachusetts senator, on foreign policy. Over the years, it was reported that it was Rostow who coined the term “New Frontier” for Kennedy. But Rostow doubted that, saying it was probably speechwriter Theodore Sorensen. He did accept credit for the slogan “Let’s get this country moving again,” which became popular during the presidential campaign of 1960.

In January 1961, Kennedy appointed him deputy special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs. A year later, he moved to the State Department, where he held the post of counselor and later chairman of the Policy Planning Council.

In early 1966, Johnson named him his special assistant for national security affairs.

Rostow remained a firm supporter of Johnson’s Vietnam policies throughout the late 1960s. Because of that, he found few openings in the East Coast academic world when he returned to the private sector. He took a teaching post at the University of Texas and remained there the rest of his life, teaching undergraduate and graduate students.

He wrote more than 30 books, including “The World Economy,” which he considered his master work.

In 1985, on the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Rostow continued to defend the U.S. efforts in Vietnam, noting, “If we get through without another big war over Southeast Asia, it is possible that historians will say that, although it was a bitter thing the Americans went through, it bought time for the people out there -- that those 10 years were not all wasted.”

He is survived by his wife, Elspeth Rostow, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas, and two children.