The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  He would regard his own rise as a personification of the American possibilities, and he would see in the American-Rusk story a moral for other people. Cherokee County, he would later point out, was an underdeveloped area, with typhoid and other problems, but it had all changed and become modernized. “I’ve been able to see in my lifetime how that boyhood environment has been revolutionized with education, with technology, with county agents, and with electricity—all that helping to take the load off the backs of the people who live there. Now I can see that this can happen in one lifetime, I disregard those who say that underdeveloped countries still need two or three hundred years to develop because I know it isn’t true. Because I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

  Dean was very good in school, though once he lost in a spelling bee because when he came to the word “girl,” he spelled it “gal.” Could there have been a Secretary of State with origins, with traditions more perfectly attuned to Lyndon B. Johnson? It was not surprising that their relationship was different from almost any other in that period of 1964. They felt so comfortable in each other’s company that if they were on a plane, they would fall into conversation that was almost giddy, like two schoolboys back together after a summer vacation. And was it not true, thought the men around Rusk, that his accent, which under Kennedy had been somewhat Scarsdale, became more Georgia again? Once Lyndon and Dean were walking around the Ranch, followed by a group of high Washington aides, Johnson taking great pride in showing all the artifacts. One in particular delighted him, an antique piece which he pointed out to the somewhat bewildered Easterners. “You and I know what this is, don’t we, Dean?” There was a smile of acknowledgment from Dean of a memory which took him back many years. It was an old indoor potty.

  As a young boy he had dreams that took him beyond Cherokee County; even then he was fascinated by the military. During World War I Dean, not yet ten years old, and Roger would cut out pictures of soldiers from newspapers and paste them on cardboard. Thousands of them, Roger would recall. Roger and Dean would dig thirty-foot trenches and follow all the battle plans. “There wasn’t a rich kid in town who had as many soldiers as we did,” said Roger Rusk, adding, “What people don’t understand about Dean is how deep are his military inclinations. It’s part of our Anglo-Saxon heritage. The South always had a military disposition.” That tradition is very real. The South is filled with minor and major military academies, and produces an abnormally high percentage of career officers and Medal of Honor winners. This was also part of Rusk’s life (both his grandfathers had fought in the Civil War, though on the Confederate side, and later when he had to fill in his security forms and was asked to list any relatives who had tried to overthrow the government of the United States, he would put down both their names).

  He was a rare person in that era, a young man who went through high school and yet graduated from college with eight years of ROTC training, for besides his religious instruction he had come across something else which fascinated him, military training. He spent four years at Atlanta Boys High in ROTC, rising to command all ROTC units in Atlanta, student colonel. “Well, of course, in the South, most of us as we were growing up just took for granted that if there was to be trouble, if the nation was at war, that we would be in it. The tradition of the Civil War was still with us very strongly . . . We assumed there was a military duty to perform . . . We took that as a perfectly natural part of being an American.” The blending of the religion and the sense of military duty, a belief in it as the most natural kind of thing, was not by any means a contradiction. The values of the region were still very close to the frontier, a hard land, with many enemies, a code which taught that if evil stalked, you did not turn the other cheek; if you were soft or tolerant of evil, it would devour you.

  Rusk had been encouraged to seek a Rhodes scholarship by a high school teacher who had been to Oxford. Here was this promising young man of truly uncommon industry and discipline, the brightest boy in the school, who spoke well on his feet—why shouldn’t he do well before the Rhodes interviewing board? And it was typical of Rusk, serious and single-minded, that in high school he had already set out a goal like this. He worked for two years as a clerk in a law office to earn the money to go to Davidson, where he once again excelled in his studies, his ROTC and his YMCA work, and where he compiled a sufficiently good record to become a likely candidate for a Rhodes. He was Phi Beta Kappa and captain of the ROTC, and he played on the basketball and tennis teams, which was all very good for the Rhodes, Cecil Rhodes having preferred to advance sound minds in sound Caucasian bodies. The Rhodes committees are local blue-chip Establishment groups with a strong scent for the future good citizen. Rhodes scholars as a group tend to be intelligent but more respectable than restless, more builders than critics, and the personal interview is highly important. Those who show indications of doing good are lauded, and such qualities are respected and encouraged, but there is doubt about someone very young who is deeply alienated.

  Rusk acquitted himself predictably well. He was questioned about what seemed like a contradiction in his record, his interest in international affairs and the eight years of ROTC, and answered (visions of the Fulbright committee to come) that the American eagle on the Great Seal has arrows in one claw and the olive branch in the other, and the two have to go together. He won the scholarship, and it would be the crucial link, the propellant for him. In a nation so large and so diverse there are few ways of quantifying intelligence or success or ability, so those few that exist are immediately magnified, titles become particularly important; all Rhodes scholars become brilliant, as all ex-Marines are tough. To make it in America, to rise, there has to be some sort of propellant; sheer talent helps, but except in very rare instances, talent is not enough. Money helps, family ties and connections help; for someone without these the way to the power elite can seem too far, too hopeless to challenge. The connection is often a Rhodes scholarship. It is a booster shot that young men are not unaware of, that will make the rest of their lives a good deal easier. Doors will open more readily, invitations will arrive, the phone will ring (thus one young applicant brought before the Rhodes committee was asked at the end of his interview what he would choose for the epitaph on his tombstone. He quickly answered, “Rhodes scholar,” and got his grant).

