Yank at Oxford

After his eldest son was killed in World War I, Lord Rothermere (Harold Sidney Harmsworth), late proprietor of the sensational London Daily Mail, endowed a chair at Oxford. Its purpose: to acquaint Britons with their recent American allies. Since 1922 such sober, unsensational U.S. historians as Harvard's Samuel Eliot Morison, Princeton's Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker and Columbia's Allan Nevins have occupied the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professorship of American History. Last week a 29-year-old, crewcut veteran of World War II sailed for England to become the new Harmsworth professor, as well as the first U.S. Rhodes Scholar ever named to an Oxford chair.

Walt W. Rostow (Yale '36) was a Rhodes Scholar just before the war. He enlivened many an Oxford sherry party by banging out a syncopated protest of his own composition (Claustrophobia Blues) on the piano. When not busy harmonizing or playing rugger for Balliol College, he was apt to be heavily engaged in a bull session. Later he got his Ph.D. at Yale and taught economics at Columbia before spending 32 wartime months abroad, ending up as an O.S.S. major in bombing intelligence. On that assignment he got to know W. Averell Harriman, who as U.S. Ambassador later sat on the committee that elected Rostow to the Harmsworth post.

At Oxford, Professor Rostow plans to resume his bull sessions and his pianoplaying, in addition to lecturing on "Economic Factors in American Politics." His thesis might have pleased the man who endowed the chair: "America is a pretty interesting place, and Britons ought to learn more about it."

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