Rostow consistently argued to Johnson that any effort at a peaceful resolution to the Vietnam War would be "capitulation". In his reports to Johnson, Rostow always put the emphasis on information that portrayed the United States as winning, becoming Johnson's favourite adviser on foreign affairs. The optimistic reports that the hawkish Rostow wrote were much preferred by the president to the more pessimistic reports written by the "doves" in the administration. A typical memo from Rostow on 25 June 1966 read: "Mr. President, you can smell it all over. Hanoi's operation, backed by the Chicoms Communists, is no longer being regarded as the wave of the future out there. U.S. power is beginning to be felt". The Ambassador-At-Large W. Averell Harriman called Rostow "America's Rasputin" as he considered him to have a sinister power over Johnson's mind, as he always pressed the president to take a harder line on Vietnam against the advice of his more dovish staff, Harriman included. Johnson was not enthusiastic about the Vietnam War, later telling his biographer Doris Kearns in a very gendered language that the Great Society was "the woman I really loved" while the Vietnam War was "that bitch of a war on the other side of the world". As a president, Johnson had often in private complained that he much rather focus on his "Great Society" program intended to end poverty and racism in America and that the Vietnam War was an unwanted distraction. Given these views, Harriman found it mystifying that Johnson should shun his advice about finding a way for the United States to gracefully exit Vietnam while accepting the counsel of Rostow.