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

by David Halberstam

If Marshall wanted him to do something, Rusk did it. Marshall was his hero, the embodiment of all that was desirable, all that a man should be. Twenty years later Rusk would repeatedly quote Marshall—Marshall had said this, Marshall had done that. He would quote Marshall on the military approvingly (always give them half of what they’re asking and double their missions), and he followed Marshall’s mode of operation. Marshall the ex-general was staff-oriented; Rusk would be staff-oriented. Marshall the ex-general was always correct and went through proper channels; Rusk would go through channels and be appalled by anyone who did not. Marshall did not deign to answer criticism; Rusk, proud, would also not deign to answer criticism. As Marshall had admired the sense of service and the intellectual capacity of the best of the military, so would Rusk, and he would quote Marshall approvingly about the modern American army, and particularly those men who had come to the fore because of World War II, a generation which had come to manhood between two great wars, superior men, learned, wise. Having a lot of time on their hands during the war, they went to special schools, read a great deal, traveled a great deal, used that leisure time well, went beyond the parochial bounds of their jobs and their careers. They were superior men, superior to comparable men whom you found in peacetime jobs, who had less sense of service. Thus he shared Marshall’s admiration for the military, without...

But in Rusk’s emulating Marshall in every way, there was a difference, and it was a crucial one: Marshall had become Secretary after a full and distinguished career. He did not need to raise his voice, he was George Marshall. He might be wearing his civies, but those stars were still there, in his mind and everyone else’s; his austerity made his achievements seem greater still. By contrast, Rusk was a man of far less achievement. He had moved upward so quietly, left so little impression behind of posture or belief that no one had seen him or heard his footsteps except for a few insiders. He did not leave a record. More brilliant men had left a record, and though it may have been a good one, they were betrayed by it and by the times, and they had disappeared. Thus Rusk emulating Marshall. Rusk as Marshall. Marshall without Marshall.

The most striking thing was that he was not associated with any particular policy or viewpoint. He was intelligent and able, and yet it was symbolic of Rusk, the shadow man, that he could have this career and yet not be identified with any policy, so that later he could be a man of NATO, a man of the United Nations, a man of the Rockefeller Foundation, a man of Marshall, a man of Dulles and a man of Stevenson, all without apparent contradiction. It was a time when the post–World War II policies of stabilizing the world and fending off a totalitarian enemy were clearly set, policies which Rusk could wholeheartedly believe in; and under the direction and the assumptions of other men he could make a total commitment of all his energies. He was doggedly hard-working and yet his meteoric rise did not seem to offend the men around him; other men with family connections or aristocratic backgrounds rising so fast might have been prima donnas, might have been abrasive to contemporaries, but not Rusk. He was invisible to them (indeed, when the North Koreans crossed the 38th parallel, Rusk, with his special background in the United Nations, was sent to New York to negotiate the United Nations troop force, which he did secretively and personally, telling none of the Americans in the UN what he was doing, appearing one day at the U.S. mission, nodding, and then leaving later without having said anything or left a single trace, not a tip of his hand, not a piece of paper behind, leaving...

The world seemed to those men who were the architects of the policy parallel to the one which had existed before the war; a totalitarian force was at work threatening Western Europe, the lines had to be drawn, only force would work. The lessons of Munich were very real and still lived; through mutual security with the force and guidance and leadership coming from the United States, the West would provide the answers which had been applicable in 1939 but which had been neglected then. This time we had learned the lessons of history, and the mistakes would not be repeated. The United States would take the place of Britain; it would balance, stabilize and protect the world. And so the lessons were clear for young Dean Rusk: whatever the United States set out to do it could accomplish.

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. Rusk’s own saints would be smeared. Marshall pilloried by McCarthy, that one career in America which seemed beyond reproach was reproached. Acheson, the man who as Secretary of State had been the great architect of containment, became badly tarnished because of China, guilty of harboring traitors and homosexuals. The Dean Acheson College for Cowardly Containment of Communism, in the words of Richard Nixon, who even then had a feel for a good phrase. Other towering men in the State Department were wounded, set back in their careers. George Kennan, Bohlen, an impeccable old-school boy like Chip Bohlen having trouble being approved as ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1953.

