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Walt W. Rostow, an economic historian who became one of the principal architects and passionate defenders of the Vietnam War as an adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, died on Thursday night at a hospital in Austin, Tex., where he lived. He was 86.
In a memorandum to Kennedy on April 12, 1961, Mr. Rostow, alarmed at the Communist insurgency in Southeast Asia, Later, Mr. Rostow was among the first officials to urge the bombing of North Vietnam, and he was the principal author of a November 1961 report recommending an increase in United States military aid and advisers at all levels to the South Vietnamese government, shifting the relationship from purely advisory to one of "limited partnership."
In December 1963, Mr. Rostow, by then chairman of the State Department's Policy Planning Council, wrote what later became known as the Rostow thesis. First circulated in the summer of 1964, it held that externally supported insurgencies could be stopped only by military action against the sources of external support, through a series of escalating measures intended to impart maximum psychological blows.
In 1964 and 1965, Mr. Rostow argued for a broad American troop presence in the Pacific region, some ground forces in Laos and South Vietnam and an intensive naval blockade of North Vietnam. Though the initial White House response was milder, Johnson eventually adopted all of those measures.
At almost every turn, Mr. Rostow argued for an escalation of the war. Sustained American bombing of North Vietnam began in March 1965, but on limited targets. By May 1966, he was advocating "systemic and sustained bombing" intended to destroy petroleum installations in Hanoi and Haiphong as a way to cut off supplies to forces in South Vietnam.
Walt Whitman Rostow was born Oct. 7, 1916, in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents who gave their three sons proud and distinctive American names. Mr. Rostow's older brother, Eugene Victor, named for the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, became dean of the Yale Law School and Johnson's under secretary of defense for political affairs. A third brother, Ralph Waldo, was named for Ralph Waldo Emerson.
