The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  His father was a preacher in a culture which produced and respected preachers, as New York City would later produce and respect psychiatrists. Stern upbringing, hard work and reverence. Other children coming to the Rusk house on Sunday mornings were allowed to look at the funny papers, but not the Rusk children, they were denied this touch of levity. The Lord’s will. Later the parents softened a bit and allowed the children to read them once in a while. Though Robert Hugh Rusk was a poor white, he was not trash; though they were of modest means, there was a sense of tradition in their house and a belief in what education could do, a passion, Dean would call it. Farther west, in Texas, in almost similar circumstances a young Lyndon Johnson would grow up with the same almost mystical belief in education and what it could do.

  One of twelve children, Robert Rusk had put himself through Davidson, one of the South’s best schools; from there he went on to Louisville Seminary, where he became an ordained minister. Eventually he had to leave the ministry because of a throat ailment; thus perhaps the house became even more Calvinist than a preacher’s house, as a kind of atonement for the failure of the vocal cords. His wife, Frances Elizabeth Clotfelter, was “the best-looking girl in Rockdale County, I believe,” Rusk would say of her, the serious ambitious young preacher getting the prettiest girl. “She was a very hard-working woman, as any wife of a family in poor circumstances in those days, or modest circumstances, would be. She made most of our clothes. We did our own washing of course. I have on my front porch now the black wash pot under which I had to build hundreds of fires to fire up the family wash. She herself had gone to normal school and had done some teaching and strongly reinforced my father’s interest in books and learning. And also a devout worshiper at the Presbyterian church.” All three sons would do well. One rose high in government, very high indeed; Roger became a professor of physics at the University of Tennessee; and the oldest, Parks, who had less schooling because he had to do more physical work, became a successful journalist. In 1912, when Dean was three years old, heavy floods cost the Rusks their crops, and they moved to Atlanta, where the children were raised. “The land didn’t want us,” said Roger.

  Young Dean was very church-oriented. A sister would remember him walking around the house reading the Bible aloud. The family committed the Bible to memory, and one of the best ways to learn was to read it aloud. He was active in Christian Endeavour, a sort of after-hours group of young people who put extra time and effort into the study of the Christian life. He attended church twice a week regularly, and at least until he was midway through high school he intended to become a minister, but about that time broader horizons began to open up.

  It was a good boyhood, so simple and basic that Rusk believed (inaccurately) for much of his life that he was delivered by a veterinarian. There were always difficulties and hardships, but they were the kind that could be dealt with, so that there would develop in the grown man a belief that any obstacle could be overcome, that hard work made no challenge insurmountable. He got his first schooling in a simple Atlanta schoolhouse, half of which was uncovered, with canvas screens pulled over part of the building when it rained. So he went to school in the open air, carrying woolen sacks in the winter, bringing hot bricks to school in the morning and putting them in the bottom of the sack to keep it warm. In the sixth grade young Dean was told by his teacher on the first day of school that he must wear shoes the next day, they were trying to stop hookworm. Dean went home with the message to his mother. Since shoes were scarce in the Rusk family, Mrs. Rusk wrote a note saying that the teacher ought to look after her end of the job, which was educating, and Mrs. Rusk would look after her end, which was feeding and dressing the children; Dean returned the next day barefoot, and proud of it.

  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 agai
n 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 Germany 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 s
peech). It was these same qualities which had caught Marshall’s eye about Rusk—intelligent without being egomaniacal, well educated, a good man.