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Eugene Rostow, 89, Official at State Dept. and Law Dean, Dies November 26, 2002 By TODD S. PURDUM WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 - Eugene V. Rostow, a legal scholar who helped create Yale Law School's current eminence and later became a vigorous defender of the Vietnam War as a senior State Department official, died today at an assisted-living residence in Alexandria, Va. He was 89. Like his more famous younger brother, Walt, who was President Lyndon B. Johnson's national security adviser and an architect of the administration's Vietnam strategy, Mr. Rostow, who served as under secretary of state for political affairs, was part of a generation of hawkish Democrats. Deeply influenced by World War II, they saw fighting Communism in Southeast Asia as central to a policy of global containment. The Brooklyn-born son of a Socialist, who named him for the party's presidential candidate, Eugene Victor Debs, Mr. Rostow exemplified the strain of hard-headed, Democratic thinking on foreign policy and defense that flowered in the 1960's. He finished his public career as the highest-ranking Democrat in the Reagan administration, as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was also an affable and erudite scholar, with a taste for bow ties and vests, fine food and wine, who as dean of Yale Law School from 1955 to 1965 built its endowment. He was renowned for recruiting more than a dozen top legal scholars in 1956, during a period of turmoil at the school over the lack of promotions for faculty members who had clerked for liberal justices. "He was perhaps the greatest dean the law school ever had," said one of his later recruits, Guido Calabresi, now a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York. "The school was deeply divided when he took over and through his generosity of spirit and reverence for the institution, he made things right." Judge Calabresi added that his deanship "had all the qualities of optimism that helped get him in trouble over Vietnam." As a young Yale professor, in 1945, Mr. Rostow published a law review article condemning the government's internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, at a time when that policy had gone largely unquestioned. In 1983, he was forced to resign as head of the arms control agency after President Ronald Reagan concluded he was not hawkish enough in his approach to negotiations with the Soviet Union. Through it all, Mr. Rostow remained blunt and unapologetic for views that made him unpopular with many fellow intellectuals and former colleagues. In 1968, the Sidwell Friends School, an elite Quaker institution here, withdrew an invitation to speak at a son's graduation because of his position on Vietnam. "A balance of power is the only possible foundation for peace," Mr. Rostow wrote in The New York Times in 1969. "The system which kept the general peace between 1815 and 1914 has vanished. If a new balance is to be attained and secured - and such a balance defines our national interest in world politics - we shall have to continue to take the lead in doing so: the pressure against equilibrium is now stronger, more diverse and more difficult to control than was the case in the late 40's." His son Victor recalled tonight that his father was, first and always, a lawyer, and saw the world in those terms. "You must recognize that he was a lawyer," the younger Mr. Rostow recalled, "and it was his belief that the United States had obligations in Asia under the Seato treaty, and quite apart from that, we were the sole power that could contain the Communist insurgency. Unlike his brother, who was in many ways an architect of our Vietnam policy, he was one of the most articulate defenders of that policy." Mr. Rostow graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale at 19, then went on to earn a law degree there before joining the faculty in 1938. Ineligible for military service in World War II because of a bad back, he worked as an adviser in the State Department, principally on lend-lease matters, before returning to Yale. In 1966, President Johnson named him under secretary of state for political affairs, which made him a frequent diplomatic point man on Vietnam. His son said he never doubted that his position was right, but added that he understood that there were aspects of the war that were not good for America. Indeed, in a 1972 article in The Times, Mr. Rostow called the degradation of public discourse the heaviest blow Korea and Vietnam have inflicted upon the American spirit. In addition to his son Victor, he is survived by his wife of 69 years, the former Edna Berman Greenberg, a psychotherapist; another son, Nicholas, of Manhattan; a daughter, Jessica, of New Haven; his brothers Walt, of Austin, Tex., and Ralph, of Sarasota, Fla.; and six grandchildren. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/26/obituaries/26ROST.html?ex=1039301622&ei=1&en=2fb09b3b5cbcc75c HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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