  From then on Rusk would be someone of note; in any application the title would jump out, Rhodes scholar. As a staff officer during the war, what he said would have meaning, he was a Rhodes, therefore an intellectual, a soldier-intellectual. Later, to a President of the United States under criticism from the intellectual community for his policies in Vietnam, it would seem very comforting: My Secretary of State is a Rhodes scholar. His accomplishment would make that very genuine modesty and tolerance of others even more becoming: Dean is a Rhodes scholar but he puts on no airs. So the Rhodes, coupled with Rusk’s intelligence, his enormous industry and energy and ambition, would carry him far and open up the great Eastern centers of power for him. Dean Rusk, Rhodes scholar.

  These years coincided with the Depression but that seemed to have little effect on Rusk. Other men coming out of the rural South of that period may have been affected by the poverty they saw around them, but Rusk was always interested in international affairs, not domestic ones. In his two years at Oxford, he was even by the standards of those days considered extremely hard-working and diligent; he won coveted awards in England and gained a respect, as many Americans did, for those special qualities of the British, understated humor (in rare moments when he is relaxed and feels himself among real friends, Rusk can be very funny indeed, but it is not a side of himself that he likes to show in public, as though somehow levity detracts from the office. It was only when he was among those who he knew already respected the office that he would let himself go). He also spent a semester in Germany and watched Hitler coming to power. The most lasting memory of those Oxford years was a belief that the best-educated and most elite young men of England with their Oxford Union had given Germa
ny the wrong impression, signaling that England would not fight; it was, he would tell friends later, the worst possible indication, and England might have been better served if the signal had reflected something closer to the heart and determination of the average workingman. The lesson was that the upper class was a little spoiled and faddish, that intellectuals and elites were not entirely to be trusted, that there was often greater shrewdness and wisdom in the mainstream.

  He came back to America in 1934 and took a job at Mills College in California teaching political science, wrote a little, and rose quickly, becoming dean at the age of thirty. In 1937 he married one of his students, Virginia Foisie. In 1940, with his ROTC commitments still alive, he was called to active duty as an Army captain in command of an infantry company. Shortly afterward, just before Pearl Harbor, he was put in charge of military intelligence for British Southeast Asia. Captain Rusk, Major Rusk, finally Colonel Rusk. These were good years. Playing on a great team, doing something that mattered and was of value, using all that training, effecting things; above all, being a part of something important. No one who ever knew Dean Rusk doubted that they were satisfying and exciting years. Some men had too much war, a bad war, had left too much of themselves behind and could only hope to shed the uniform the day it was over, if not sooner, but for Rusk it was a fulfilling time, with tasks he was well prepared for and found he did well. He was far from Cherokee County, and it was in a sense liberating; unlike so much of life, what you did had meaning. Studies by Lloyd Warner, the sociologist, showed that Americans had never had such a sense of purpose, usefulness, of being needed, as in the war, and Rusk was a good example.

  He served first in Washington and then in the China-Burma-India theater, in the New Delhi section, where he became deputy chief of staff. He was an operations man as well, and his intelligence and extreme diligence put him a notch or two above the men around him. Two qualities emerged for the first time which were to propel him further upward. The first was that he was a very good diplomat, which was particularly important in the tense and often explosive atmosphere of Delhi, where the final days of an empire were flashing by, the final prejudices, the last kicking of the wog. True, the British were our allies and we needed them, but the Americans were idealistic, anti-imperialist, and despised British colonialism. They believed in the new order which they were helping to create, and hated the way the British treated the Indians. If most of the Americans there reacted to it, General Joe Stilwell, the classic American anti-imperialist, the man who was on the side of the little fellow, with his instinctive commitment to the poor and wretched, rebelled the most. He was, in the words of Harold Isaacs, “an impatient and puritanical soul, hating liars and grafters and men in pinstripe suits.” He naturally hated British colonialism, and he broke a lot of crockery and wounded some sensitive feelings at headquarters, he was not a headquarters man. But Rusk was. In the short-tempered world of New Delhi, where we both needed and hated the British, Rusk was the good guy, the man who handled the touchy tempers; he was smooth where Stilwell was abrasive. You talked with Rusk and you knew he was for the same things you were for. He hated the racism of the British, the arrogance of the colonialist, but in a divided atmosphere, he was someone everyone could talk to. He was the good soldier who was also a good diplomat, and these were not qualities which were lost upon that supreme soldier-diplomat George Catlett Marshall, public servant personified.

