Walt Whitman Rostow
Walt Whitman Rostow was national security advisor and director of Policy Planning.
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History
Rostow rose through the OSS during World War 2.
In 1947, he served as executive secretary for the UN Economic Commission for Europe. He became involved in planning the Marshall Plan in this capacity.
Beginning in 1954, he advised Eisenhower on economics and foreign policy.
He held several, brief professorships at Oxford, Cambridge, and MIT. He formulated and published his theories on international development in this time.
Rostow became a major advisor to JFK during his campaign; he is credited with the New Frontier speech, the flexible response doctrine, etc.
He was appointed deputy national security advisor in 1961; Johnson promoted him to advisor in 1963. He had been sidelined during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but played a significant role in the planning of the Vietnam War and in the management of Israeli expansionism (Samu incident, Six Day War, etc.).
Following Nixon's election, he returned to academia and taught at the University of Texas at Austin.
Legacy
Rostow's theories on international development and geopolitical warfare were massively influential on U.S. foreign policy from the JFK presidency onward. As a result, the retrospective reckoning of those policies' outcomes is also a reckoning of his own work.