Economist Walt Rostow believed he could engineer history. History had other plans

When I was studying economics in the early 1960s, the hot new star was an American named Walt Rostow. His book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, had caused quite a stir when published in 1960. And now he’d gone to work for John F. Kennedy’s shiny new administration in Washington.

Decades later, Godfrey Hodgson’s obituary for Rostow captured the moment nicely: “This was the age of liberal consensus when there was a broad acceptance of a conservative, anti-communist foreign policy, and a welfare state strategy in domestic politics.” JFK was the epitome of political modernity and Rostow was just the kind of intellectual star to help bring the brave new world into being.

Rostow was born in New York City in 1916, the son of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Russia. Although his parents were dedicated socialists, they were also vigorously anti-communist. And the son inherited his parents’ hostility.

Rostow was also preternaturally bright, graduating from Yale at 19 and becoming a professor of economics at Columbia by the age of 24. Serving with the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War, he was posted to London in 1942, where he helped pick strategic bombing targets. After the war, he took up teaching at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all the while writing scholarly books and articles.

The Stages of Economic Growth was very much in tune with the 1960s zeitgeist, which held that technocrats and experts could solve most of the world’s problems by applying the right techniques and pulling the appropriate levers. The field of economics was particularly prone to this conceit.

Armed with Keynesian ideas—and the then-fashionable Phillips Curve, which suggested governments could reduce unemployment by accepting higher inflation—professional economists and the politicians they advised came to believe in their ability to fine-tune the economy to permanently benign ends. Alas, the stagflation of the 1970s proved otherwise.

Rostow’s book applied this “expert” mentality to global poverty and underdevelopment, subjects that had acquired significant political and moral salience. By following his prescriptions, impoverished countries could be helped onto the road to modernity and ultimate prosperity.

But as critics subsequently pointed out, he was attempting to “generalise a mostly European experience into one suitable for any country on Earth.” It’s fair to say that, over the years, The Stages of Economic Growth hasn’t worn particularly well.

However, all that was in the future. When he joined the Kennedy administration as deputy national security adviser in 1961, Rostow was one of the world’s most famous thinkers, someone who seemed to be a perfect fit for a bold new era.

Kennedy’s enthusiasm for Rostow palled within a year. To quote: “Walt is a fountain of ideas; perhaps one in 10 of them is absolutely brilliant. Unfortunately, six or seven of them are not merely unsound, but dangerously so.” Rostow was thus removed from operational matters and assigned to the State Department as director of policy planning. Maybe working on long-range scenarios would be a better fit for his fertile mind.

However, that didn’t stop his propensity to write memos on current issues; and as the question of Vietnam acquired greater importance, his anti-communism manifested itself in increased hawkishness. Then, following Kennedy’s assassination, Rostow became influential with the new president, Lyndon Johnson, even being appointed national security adviser in 1966.

Strategic bombing had been Rostow’s particular area of Second World War expertise, and he went back to it in Vietnam. He was convinced it was the key to turning off North Vietnam’s support for the war in the South, whether by raising the price of such support or eliminating the capacity to provide it.

His thinking had two flaws.

First, he committed the classic error of assuming that your opponent’s incentives and values are identical to your own. By threatening North Vietnam’s emerging industrial base, he assumed that Hanoi would decide the price was too high. But as it turned out, winning the war was more important to the North Vietnamese than the protection of any industrial base (such as it was).

And second, he didn’t reckon with the fact that both the Soviet Union and China would ramp up material support for North Vietnam in tandem with the escalation of American bombing.

By the time the Johnson administration (Rostow included) left office in January 1969, the Vietnam War was poisonous at elite universities. Hence there was no welcome mat for Rostow in the Northeastern Ivy League world where he’d once been celebrated. The rest of his career was spent at the University of Texas at Austin, where he continued to teach and write. His last book was published in 2002, the year before his death.

Thinking about Rostow brings to mind an observation once made by Keynes himself: “If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.”

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical – well, perhaps a little bit.