If Marshall wanted him to do something, Rusk did it. Marshall was his hero, the embodiment of all that was desirable, all that a man should be. Twenty years later Rusk would repeatedly quote Marshall—Marshall had said this, Marshall had done that. He would quote Marshall on the military approvingly (always give them half of what they’re asking and double their missions), and he followed Marshall’s mode of operation. Marshall the ex-general was staff-oriented; Rusk would be staff-oriented. Marshall the ex-general was always correct and went through proper channels; Rusk would go through channels and be appalled by anyone who did not. Marshall did not deign to answer criticism; Rusk, proud, would also not deign to answer criticism. As Marshall had admired the sense of service and the intellectual capacity of the best of the military, so would Rusk, and he would quote Marshall approvingly about the modern American army, and particularly those men who had come to the fore because of World War II, a generation which had come to manhood between two great wars, superior men, learned, wise. Having a lot of time on their hands during the war, they went to special schools, read a great deal, traveled a great deal, used that leisure time well, went beyond the parochial bounds of their jobs and their careers. They were superior men, superior to comparable men whom you found in peacetime jobs, who had less sense of service. Thus he shared Marshall’s admiration for the military, without wondering perhaps if it was equally applicable to another time.
He admired Marshall’s virtues, the urbanity, civility; the Virginia gentleman, and yet distant, never intimate; never write your memoirs, confide in no one but the President. Always put duty and country above self. Marshall had given up the chance to head the invasion of Europe because Roosevelt needed him in the less dramatic job in Washington; after the war he had taken on the China mission for Truman, trying to negotiate an agreement between Mao and Chiang while protecting the President, by the very use of his great prestige, from the immediacy of political fallout on that supercharged question, mediating between Chiang and Mao. Rusk took a demotion from Deputy Undersecretary to become Assistant Secretary for the Far East because it had become a hornet’s nest; Rusk was willing to take all the brutal criticism of the war in Vietnam because the more he took, the more it might shield the President. Rusk was upset after his term not because the criticism of Vietnam had been so personal, but far more important, because he feared it was sweeping America away from courses of foreign policy in which he deeply believed. He thought the new drift very dangerous, to this country and to the world, which had been held together by that foreign policy (was it surprising that of the policy of containment, the greatest edifice had been given the name of his mentor, the Marshall Plan?).
Marshall was austere, impressive, selective with his praise; years later Rusk took aside aides who would work through the night and into the morning, passing on those Olympian words: “I will never forget what George Marshall said one day when he was Secretary of State. I had worked fourteen hours long into the morning and as I was leaving his office, he said, 'Mr. Rusk, you’ve earned your pay today.’ So I took that lesson from the greatest man I’ve ever known. If you have very good people it isn’t necessary to compliment them. They know how good they are.” Marshall was genteel, always the gentleman, above the fray, never entering into petty fights; when Rusk left the government in 1952, he eschewed the rough-and-tumble of the business world or politics, where it was very hard to be both successful and a gentleman, and found comfort in the less savage world of the foundations, where you could hold on to the old values and still rise. As Secretary, he brought this sense, this lack of jugular instinct back into the government, a lack of willingness to fight with the sharp young Kennedy people, or Harriman, or Defense, or any other force. A bright aide would remember the situation early in the Administration when the question of the publicly owned satellite arose. The top State people gathered and decided that State was for the publicly owned satellite, and there was a sense of excitement among some of the new people, why, they had just seen policy set. But State, having taken a position, did not get behind it, used no force or pressure, left the issue to low-ranking assistants, who were cut up very badly, since State turned out to be the only organ in the government which was for it. On something like a satellite, if you want it, you get behind it, very hard, otherwise you let it alone completely.
Marshall, too, had been above the crowd, confiding in the President and in few others, and Rusk would be the same. It was not proper for him to get into fights with twenty-nine-year-old headhunters and bright desk officers who seemed to want to challenge all their superiors, so the Secretary of State reserved his counsel for the President of the United States, driving people at State mad and indeed irritating the President. But in Rusk’s emulating Marshall in every way, there was a difference, and it was a crucial one: Marshall had become Secretary after a full and distinguished career. He did not need to raise his voice, he was George Marshall. He might be wearing his civies, but those stars were still there, in his mind and everyone else’s; his austerity made his achievements seem greater still. By contrast, Rusk was a man of far less achievement. He had moved upward so quietly, left so little impression behind of posture or belief that no one had seen him or heard his footsteps except for a few insiders. He did not leave a record. More brilliant men had left a record, and though it may have been a good one, they were betrayed by it and by the times, and they had disappeared. Thus Rusk emulating Marshall. Rusk as Marshall. Marshall without Marshall.
