Developmental-ism was not only the dominant academic approach but it had also become the approach underlying U.S. assistance programs and policy to- ward the emerging nations. Here the key person had been W. W. Rostow, author of the earlier summarized The Stages of Economic Growth, who had gone from his academic position at MIT in the late 1950s, where he had written his main works on development; to head of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, where he had also been the chief architect of John F Kennedy's foreign aid program through the newly created Agency for International Development (AID), and specifically for Latin America in the form of the Alliance for Progress; to National Security Adviser under President Lyndon Johnson, where he had been one of the leading planners of the war in Vietnam. Rostow is one of those rare individuals who has had the opportunity to con- vert his academic ideas and writings into policy practice.