ABSTRACT
Walt Whitman Rostow was Rex G. Baker, Jr. Professor of Political Economy at the University of Texas at Austin. He was born in New York City in 1916 and died in Austin in 2003. He was educated at Yale University (B. A., 1936; Ph.D., 1940) and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1936-38. During the 1940s he alternated academic with public service. He taught at Columbia in 1940-41 and worked in the Office of Strategic Services in Washington and London during the war years. In 1946-47 he was Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford, went to Geneva to work at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in 1947-49, and was Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge in 1949-50. He was a member of the humanities faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1951 to 1961. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations he worked at the White House and at the Department of State, returning to academic life at Texas in 1969. He was honored both for public service and for scholarship. In 1945 Rostow received an honorary Order of the British Empire and from the United States a Legion of Merit, and was awarded with The Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1957 and Fellow of the American Philosophical Society in 1983; in 1982 he was presented with Economics in the Long View, a three-volume Festschrift edited by Charles P. Kindleberger and Guido di Tella (New York University Press). The interview took place in March 1994 at Rostow’s home in Austin, and was conducted by J V. C. N, then of Washington University in St. Louis, who writes:
Walt Rostow was one of the most influential, imposing and controversial figures in the fields of economic history and development for over half a century. He is best known for The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), which popularized the term “take-off into sustained growth” and which had an enormous impact on the economic development
policy literature. His first works on the growth and development of early industrial Britain, partly in collaboration with A. D. Gayer and Anna Schwartz, served as pioneering works of cliometrics even before the term was invented. Despite his early interest in quantification, Rostow remained outside the cliometrics movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He often referred to himself as a maverick in the profession.
