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

by David Halberstam

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 as a decoy for broader dovishness, since their other reasons were disregarded; later there may have been lingering regrets of Rusk about the escalat...