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APPENDIX฀B the฀others Rostow, Brzezinski, Lake, Berger, and Hadley I.฀Lyndon฀Johnson:฀Walt฀Rostow On April 1, 1966, Walt Whitman Rostow succeeded McGeorge Bundy as NSC advisor. Oddly, Bundy had favored Bill Moyers for the job, one of Lyndon Johnson’s closest advisers but a policy generalist and speechwriter without deep expertise in national security affairs.1 A second competitor was Robert Komer, a White House assistant who was a strong hawk on Vietnam .2 However, Jack Valenti, another close aide to LBJ, lobbied on Rostow’s behalf and he was chosen.3 Rostow brought impressive credentials to the job, perhaps even exceeding those of Bundy. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Rostow won a scholarship to Yale for students of New Haven high schools, where the family then resided. He graduated from Yale at nineteen and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, where he studied at Balliol College. Rostow developed an early interest in economic history and its relationship to political and economic development. This interest led to a doctorate when he returned to Yale, and it became the basis for his subsequent—and prolific—academic research.4 During the war years he served in the Office of Strategic Services (the wartime precursor of the CIA), with much of his work dealing with bombing target selection—an early career experience that later served him in good stead. After the war, he was assistant head of the German-Austrian economic division in the State Department. He later served as assistant to Gunnar Myrdal—the then executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Europe—where Rostow was involved in the Marshall Plan. In 1946, Rostow taught for a year as Oxford’s Harmsworth Professor of American History. In 1949, he was at Cambridge as the Pitt Professor of American History, both prestigious appointments for someone so early in an academic career. In 1950, he was appointed professor of economic history at MIT, where he served until 1961.5 During the Eisenhower years, he was called upon as an outside consultant; 314฀ |฀ Appendix฀B he played an especially important role in the 1955 Open Skies proposal and as an adviser to then White House aide Nelson Rockefeller. In 1961, Rostow, by now a member of the Kennedy inner circle,6 was initially tapped to serve as Bundy’s deputy at the NSC. In December 1961, however, he was moved over to the important post of chair of policy planning in the State Department, George Kennan’s perch during the Truman years.7 Kevin Mulcahy raises the point whether the “overly garrulous,” “idea-aminute ” Rostow was a poor fit for the more focused Kennedy White House. “We have to play with a narrow range of choices,” Kennedy told him, “We can’t do long-range planning; it has to be done over there [at State].”8 Was it a brush-off on Kennedy’s part, after a failed test run? “Temperamentally,” Kai Bird notes, Rostow “was hardly the kind of man to serve as [Bundy’s] deputy. Rostow was voluble, exuberant and full of good and sometimes foolish ideas.”9 Bundy was reportedly “dumbfounded” when he learned that Rostow had been appointed to succeed him; Bundy thought Rostow the kind of person who decides an issue “before he thought about [it].”10 Given his ties to the Kennedy presidency, his appointment as NSC advisor in 1966—when many of the Kennedy loyalists had by then left the Johnson administration—was “something of a mystery,” as Larry Berman notes.11 In bringing him back to the White House, Johnson certainly did not register any concerns for the problems that Kennedy and Bundy had perceived. Rostow and Johnson developed a close, if not at times a too close and symbiotic relationship. As Johnson noted, Rostow is “my intellectual . He’s not your intellectual. He’s not Bundy’s intellectual. He’s not Schlesinger’s intellectual. He’s not Galbraith’s intellectual. He’s going to be my Goddamn intellectual.”12 Indeed that bond of “my intellectual” proved long: Rostow’s entire post–White House career was spent, until his death in 2003, in an endowed chair at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. Yet there were nuances in the LBJ-Rostow relationship. I. M. Destler notes that “Rostow seems not to have had as strong a mandate as Bundy.” There were also differences between LBJ’s two NSC advisors. Bundy was “an exceptional administrator-operator,” while Rostow was “primarily...

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