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

by David Halberstam

If Rusk sometimes seemed to say mea culpa about China, there was good reason. For if Vietnam is a major Greek tragedy, it is compiled of many minor scenes which come together in one great epic. In 1950 one of those scenes was unveiled in the Far Eastern bureau of the Department of State. There Assistant Secretary Rusk prided himself on his knowledge of China (though later when he was Secretary of State an assistant who knew him well described him as a “real Grandma Moses on China,” each year asking the China desk a list of detailed and somewhat archaic questions on China, including, for instance, the chances for secession of various areas, the possibility of the return of war lordism). The head of his China desk was Edmund Clubb, intelligent, dogged, a little heavy-handed in his writing, but he was that rarest of men, a genuine expert—not only on the new China but on the Soviet Union and the Manchurian border area as well. He was, in the view of some of his contemporaries, less graceful as a writer than Service, less sophisticated than Davies. He had made many enemies as a young foreign service officer among the older, more traditional and wealthier American community in China, the upper-class America of those small foreign enclaves. And when he started to study the Chinese Communists in the early thirties, this in itself aroused suspicion—wasn’t he making too much of these people? They were, after all, only bandits. Wasn’t he too sympathetic? When the dark clouds gathered...