Rostow attended New Haven High School and was admitted to Yale College in 1929. At the time, his scores on his entrance examinations were so high that The New York Times called him the first "perfect freshman". In 1931 he earned Phi Beta Kappa, and in 1933 he earned a B.A., graduating with highest honors, and receiving the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize, which is awarded annually to that senior who, through the combination of intellectual achievement, character and personality, shall be adjudged by the faculty to have done the most for Yale by inspiring in his classmates an admiration and love for the best traditions of high scholarship. He became a member of Alpha Delta Phi.
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. Leon Lipson says, "Throughout his career, he has woven ideas or beliefs about American constitutional bases and practices with others about international diplomacy, politics, and force. The linking threads are morality and law."[2]
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 AffairsDean 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?"
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."[6][7]
In 1984, Rostow became Sterling Professor of Law and Public Affairs Emeritus.
Kathleen Christison writes that Rostow's perspective on the Arab–Israeli conflict was quite pro-Israeli, and he generally failed to acknowledge the existence of Palestinians.[8] For example, Rostow delivered an entire symposium in 1976 on the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 war without a single mention of the Arabs of Palestine and their exodus.[8]
In 1990, Rostow had this to say on 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."[9]
Personal life
In 1933 Rostow married Edna Greenberg, and they remained married until his death from congestive heart failure. Together they had three children, Victor, Jessica, and Nicholas. Had 6 grandchildren and 3 great grandchildren
His younger brother, Walt Whitman Rostow, served as national security adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
^John Rosenberg, John. "The Quest against Détente: Eugene Rostow, the October War, and the Origins of the Anti-Détente Movement, 1969–1976." Diplomatic History 39.4 (2014): 720-744.
^J. Peter Scoblic (2008) U.S. vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security, New York: Viking, ISBN0-670-01882-1, p. 126.
^"Nomination of Eugene V. Rostow," Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, 79th Congress, First Session (July 22–23, 1981), p. 49.
^ abChristison, Kathleen (2023). Perceptions of Palestine. University of California Press. pp. 110–111.
Goldstein, Abraham S. "Eugene V. Rostow as Dean, 1955-1965." Yale Law Journal (1985): 1323–1328. online
Lipson, Leon. "Eugene Rostow." Yale Law Journal (1985): 1329–1335. online
Rosenberg, John. "The Quest against Détente: Eugene Rostow, the October War, and the Origins of the Anti-Détente Movement, 1969–1976." Diplomatic History 39.4 (2014): 720–744.
Whitworth, William, and Eugene Victor Rostow. Naive questions about war and peace: Conversations with Eugene V. Rostow (W.W. Norton, 1970).
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Eugene Rostow.
