The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  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 thought 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.

  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 val
ues 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 st
orm, 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.