Eugene V. Rostow

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,

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 (becoming a full professor in 1944),

During World War II, Rostow served in the Office of Lend-Lease Administration 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.

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 on November 25, 2002, from congestive heart failure, in Alexandria, Virginia. 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 "The Japanese American Cases: A Disaster", 54 Yale Law Journal 489 (1945). A National Policy for the Oil Industry (1948) "The democratic character of judicial review." Harvard Law Review 66.2 (1952): 193–224. Planning for Freedom (1959) The Sovereign Prerogative (1962) Law, Power, and the Pursuit of Peace (1968) Is Law Dead? (ed., 1971) "Great Cases Make Bad Law: The War Powers Act." Texas Law Review 50 (1971): 833+ The Ideal in Law (1978) A Breakfast for Bonaparte US national security interests from the Heights of Abraham to the Nuclear age (1993), (Published as "Towards Managed Peace" under Yale University Press)