When Richard Nixon became president in 1969, Rostow left office, and over the next thirty years taught economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin with his wife Elspeth Rostow, who later became dean of the school. In 1969, he was told that because of his support for the Vietnam war that he was not welcome to resume teaching at MIT, forcing him to take up a position at the University of Texas. By 1968 the general consensus amongst the liberal American intelligentsia was that the Vietnam war was a horrific mistake of epic proportions and when Rostow left government service in January 1969, he found himself an unpopular figure with the liberal intelligentsia, making it impossible for him to return to MIT. Rostow's biographer, the British historian David Milne, wrote: "In 1969, Rostow's notoriety was such that none of America's elite universities were willing to offer him a job". For a man who had previously held professorships at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and the MIT, it was considered within academic circles to be a real comedown for him to teach at the University of Texas.