It would become fashionable later among Kennedy people to portray Rusk as a man of some mediocrity and it was a widely shared belief of many Kennedy insiders that Rusk’s greatest problem in those years was simply brain power, he just wasn’t as smart as that bright Bundy group. There was an air of patronizing, a sort of winking to each other about Rusk, about the need to check with the good people at State, which did not mean Rusk. Yet in the late forties and early fifties he was considered the most professional officer at State by many who knew the Department well. He rose faster than anyone else, in harder times under more difficult circumstances; in five years he went from an Assistant on loan from the War Department to office director for the United Nations to director of Special Political Affairs to Deputy Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, the highest career job. The most striking thing was that he was not associated with any particular policy or viewpoint. He was intelligent and able, and yet it was symbolic of Rusk, the shadow man, that he could have this career and yet not be identified with any policy, so that later he could be a man of NATO, a man of the United Nations, a man of the Rockefeller Foundation, a man of Marshall, a man of Dulles and a man of Stevenson, all without apparent contradiction. It was a time when the postWorld War II policies of stabilizing the world and fending off a totalitarian enemy were clearly set, policies which Rusk could wholeheartedly believe in; and under the direction and the assumptions of other men he could make a total commitment of all his energies. He was doggedly hard-working and yet his meteoric rise did not seem to offend the men around him; other men with family connections or aristocratic backgrounds rising so fast might have been prima donnas, might have been abrasive to contemporaries, but not Rusk. He was invisible to them (indeed, when the North Koreans crossed the 38th parallel, Rusk, with his special background in the United Nations, was sent to New York to negotiate the United Nations troop force, which he did secretively and personally, telling none of the Americans in the UN what he was doing, appearing one day at the U.S. mission, nodding, and then leaving later without having said anything or left a single trace, not a tip of his hand, not a piece of paper behind, leaving them the impression that he was Chinese).
He never inflicted his problems on superiors, nor questioned their judgment. Lovett would in fact remember Rusk, an Assistant Secretary, showing up one day exhausted, his face almost green. Shocked, Lovett asked what was wrong. It turned out that one of the Rusk children had scarlet fever; the family was quarantined and Rusk had been up most of the night washing
sheets, never complaining, never asking for help. Lovett was appalled—my God, Dean, we have lots of people around the department just for things like that.
He was Marshall’s and Lovett’s and finally Acheson’s boy in those days, cool, competent, unflappable, dogged in carrying out policies which they set, years in which the very bases of the great policies of the Cold War were set down. The world seemed to those men who were the architects of the policy parallel to the one which had existed before the war; a totalitarian force was at work threatening Western Europe, the lines had to be drawn, only force would work. The lessons of Munich were very real and still lived; through mutual security with the force and guidance and leadership coming from the United States, the West would provide the answers which had been applicable in 1939 but which had been neglected then. This time we had learned the lessons of history, and the mistakes would not be repeated. The United States would take the place of Britain; it would balance, stabilize and protect the world. And so the lessons were clear for young Dean Rusk: whatever the United States set out to do it could accomplish. There was a great centrist political strength in the United States; further, when confronted by the strength and, most important, the determination of a just and honorable democracy, the totalitarian forces of the world would have to respect that power.
It was extraordinary that in this period Rusk avoided the one dangerous issue of the time, on which he seemed to be an expert. The issue was China, the one major place in the world where Communism would become entwined with nationalism and cause major domestic problems for the United States. The fall of China would send American policy—first domestic and then inevitably foreign—into a crisis and convulsions that would last for more than two decades and give the policy in Asia a hard-rock interior of irrationality. Good men of genuine honor and intelligence would have their careers destroyed. Rusk’s own saints would be smeared. Marshall pilloried by McCarthy, that one career in America which seemed beyond reproach was reproached. Acheson, the man who as Secretary of State had been the great architect of containment, became badly tarnished because of China, guilty of harboring traitors and homosexuals. The Dean Acheson College for Cowardly Containment of Communism, in the words of Richard Nixon, who even then had a feel for a good phrase. Other towering men in the State Department were wounded, set back in their careers. George Kennan, Bohlen, an impeccable old-school boy like Chip Bohlen having trouble being approved as ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1953.
The handful of genuine experts in the China field saw their careers totally destroyed, driven out of the Department, a scarlet letter branded into them. But not Dean Rusk. Rusk was clean, and the Kennedy people were reassured—be grateful for small favors—though the very fact that Rusk had not been involved in the China problem, that he was not burned, should have been some kind of warning. Yet he had been Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East in that period, but not only that, he had volunteered for the job, taken a demotion from the job as Deputy Undersecretary and asked for FE, which seemed the suicide seat; the Department was already under terrible pressure from the right and from the Hill. He told Acheson someone had to take the job and he was qualified. “I fit it,” he said. “You get the Purple Heart and the Congressional Medal of Honor all at once for this,” Acheson answered. And thus into the pit. Except in a curious way, by the time he took the job, though it was an exhausting, demanding place, it was no longer the pit.
