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Walt Whitman Rostow, former Special Assistant for National Security Affairs in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, died of kidney failure on Thursday, 13 February 2003. He was 86.
Dr. Rostow was born on 7 October 1916 in New York City. In 1936, at age 19, he received a BA from Yale University. He completed his PhD, also awarded by Yale, in the following four years, two of which were spent as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College in Oxford. He was hired as an instructor of economics at Columbia University immediately after completing his PhD. He was an intelligent and fortunate man.
How Dr. Rostow chose to use his gifts is less fortunate.
Roughly the first half of his sixty-three year career was divided between academia and the public sector. During World War II, he served as a spook with the rank of Major in the Office of Strategic Services, using probably ethically questionable means to uphold his country's wartime alliance with Joseph Stalin, the bloody-handed dictator of the Soviet Union. Immediately after the war, he served as the Assistant Chief of the German-Austrian Economic Division in the United States Department of State, and later, after a year's hiatus teaching, the Assistant to the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Europe. In these positions, Dr. Rostow made his own contributions to policies that, with whiplash speed, reversed the alliance with the Soviet Union and helped begin the escalation of the Cold War and the original nuclear arms race.
In 1949, Dr. Rostow returned to academia for several years, with positions at Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was called back into public affairs by President Kennedy, who made Rostow his Deputy Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs in January 1961. In December of that year, he was appointed counselor of the Department of State and Chairman of the Policy Planning Council, Department of State. In May 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Rostow to the additional duty of United States Member of the Inter-American Committee on the Alliance for Progress, with the rank of Ambassador.
He served in these latter two capacities until early 1966, when President Johnson called him back to the White House as his Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, where he remained until January 20, 1969. It was during this time that Dr. Rostow designed and oversaw the implementation of a system in concentration camps in South Vietnam, more often euphemistically referred to as the Strategic Hamlet Program. The system forcibly displaced civilians in an allied and allegedly democratic state and resettled them in small areas with appalling living conditions, in order to allow their movements to be better monitored by young US draftees who had been unconstitutionally sent to combat in Vietnam.
In its primary goal of significantly inhibiting the Viet Cong's guerilla warfare, the program was a failure. However, it proved a handy repression tactic and was passed on to later US allies such as Guatemala, where it became part of a policy package that killed as many as 200,000 civilians during that country's internal conflict.
In February 1969 Dr. Rostow returned to teaching, at the History Department of The University of Texas at Austin, as the Rex G. Baker, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Political Economy. He and his wife, Elspeth, also became active in the community; and Dr. Rostow continued his prolific publication of generally half-baked political and economic tracts.
Until his death, he remained active, teaching undergraduates (frankly horrifying that he should be entrusted with minds so impressionable) in the fall semesters, and a graduate seminar in the spring.
The preceding is a radical adaptation of the obituary for Rostow on the website of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum. This institution, which has always prided itself, seemingly with reason, on its balanced presentation of LBJ's administration - The Great Society and Vietnam given equal weight - managed to eulogize Rostow without even using the word "Vietnam," and so cast a pall over its own credibility in less than 600 words.
Worse for me was the reaction that I found on the student listserve for UT's LBJ School of Public Affairs. Rostow's death prompted me to clean out my inbox for that 30-post-a-day account, which I have delayed doing for the two months since I have been back from working half a year as a human rights observer in Guatemala. As I deleted the old messages as quickly as possible, I noted a definite and disappointing hard turn to the right in the discourse as the push for attacking Iraq progressed. It is something that I suppose I should have seen coming, at the very latest when I was the first to post a dissenting view on 911 to that forum, and I waited half a day for any support. But I hadn't wanted to see the shift. With it there, laid out in a documented timeline for me, though, I couldn't ignore it any longer. I wanted to cry.
And there, at the end of the list, was the mention of Rostow's passing. There was one message. That was all. The subject line of that one message was "Sad News," and the student had written about how much he admired Rostow, how much he had learned from him. I had just finished sending the news to a friend of mine, under the heading, "One More Fascist Down." I laughed instead of crying.
On the listserve, no one else thought or dared to object. Not even me, and I hated myself for it. But I'm still shy a thesis and a degree that I don't want to jeopardize, and Elspeth is a prominent professor at LBJ. Suddenly, I see how moral guilt develops.
I met Walt Rostow one night in the autumn of 2000, when he guest lectured a course I was taking. The course dealt with the development of US foreign policy, and it had an intense unit on Vietnam.
We were as well-versed, left-leaning, and intellectually rigorous as LBJ students once deserved our reputation for being. We asked the hard questions. Did it never occur to the administration that a régime that needed so much support just to survive was not one the US should have been defending in the name of democracy? In planning the Gulf of Tonkin scam, did anyone in the administration counsel that such an usurpation of Congress' powers could be grounds for impeachment if it went wrong? What could possibly have possessed you, personally, Dr. Rostow, to believe that the Strategic Hamlet Program was the right thing to do?
Dr. Rostow, though, had long since built a psychological shell around himself thicker than the Maddox's hull, and he had coated it with a non-stick substance Dupont only wish they held the patent for. He answered each of our questions with a verbatim quote, more often irrelevant than not, from our preparatory reading for the class - a chapter, exceedingly arrogant in tone, from one of his books. When we protested this treatment, he accused us of not having done our reading. We cited passages for him. It was a debacle. But nothing we did, it seemed, could touch him. There seemed, in fact, no one there to touch. His facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice never changed throughout the night. When it was over, though infuriated, we also pitied him.
Unrepentant to the end, Walt Whitman Rostow has finally heeded the advice of decent people everywhere that he ignored for decades: He has gone to hell.
In the official University of Texas eulogy for Rostow, university president Larry R. Faulkner said, "Walt was a great and gracious scholar and the faithful servant of his nation."
No one who is that arrogant and that injured can possibly be great or gracious. Nor can they be a scholar. Walt Rostow was a profoundly misguided hack, and that was how he served his nation.
"He will be acutely missed," Faulkner continued. "Our sympathies go now especially to Elspeth."
If Rostow is what we must miss and admire today, as the US slides, using a Tonkin Resolution look-alike as a sled, down the petroleum-greased slope toward a manifestly unpopular conflict in Iraq, it is not the bereaved Elspeth who needs our sympathies most. It is us.
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