Economic Vanguard: Architect of Peace and Prosperity, Unlocking the Legacy of Walt Rostow

By Fouad Sabry

Who is Economic Vanguard

Walt Whitman Rostow /rahs-TOU/ was an American economist, professor and political theorist who served as national security advisor to president of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1969.

How you will benefit

(I) Insights about the following:

Chapter 1: Walt Rostow

Chapter 2: Vietnam War

Chapter 3: 1968 Democratic National Convention

Chapter 4: Ho Chi Minh

Chapter 5: Viet Cong

Chapter 6: Murray Rothbard

Chapter 7: Graham Martin

Chapter 8: Dean Rusk

Chapter 9: Robert McNamara

Chapter 10: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

Chapter 11: J. William Fulbright

Chapter 12: Matthew Ridgway

Chapter 13: W. Averell Harriman

Chapter 14: Glassboro Summit Conference

Chapter 15: Anna Chennault

Chapter 16: Attack on Camp Holloway

Chapter 17: Taylor-Rostow Report

Chapter 18: Foreign policy of the John F. Kennedy administration

Chapter 19: Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

Chapter 20: Foreign policy of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration

Chapter 21: Henry Kissinger and the Vietnam War

Who this book is for

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information about Economic Vanguard.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Apr 21, 2024

Book preview

Chapter 1: Walt Rostow

Walt Whitman Rostow OBE (7 October 1916 – 13 February 2003) was an American economist, scholar, and political theorist who served as Lyndon B. Johnson's national security advisor from 1966 to 1969. He was a fierce anti-communist, a believer in the efficacy of capitalism and free enterprise, and a firm supporter of US engagement in the Vietnam War. He was renowned for his role in formulating US foreign policy in Southeast Asia throughout the 1960s. The 1960 publication The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto by Rostow is influential in various social science domains. Many officials in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations welcomed Rostow's theories as a possible alternative to the rising popularity of communism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Rostow never expressed remorse or apologies for his activities in Vietnam; as a result, he was virtually barred from working at prestigious American colleges following his retirement from government service. His older brother Eugene Rostow also had a number of key foreign policy positions in the government.

Rostow was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Manhattan, New York City. Lillian (Helman) and Victor Rostow are his parents, During World War II, Rostow served under William Joseph Donovan in the Office of Strategic Services. He participated in picking targets for U.S. bombing, among other duties. Later, Nicholas Katzenbach joked: I finally comprehend the distinction between Walt and myself [...] I was the navigator who was shot down and served two years in a German prison camp, whereas Walt was the individual responsible for selecting my targets. Eisenhower conditioned Operation Vulture on British participation, and when the British predictably declined to participate, he used this as a reason not to conduct Operation Vulture.

In August 1954, Rostow and fellow CIA-connected MIT economics professor Max F. Millikan persuaded Eisenhower to raise US foreign aid for development as part of a military-backed effort to promote American-style economic prosperity in Asia and abroad. At a time when Nikita Khrushchev boasted that the Soviet Union with its Five Year Plans would soon surpass the United States as the world's preeminent economic power because Marxist theory explained both the past and the future, American political and intellectual establishments had a strong desire to evaluate its ideological dimensions.

1960 saw the publication of The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, in which Rostow proposed the Rostovian take-off model of economic growth, one of the major historical models of economic growth, which argues that economic modernization occurs in five basic stages of varying length: traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, and high mass consumption. This became an important notion in social evolutionism's theory of modernization. A product of its time and place, the book argued that one of the central problems of the Cold War as understood by American decision-makers, namely that millions of people in the Third World lived in poverty and were attracted to Communism, could be solved by a policy of modernization fostered by American economic aid and growth.

John F. Kennedy, a presidential contender, was so impressed by The Stages of Economic Growth that he named Rostow as one of his political counselors and sought his counsel. As the apostle of modernization theory, Rostow devised countermeasures to communism in the Third World.

Rostow backed the Bay of Pigs invasion, but with reservations, believing that the existence of a Communist government in Cuba was untenable because it may infect the rest of Latin America.

The documents penned by Rostow advocated for a policy of graduated pressure in which the United States would gradually escalate its bombing to the point where it would destroy North Vietnam's fledgling