Dean Rusk hated to challenge the military on its needs and its requests because he feared a State-Defense split such as had existed between Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and he would do almost anything to avoid it. In particular, he did not like to be out front on a policy, and he was content to let McNamara surge into the vacuum of leadership, poach on his terrain. All of this was the bane of his subordinates at State, who again and again, when they heard of some projected Defense policy for Vietnam, would go to Rusk and protest it, trying to get him to intervene, to
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