Walt Whitman Rostow - Professional and Academic Career

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.