Rostow, Walt Whitman (1916–2003)

Walt Whitman Rostow, born in New York City to a Russian Jewish émigré family, was an American economic historian and a pioneer of postwar development economics. He taught at Oxford and Cambridge before taking up a chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT (1951–1961). In 1968 he joined the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained and lectured until his death in 2003.

A speechwriter for Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the 1960s, Rostow took an active part in U.S. politics. Under the Kennedy administration, he was among the architects of the Alliance for Progress. He was later appointed National Security Advisor by President Lyndon Johnson and helped with planning the country's foreign policy as well as determining its strategy in the Vietnam War.

Rostow's ...