http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/15/us/walt-rostow-adviser-to-kennedy-and-johnson-dies-at-86.html

The son of a Socialist immigrant who named him for the poet Walt Whitman, Mr. Rostow graduated from Yale at 19, won a Rhodes scholarship, served as a major in the Army's covert Office of Strategic Services in World War II, then pursued a brilliant career as a scholar of economic modernization and an adviser to politicians. He coined Kennedy's 1960 campaign slogan, ''Let's Get This Country Moving Again.''

But it was his relentless support of American military intervention in Southeast Asia, first as a White House and State Department official in the Kennedy administration and then as Johnson's national security adviser at the height of the Vietnam War, that marked him for life.

''He became the president's national security adviser at a time when criticism and opposition to the war were beginning to crystallize, and he eventually served the purpose of shielding the president from criticism and from reality,'' wrote David Halberstam in ''The Best and the Brightest,'' his 1972 study of the war's origins. ''He deflected others' pessimism and rewarded those who were optimistic. It was not contrived; it was the way he was.''

Walt Rostow (1916)