When Kennedy became president in 1961 , he appointed Rostow as deputy to his national security assistant McGeorge Bundy . Rostow annoyed Kennedy as an " idea-a-minute man " , causing him to complain that Rostow had too many ideas for his own good and was unable to focus on what was really important . Kennedy 's main complaint was that Rostow would in a rapid fire fashion offer up a deluge of ideas , which made him hard to follow . Kennedy also complained that Rostow was too fixated on Vietnam , charging he seemed to have an obsession with that country as he spent much time talking about Vietnam . As early as June 1961 , Rostow was advising Kennedy to bomb North Vietnam . During the Berlin crisis of 1961 , Rostow advised Kennedy : " We must find ways of putting pressure on Khrushchev 's side of the line with conventional forces or other means ... We must begin now to present Khrushchev with the risk that if he heightens the Berlin crisis , we and the West Germans may take action that will cause East Germany to come unstruck " . The particular action that Rostow advised Kennedy to take was to " take and hold a piece of territory in East Germany that Khrushchev may not wish to lose ( for example , Magdeburg ) " . Kennedy rejected this advice as too dangerous , stating that having U.S forces seize part of East Germany would almost certainly cause a nuclear war with the Soviet Union . Later that year , Rostow became Director of the State Department 's Policy Planning Staff . Kennedy told Rostow that his being demoted from the White House to the State Department was because : " Over here in the White House we have to play with a very narrow range of choices ... We ca n't do long-range planning ; it has to be done over there . I want you to go over there and catch hold of the process at the level where it counts " . Appealing to Kennedy 's Catholicism , Rostow complained that : " I am going from being a priest in Rome to being a bishop in the provinces . " In October 1961 , Rostow went on a fact-finding mission with General Maxwell Taylor to South Vietnam and he returned full of enthusiasm for greater American involvement in what he stated " might be the last great confrontation " with Communism . The report that Taylor and Rostow wrote advocated that Kennedy sent between 6 , 000-8,000 U.S Army troops to fight in South Vietnam under the guise of being " flood relief workers " . Kennedy rejected the Rostow-Taylor report 's recommendation that he sent troops to fight in South Vietnam , but accepted the report 's other recommendations calling for more military and economic aid to South Vietnam . . Karnow described Rostow as a man who " seemed to revel in the war " as it appeared that he wanted to prove that a short , bald , bespectacled New York intellectual could be just as hard , tough and macho as the idealized World War II veteran that Hollywood kept portraying in action films at the time . Rostow had served in World War II as an intelligence analysis with the task of selecting bombing targets in Germany , an important , but comfortable " desk job " that ensured he never saw combat , a point about which he was very sensitive about . During the Cuba Missile Crisis , Rostow was mostly excluded from the decision-making process , having only meeting with Kennedy during the crisis where he advised him to stop Soviet ships carrying oil to Cuba , advice that was not taken . Unaware that Kennedy had promised not to invade Cuba and to pull American missiles out of Turkey as part of the resolution , Rostow saw the Cuba Missile Crisis as a triumph , which proved the superior power of the United States . Inspired by the Cuba Missile crisis , Rostow on 28 November 1962 called in a memo for the bombing of North Vietnam , writing : " The whole lesson of the Cold War including the recent Cuba crisis is that Communists do not escalate in response to our actions " . In 1962 , Rostow started to advocate what became known in Washington as the " Rostow Thesis " , namely if the United States bombed North Vietnam along the same lines that Germany and Japan were bombed in World War II , then the North Vietnamese would have to cease trying to overthrow the government of South Vietnam . In 1963 , Rostow first advocated invading North Vietnam , arguing for American and South Vietnamese landings on the coast of North Vietnam as the prelude for reuniting Vietnam under the Saigon government . In a policy paper addressed to the Assistant Secretary of State for Asian Affairs , W. Averell Harriman , dated 2 February 1963 , that began with the sentence : " Before you decide your old and respectful friend has gone off his rocker ... " , Rostow advocated invading North Vietnam . As the approach of U.S. troops to the Yalu river in 1950 led to the Chinese intervention in the Korean War , it was generally accepted within Washington that invading North Vietnam would likewise lead to a war with China . For this reason , Harriman was not impressed with Rostow 's paper and advised Kennedy to sent Rostow back to his perch in academia , saying that Rostow was far too blasé about the possibility of a nuclear war with China . The Chinese nuclear program was well advanced by 1963 , and in 1964 China exploded its first atomic bomb , followed by its first hydrogen bomb in 1967 . Rostow underlined this consideration in paper addressed to Harriman in July 1963 , stating would be best to invade North Vietnam before the Chinese " blow a nuclear device " . Harriman was one of the richest men in the United States , who was very generous in donating to the Democratic Party , and as such served as a friend and adviser to every Democratic president from Roosevelt to Johnson . The persistence which Rostow advocated invading North Vietnam even after the first Chinese nuclear test in 1964 worried Harriman , and he consistently sought to club Rostow 's influence , making him into one of Rostow 's main enemies in Washington . After Kennedy 's assassination , his successor Lyndon B. Johnson promoted Rostow to Bundy 's job after he wrote Johnson 's first State of the Union speech . In 1964 , Rostow championed the idea of Congress giving President Johnson the power to wage war in Southeast Asia , an idea that he first suggested in February 1964 . Rostow pointed out in a memo to the president that the degree of escalation in the Vietnam war envisioned by the administration would pose constitutional and legal problems as the constitution gave Congress , not the president , the right to declare war and the level of escalation envisioned would be a war in everything , but name . Rostow ' solution to this problem was for Congress to pass a resolution giving the president the legal power to essentially wage a war in Vietnam
Kennedy 's assassination
Assassination of John F. Kennedy
Walt Whitman Rostow