[2] In 1953, as one of the first in Congressional Fellowship Program of the American Political Science Association (APSA), Westerfield worked in the office of Congressman Lawrence Brooks Hays (D-Arkansas) of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
At this point in his development, he was a self-styled "hawk" in terms of the ongoing Vietnam War; but he considered himself a moderate consensus builder in matters relating to the Yale faculty and his own department.
[1] Cheney's political views were informed by a course he took from Westerfield, then a self-described ardent hawk who believed the United States should be assertive in its role as the leader of the free world.
[7] However, Westerfield's views were modified over the course of time, and he came to characterize the Bush administration's foreign policy as "precisely the wrong approach.
Yale's Political Science department offered a seminar on American foreign policy modeled on Westerfield's graduate course.