Those who had been hurt, the real experts, were the young men who had been in China during the storm, who witnessed the collapse of the old order, the death of feudal China in the late forties; as they had watched the rise of the new China they saw the inevitability of its victory and they said so, and they were later victimized by their own prophecies. O. Edmund Clubb, a foreign service officer in China for twenty years, had been interested in Chinese Communism as early as 1931 and was attacked even then because of the attention he paid to it—if he was so interested in it, didn’t that mean that he liked it? (His security file would contain a particularly mindless list of suspicions of people from an earlier day who disliked his energy in analyzing the early roots of Chinese Communism.) Davies and Service had been saying that the Communists were going to win, suggesting that the United States get ready to deal with the new China. Like it or not, the future is theirs, Davies wrote, and we had better recognize it. Of course they were right, and predictably, China fell. Chiang had spread himself too thin rather than conserving his troops and resources and concentrating them in more limited areas, thus forcing the Communists to deal with him (as Davies, among others, was suggesting). But there was little disposition to accept the inevitability of Chiang’s decline (particularly on the part of Republican congressmen who were pushing intensively for a more rapid demobilization to bring the boys home at a time when the only American action which might have affected the balance in China would have been the commitment of hundreds of thousands of American troops to China to save Chiang). Instead, scapegoats had to be found and they became the State Department officers in question, both in Washington and in China.
But Rusk went to FE after China had fallen; it was a fait accompli, and he was in no way involved. Deeply anti-Communist himself, a containment man, he was in fact a man who seemed to give to those around him a sense that there were moral overtones to the Communist conquest of the mainland, that it was wrong, that a real enemy was installed there, an immoral government. This viewpoint did not get him into trouble on the Hill; if anything, at a time when State had particularly bad relations, Rusk had good relations (the shadow-cabinet Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, ever sensitive to the nuances of the Hill, spotted him as a comer, would want to befriend him, and Rusk of course was wise enough always to stay in with the outs, which meant that he and Dulles would have a very nice quiet friendship). Thus Rusk entered the job clean; he was not associated with the past, he was on neither side of the great issue (had he been on the pro-Chiang side he would eventually have become unacceptable to the Democratic party). Then, less than two months after he took the job, the Korean War broke out, and it made him even less likely to be controversial, made him safer. There was a real enemy now, everyone rallied round the flag and the policy. A real war, a real enemy, they both cleared the air, everyone came on board. State’s job was to co-operate with the military, to make sure that things got done. The job became more functional than anything else; since the Allied forces fought under the UN flag, Rusk was particularly valuable because of his knowledge of the UN and he had a good deal to do with compiling the UN manpower lists. The complicated and destructive problem in State of where you stood on China evaporated; there was a team now and everyone was aboard; and here was Rusk, playing his role, effective, hard-working, he was State’s man working for the military.
The Korean War was to prove a difficult and often painful experience for Rusk; in some ways the frustrations of a limited land war in Asia were as painful for him as they were for the American military. He was part of the civilian decision-making process which had set the particular limits of the war, which had in effect created sanctuaries for the enemy—for good reasons, certainly, but making American boys fight under terrible hardships which seemed very difficult to explain. This meant that Rusk the civilian was limiting Rusk the soldier. Some of those who knew him well in that period felt that the Korean War was perhaps the most painful experience of his career before Vietnam. There were two reasons for this: first, the sense of being at least in part responsible for the limits under which American troops fought, and second, a sense of responsibility because he had not forecast the Chinese entry into the war. He would talk about this a great deal with close friends (finally those who worked with him during the Vietnam war and wanted to push him toward dovishness, wanted to turn him on a specific issue against the military, would know that the only way they could do it was by mentioning China—well, suppose China came in if we escalated beyond a certain point in a certain way—and they played on it very skillfully, using China a
s a decoy for broader dovishness, since their other reasons were disregarded; later there may have been lingering regrets of Rusk about the escalation, not that we got into it, but perhaps that we did it too slowly, we had felt too many inhibitions. Rusk’s reservations about the use of power in 1965 and 1966 were not those of other civilians who felt we had used too much power; they were almost exactly the same as the senior military, that we had used too little). But Rusk had not warned us about Chinese intervention in Korea, and he felt the burden of the latter stages of that conflict in a particularly personal way.
If Rusk sometimes seemed to say mea culpa about China, there was good reason. For if Vietnam is a major Greek tragedy, it is compiled of many minor scenes which come together in one great epic. In 1950 one of those scenes was unveiled in the Far Eastern bureau of the Department of State. There Assistant Secretary Rusk prided himself on his knowledge of China (though later when he was Secretary of State an assistant who knew him well described him as a “real Grandma Moses on China,” each year asking the China desk a list of detailed and somewhat archaic questions on China, including, for instance, the chances for secession of various areas, the possibility of the return of war lordism). The head of his China desk was Edmund Clubb, intelligent, dogged, a little heavy-handed in his writing, but he was that rarest of men, a genuine expert—not only on the new China but on the Soviet Union and the Manchurian border area as well. He was, in the view of some of his contemporaries, less graceful as a writer than Service, less sophisticated than Davies. He had made many enemies as a young foreign service officer among the older, more traditional and wealthier American community in China, the upper-class America of those small foreign enclaves. And when he started to study the Chinese Communists in the early thirties, this in itself aroused suspicion—wasn’t he making too much of these people? They were, after all, only bandits. Wasn’t he too sympathetic? When the dark clouds gathered and the China experts were pilloried, Clubb was included. One of the ten charges against him was that he had associated with Communists in Hankow in 193134.
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