The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

Foreign affairs was something special, it was filled with pitfalls for well-meaning idealists. A brief scene: 1962. The Soviets had apparently resumed testing. Kennedy was trying to decide whether to test again. Adlai Stevenson asked what would happen if the United States did not test. Jerome Wiesner answered that American weapons were better, so that if there was a delay in the resumption of testing, what he called a benefit of the doubt delay, it would not make much difference. Then Stevenson (would-be Secretary of State, the man for whom in 1960 Rusk had served as the Scarsdale chairman of “Citizens for Stevenson,” Rusk’s highest political office) said that perhaps the United States ought to take a small risk in the strategic balance on a question like this, that it ought to try for moral leadership. Rusk interjected at this point: “I wouldn’t make the smallest concession for moral leadership. It’s much overrated.” A young White House aide remembered the conversation, which shocked him, and from then on always thought of Rusk in that context; he thought that when Rusk died that should be inscribed on his tombstone, his epitaph.