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.
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