Career
After graduation, Rostow worked at the New York law firm of Cravath, deGersdorff, Swaine and Wood specializing in bankruptcy, corporations, and antitrust. In 1937 he returned to Yale Law School as a faculty member (becoming a full professor in 1944), and became a member of the Yale Economics Department as well.
During World War II Rostow served in the Lend-Lease Administration as an assistant general counsel, in the State Department as liaison to the Lend-Lease Administration, and as an assistant to then–Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs Dean Acheson. He was an early and vocal critic of Japanese American internment and the Supreme Court decisions which supported it; in 1945 he wrote an influential paper in the Yale Law Journal which helped fuel the movement for restitution. In that paper he wrote, “We believe that the German people bear a common political responsibility for outrages secretly committed by the Gestapo and the SS. What are we to think of our own part in a program which violates every democratic social value, yet has been approved by the Congress, the President and the Supreme Court?”
In 1955 Rostow became dean of Yale Law School, a post he held until 1965. From 1966 to 1969 he served as Under Secretary for Political Affairs in Lyndon B. Johnson's government, the third-highest ranking official in the State Department. During this time he helped draft UN Security Council Resolution 242, one of the most important Security Council resolutions relevant to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
After leaving government service Rostow returned to Yale Law School, teaching courses in constitutional, international, and antitrust law. Concerned about Soviet military expansionism, in the mid-1970s he was an active member of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority and helped found and lead the Committee on the Present Danger. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan appointed him director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, making Rostow the highest-ranking Democrat in the Reagan administration.
At his confirmation hearing in 1981, Senator Claiborne Pell asked Rostow if he thought the US could survive a nuclear war. Rostow replied that Japan "not only survived but flourished after the nuclear attack." When questioners pointed out that the Soviet Union would attack with thousands of nuclear warheads rather than two, Rostow replied, "the human race is very resilient. . . Depending upon certain assumptions, some estimates predict that there would be ten million casualties on one side and one hundred million on another. But that is not the whole of the population."
In 1984 Rostow became Sterling Professor of Law and Public Affairs Emeritus.
In 1990 Rostow had this to say regarding the Geneva Convention/Oslo Accords and finding a peace between Israel and the Palestinians; The Convention prohibits many of the inhumane practices of the Nazis and the Soviet Union during and before the Second World War - the mass transfer of people into and out of occupied territories for purposes of extermination, slave labor or colonization, for example....The Jewish settlers in the West Bank are most emphatically volunteers. They have not been "deported" or "transferred" to the area by the Government of Israel, and their movement involves none of the atrocious purposes or harmful effects on the existing population it is the goal of the Geneva Convention to prevent.
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