Johnson's background growing up poor on a farm in Texas left him with a sympathy for the underprivileged, and he was very interested in Rostow's plans for Third World development. Rostow later recalled about Johnson: "he was always for the underdog". Through Johnson believed that Africa was a hopeless disaster, he had great hopes for developing Latin America and Asia, remembering how the New Deal infrastructure projects of the 1930s had transformed Texas, until then a very backward state. As Rostow's specialization was the subject of the economic modernization of the Third World, his area of expertise appealed to the president, who often talked grandly of his plans to bring electricity to the rural areas of South Vietnam as the necessary prelude to ending poverty in South Vietnam. Finally, Rostow's consistently optimistic appraisal of the Vietnam war appealed to Johnson while his reputation as a hardliner was meant to signal that Johnson was prepared to do whatever it took to win the war. The abrasive Johnson, who was notorious within Washington for mistreating his staff, "initiated" Rostow by humiliating him by first leaking news of his appointment to the press, and then calling up to accuse him of being the leak. After unleashing a torrent of obscurities and screaming at him, the president hung up the phone without giving Rostow a chance to reply. Johnson always "initiated" his staff by humiliating them in some way to assert his dominance, and Rostow seems not to have taken it personally.