The Real Washington Consensus

Among American foreign policy whisperers and assessors of the state of the world, no one had a more checkered reputation than Walt Rostow—academic economist, influential author, adviser to presidents, and, as the U.S. diplomat Averell Harriman once called him bitingly, “America’s Rasputin.” In the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, nearly every strategic move Rostow advocated turned out to be wrong, from escalating the commitment of U.S. combat troops for South Vietnam to rejecting peace talks with the North Vietnamese. Since he continued to defend those positions after most other people had concluded