Kennedy told Rostow that his being demoted from the White House to the State Department was because: "Over here in the White House we have to play with a very narrow range of choices...We can't do long-range planning; it has to be done over there. I want you to go over there and catch hold of the process at the level where it counts". Appealing to Kennedy's Catholicism, Rostow complained that: "I am going from being a priest in Rome to being a bishop in the provinces." In October 1961, Rostow went on a fact-finding mission with General Maxwell Taylor to South Vietnam and he returned full of enthusiasm for greater American involvement in what he stated "might be the last great confrontation" with Communism. The report that Taylor and Rostow wrote advocated that Kennedy sent between 6,000 and 8,000 U.S Army troops to fight in South Vietnam under the guise of being "flood relief workers". Kennedy rejected the Rostow-Taylor report's recommendation that he sent troops to fight in South Vietnam, but accepted the report's other recommendations calling for more military and economic aid to South Vietnam. Karnow described Rostow as a man who "seemed to revel in the war" as it appeared that he wanted to prove that a short, bald, bespectacled New York intellectual could be just as hard, tough and macho as the idealized World War II veteran that Hollywood kept portraying in action films at the time. Rostow had served in World War II as an intelligence analysis with the task of selecting bombing targets in Germany, an important, but comfortable "desk job" that ensured he never saw combat, a point about which he was very sensitive.