Eugene V. Rostow


Eugene Victor Debs Rostow was an American legal scholar and civil servant. He was appointed dean of Yale Law School and served as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs under U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson. During the 1970s, Rostow was a leader of the movement against détente with the Soviet Union, and in 1981, U.S. President Ronald Reagan appointed him director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Early life

Rostow was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. He was raised in Irvington, New Jersey and New Haven, Connecticut. His parents were active socialists and their three sons, Eugene, Ralph, and Walt, were named after Eugene V. Debs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman.

Education

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 joined the Phi Beta Kappa, and in 1933 he earned his 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. Subsequently, he became a member of Alpha Delta Phi.
From 1933 to 1934, Rostow studied economics at the King's College of the University of Cambridge as a Henry Fellow. He then returned to Yale, attending Yale Law School, and earning his L.L.B. with highest honors. From 1936 to 1937, he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. Rostow defined himself as a "New England Puritan Jew".

Career

After graduation, Rostow worked at the New York law firm of Cravath, deGersdorff, Swaine and Wood, specializing in bankruptcy, corporations, and antitrust.
In 1938 he returned to Yale Law School as a faculty member, 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."
During World War II, Rostow served in the Office of 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 Affairs Dean 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 published 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?"

Dean of Yale Law School

In 1955, Rostow succeeded his professor Harry Shulman as dean of Yale Law School, a post he held until 1965. Towards the end of his tenure, he was appointed Sterling Professor of Law and Public Affairs. In 1959, he was appointed Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge. At one point in 1962 he was considered by U.S. President John F. Kennedy for appointment to the Supreme Court but geographical and religious issues interfered.
Rostow coined the term "ceremonial deism" in 1962, and has been used since 1984 by the Supreme Court to assess exemptions from the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, thought to be expressions of cultural tradition and not earnest invocations of a deity. However, American academic and professor of philosophy Martha Nussbaum remarks that the term does not describe any school of thought within Deism itself.
From 1966 to 1969, he served as Under Secretary for Political Affairs in Lyndon B. Johnson's government, the third-highest-ranking official in the State Department. During this time he helped draft UN Security Council Resolution 242, one of the most important Security Council resolutions relevant to the Arab–Israeli conflict.
After leaving government service, Rostow returned to teach at Yale Law School, teaching courses in constitutional, international, and antitrust law. In 1984, Rostow was appointed Sterling Professor of Law and Public Affairs Emeritus at Yale University.

Foreign policy

Rostow spent much of the 1970s in warning that détente with the Soviet Union was a dangerous fiction, downplayed Soviet military expansionism, and enabled a "Soviet drive for dominance" in the world.
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. For example, Rostow delivered an entire symposium in 1976 on the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War without a single mention of the Palestinian people and their exodus.
Rostow was a leader of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority and helped found and lead the Committee on the Present Danger. In 1981, U.S. President Ronald Reagan appointed him director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which made Rostow the highest-ranking Democrat in the Reagan Administration; he was removed from office in 1993. At his confirmation hearing during the same year, U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell asked Rostow if he thought the United States 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."
In 1990, regarding the legal principles of the Geneva Convention/Oslo Accords and the establishment of a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine, Rostow declared: "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."

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, along with 6 grandchildren and 3 great grandchildren. His younger brother, Walt Whitman Rostow, served as national security adviser to U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Selected publications