  No one grasped like Marshall the vast complexities of the war, and the political problems as well; he was also aware of the coming of the United States as a superpower and of the future decline of the British, aware of the need to harness the British potential and yet to understand their limits without offending them. It was not by chance that he had reached down and chosen Dwight D. Eisenhower, that general who was the most subtle politician, as his Supreme Commander in Europe, a man brilliant at synthesizing the work of others, extracting their best qualities, and controlling his own anger (so good, in fact, at controlling his own rages when need be that years later, when Joe McCarthy slandered George Marshall and called him a traitor, Ike, fine diplomat, good pol, for the good of the party and the Republican crusade, swallowed his pride and loyalty and excised criticism of McCarthy and defense of Marshall from his speech). It was these same qualities which had caught Marshall’s eye about Rusk—intelligent without being egomaniacal, well educated, a good man.

  There was one other quality which had begun to surface, Rusk’s writing ability. Is there such a word as “expositor” for a man who writes almost classic expository prose? If so, Rusk was a brilliant expositor; he had a genius for putting down brief, cogent and forceful prose on paper—a rare and much needed quality in government. There was no descriptive, flowery writing, but brief, incisive action cables for men who, already overburdened by words, had too little time. He had been virtually discovered as a writer through the cables he sent back from that theater, and after a while, in the nerve ends of the Pentagon, people began to talk about this young officer out there. General George (Abe) Lincoln, a West Point man who was also a Rhodes scholar and a key man in that special underground world of military intellectuals teaching at the Point, spotting talent, making sure that it was promoted into key slots, had been impressed by the Rusk cables and he asked a friend who this Rusk was, he seemed like a hell of a man. “You don’t know Rusk?” the other officer answered. “I thought you were at Oxford together. Why, Rusk is a Rhodes scholar.” Then Lincoln, who was a talent scout for Marshall, began to pay closer attention and Rusk became singled out. Lincoln soon decided that Rusk’s reports were the best there were, which was quite an accolade, since the competition was very stiff; Bedell Smith, after all, was writing for Ike from Europe.

  Toward the end of the war Lincoln decided that they would need Rusk on some of the upcoming political problems, so he persuaded the Delhi headquarters to let Rusk come back to join a very special political-military group which was going to determine the political divisions of the postwar world working directly under Secretary of War Henry Stimson, with Lincoln as the connecting officer. Since the State Department had become moribund during the war, with all the talent having been siphoned off to the military, this was the creation of a new instant State Department, comprising talented young men who were having to make quick decisions on what the postwar map would be, which country should accept surrender, where various countries would be divided. It also had to prepare the Japanese peace terms (which meant getting the right terms, getting Chiang, MacArthur and the British aboard, and doing it quickly, because hundreds of thousands of lives might be lost). It was highly pressurized work, with lives in the balance, but also a sense that a mistake, the wrong line drawn, the wrong island given away, could come back to haunt you years later. The group was in effect the forerunner of the National Security Council, and the problems it faced were very tough: whether or not to let some Dutch marines back into Indonesia; where to divide Korea as the Russians came pouring through—it was Rusk who, checking with old maps, picked the 38th parallel. And deciding, as the war came to a close, to go along with the pressure from the British and French and let the British accept the Japanese surrender in Indochina, a particularly fateful decision as far as Vietnam was concerned.

  John McCloy was the head of the group, which also included General Charles Bonesteel, a Rhodes scholar and one of the Pentagon’s intellectuals (who would, like Lincoln, become one of Rusk’s lasting friends—his old friends tended to be from the military); James Pierpont Morgan Hamilton; Andy Goodpaster, a bright up-and-coming officer who was also a Rhodes scholar (later the influence of Lincoln in all this would become so profound that his men would be known as the Lincoln Brigade).

  In this high-powered group, Colonel Rusk dealt on an equal level with four-star generals and the great figures of World War II. It was in this period particularly that he caught Marshall’s eye. Rusk intended to stay in the Army; these had been happy years with the military. He liked the atmosphere in which he worked and he th
ought that there would be a need for men like him in the new Army. His future seemed secure, the first star was on its way, and with Rusk’s special credentials, the intellectual qualities which would now show, the second and third would not be far behind. Not being a West Point man, perhaps he would never be Chief of Staff, but he would certainly be a top staffman and it would be a good and useful career.

  It was at this point that Marshall asked him to go to State. Marshall, who had been so brilliant at promoting the bright young men in the Army and speeding their careers in the military, now wanted to redress the balance and move talent back to State. He prevailed upon Rusk, and Rusk somewhat reluctantly agreed; he had worked with the State Department people doing some of the planning for the United Nations and now, with the war over, he went to work for State in the UN bureau, eventually becoming director of Special Political Affairs.