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:
“Never be intimidated when you deal with men. Curse, don’t cry.”
—Anonymous, U.S. professional woman. As quoted in Aspirations and Mentoring in an Academic Environment, ch. 4, by Mary Niles Maack and Joanne Passet (1994)
“If twins are believed to be less intelligent as a class than single-born children, it is not surprising that many times they are also seen as ripe for social and academic problems in school. No one knows the extent to which these kind of attitudes affect the behavior of multiples in school, and virtually nothing is known from a research point of view about social behavior of twins over the age of six or seven, because this hasn’t been studied either.”
—Pamela Patrick Novotny (20th century)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)