Professional and Academic Career
During World War II he served in the Office of Strategic Services under William Joseph Donovan. Among other tasks, he participated in selecting targets for U.S. bombardment. (Nicholas Katzenbach would later joke, "I finally understand the difference between Walt and me I was the navigator who was shot down and spent two years in a German prison camp, and Walt was the guy picking my targets.") Rostow became Assistant Chief of the German-Austrian Economic Division in the United States Department of State in Washington, D.C., immediately after the war. From 1946 to 1947, he returned to Oxford to teach as the Harmsworth Professor of American History. Rostow became the Assistant to the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Europe in 1947, and was involved in the development of the Marshall Plan.
He spent a year at Cambridge University as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions. Rostow was Professor of Economic History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1950 to 1961 and a staff member of the Center for International Studies, MIT, from 1951 to 1961. In 1958, he became a speechwriter for President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Read more about this topic: Walt Whitman Rostow
Famous quotes containing the words professional, academic and/or career:
“If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”
—Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)