Word: rostow
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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President Johnson's replacements of top personnel in the State Department demonstrate the Administration's difficulty in recruiting top policy-making officials from outside the government. Professor Eugene Rostow, who will leave Yale Law School to become Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, was the only outsider named to fill one of the three vacant positions. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach will succeed George Ball as Under-Secretary of State and Foy Kohler, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, will be the new Deputy Under-Secretary for Political Affairs...
...Rostow, who will succeed the much maligned Thomas Mann in the third-ranking post in the State Department, is expected to assume Ball's duties in supervising U.S. policy toward Europe. Like Ball, he firmly believes in a strong Atlantic Alliance including the Common Market and Great Britain, although three years ago he authored a plan for intra-alliance nuclear sharing that differed sharply in conception from the MLF plan backed by Ball. Most important, he must cope with the problems of French military independence, West Germany's nuclear role, and the size and significance of U.S. troop commitments...
More than Pollyanna. Rostow is distrusted by many for his hawkish attitudes and derided even within the Administration as an expounder of outspoken and endless optimism to a President who craves good news. Rostow does see through rather rosy lenses. He has said: "We're closer to an era of real global peace than any time since 1914." On Face the Nation, he said bluntly of the Communist campaign in South Viet Nam: "They have been tactically defeated." Having once referred to John Kennedy's success in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis as "the Gettysburg of global civil...
Lyndon Johnson, who likes his staffmen to keep their mouths shut and stay out of sight unless he personally deputizes them to speak and be seen in public, has shown his trust by ungagging Rostow and allowing him to surface publicly from his office in the White House basement. He sent Rostow to Los Angeles last week to participate in the supersensitive briefings on Viet Nam before the Governors' Conference, permitted him to appear on CBS's Face the Nation to wrestle with newsmen's questions about the stepped-up bombing. Rostow joined Johnson and others...
Still, more and more people are beginning to feel that things are going well in Viet Nam, and Walt Rostow's elevation from the basement reflects far more than Pollyannish optimism. Soon after Johnson took office, Rostow (then a top State Department policy planner) said flatly: "Viet Nam is Johnson's Cuba; it will make him or break him." As one of the Administration's toughest-talking hawks, he began urging heavy commitments of ground troops early in Kennedy's tenure-nearly four years before Johnson actually made the decision in 1965. In a town where...