Elspeth Davies Rostow

My mother, Elspeth Vaughan Davies Rostow died Sunday, December 9, at her home of a sudden morning heart attack. She was 90 years old, although only a select few were aware of her actual age. She had just finished co-teaching a graduate seminar at the LBJ School of Public Affairs on the last 60 years of American foreign policy with Dean James Steinberg. Next semester, she was planning to teach another seminar, a solo class on 20th century American public policy, after which she swore she would retire. She had been teaching since her early 20s, longer if you count the teaching she did as a graduate student at Radcliffe. She had an exceptional life, marked most of all by a passionate marriage of over half a century to the man she loved. She was witness to history; the depression, World War II, the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses, and the last third of the century that most of us also shared with her. But she was more than a passive witness. She was an original, thoughtful analyst of world events and an instinctive teacher, not just to her students, but to everyone who crossed her path. Even as she began her tenth decade, she was at just as ease with graduate students as she had been back in the day, when she was younger than the students she taught. She was ageless in that regard. Until her last hours, she was vibrant, intellectual, involved with life, involved with people, independent, funny, acerbic, and elegant. She was born and raised in Manhattan, went to Barnard and Radcliffe, and met her future husband, Walt Rostow, at a seminar in Paris in 1937. After the war, when she worked in Washington for the OSS analyzing the efforts of the French resistance, she went to London and married in 1947. She and my father lived in Geneva for three years, and moved back to the U.S. where they both taught at MIT. In the early 1950s, she and my father adopted my brother Peter Vaughan Rostow, and myself, Ann Larner Rostow. They moved the family to Washington, D.C. during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and in 1969, she and my father moved to Austin, to begin what would turn out to be the richest part of her life. For nearly forty years, my mother devoted herself to the University of Texas, to the LBJ School of Public Affairs, to non-profit boards and commissions including the U.S. Institute for Peace, and to the city of Austin. Most of all, she devoted herself to her students, her colleagues and her friends--- a. devotion that was returned in full measure to her great, but often private, joy. She was sometimes perceived as an intimidating woman, regal and erudite. Underneath that image was a woman who was somewhat shy, somewhat reserved, poetic, sensitive and wickedly funny. Her brilliant limericks are too racy to be published in a family newspaper. The kindness and depth of the mother I knew are too profound to express in a short obituary. Her loss is heartbreaking, although the streets of Austin are undeniably safer without her behind the wheel. In addition to my brother and myself, she leaves her daughter-in-law, Kathryn Rostow, her granddaughter, Diana Leigh Rostow, and her beloved nieces, nephews and cousins. Services will be held at Weed Corley Fish at 3pm, Friday, December 14, and we hope well-wishers will also join us at Weed Corley Fish on Thursday, December 13, from 6pm to 8pm. In lieu of flowers, my mother was committed to The Austin Project; (theaustinproject.org). Obituary and guestbook online at wcfish.com