The handful of genuine experts in the China field saw their careers totally destroyed, driven out of the Department, a scarlet letter branded into them. But not Dean Rusk. Rusk was clean, and the Kennedy people were reassured—be grateful for small favors—though the very fact that Rusk had not been involved in the China problem, that he was not burned, should have been some kind of warning.

Those who had been hurt, the real experts, were the young men who had been in China during the storm, who witnessed the collapse of the old order, the death of feudal China in the late forties; as they had watched the rise of the new China they saw the inevitability of its victory and they said so, and they were later victimized by their own prophecies. O. Edmund Clubb, a foreign service officer in China for twenty years, had been interested in Chinese Communism as early as 1931 and was attacked even then because of the attention he paid to it—if he was so interested in it, didn’t that mean that he liked it? (His security file would contain a particularly mindless list of suspicions of people from an earlier day who disliked his energy in analyzing the early roots of Chinese Communism.) Davies and Service had been saying that the Communists were going to win, suggesting that the United States get ready to deal with the new China. Like it or not, the future is theirs, Davies wrote, and we had better recognize it. Of course they were right, and predictably, China fell. Chiang had spread himself too thin rather than conserving his troops and resources and concentrating them in more limited areas, thus forcing the Communists to deal with him (as Davies, among others, was suggesting). But there was little disposition to accept the inevitability of Chiang’s decline (particularly on the part of Republican congressmen who were pushing intensively for a more rapid demobilization to...

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...

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...

Rusk’s speech gave vital insight into his thinking; here was a man who believed in his origins and experiences—the democracies were ipso facto good and the totalitarians were ipso facto bad, and this helped explain the force of his positions. But it also explained some of the danger of his tenets because they were held by a man so wedded to certain concepts and truths that he did not reckon with the whimsical quality of history, that the forces of history can just as easily make the democracies aggressive, that to some small states, large democracies look tyrannical, that justice and decency have various definitions in different parts of the world. These were the words of a man who advocated his own concepts, whether the world was ready for them or not. The world would have to adapt to him. Yet the steadfastness of his beliefs was also his greatest asset; he believed, he was not ambivalent. He believed in both the might and the decency of America (having never dealt in the domestic processes, he was uncritical of them; he was willing to accept the high school civics class theory of their reality). If America was both honorable and strong, and turned that strength in the right directions—which had been charted in the postwar years as containment of the totalitarians—then our side would triumph. Perhaps not easily, perhaps the struggle would be long, but eventually quality and class would tell. In 1965 and 1966, as the Vietnam war began to look more and more difficult and Ge...

For the truth was that despite the Democratic desire to blame Dulles for the commitment to Southeast Asia, the creation of South Vietnam, and the invention of Diem, the roots of the change in American policy actually predated Eisenhower’s coming to power. The really crucial decisions were made at the tail end of the Truman years, with Acheson as Secretary of State and Rusk as his principal deputy for Asia. This was the period when the United States went from a position of neutrality toward both sides in the Indochina war to a position of massive military and economic aid to the French. The real architect of the American commitment to Vietnam, of bringing containment to that area and using Western European perceptions in the underdeveloped world, was not John Foster Dulles, it was Dean Acheson.

He became a Democratic icon of the fifties both because he had been viciously attacked by McCarthy and had stood the attack without flinching (personally, if not professionally), and because he would not turn his back on Alger Hiss (who was of course a member of the Establishment in very good standing; a remarkable amount of what Acheson was committed to was at its heart class). His reputation in the fifties because of those McCarthy years, a quirk of history really, was somehow that he was a soft-liner, and that Dulles was the hard-liner. If anything, the reverse was true. It was not so much that Dulles was softer, but for all the bombast of his speeches, the verbal righteousness in public, there was an element of private flexibility (the great corporation lawyer who can make a resounding appeal in the courtroom and then a more subtle private deal in the judge’s chambers), whereas Acheson was the hard-liner who felt that Dulles’ policies were extremely dangerous and that the defense budget was too small. Acheson was always the true interventionist who deeply believed that the totalitarians might exploit the democracies. He was not soft, Acheson, he never was. He was Wilsonian, but new-generation Wilsonian, Wilson flexing old ideals with new industrial and technological might, Wilson with a longer reach.

Dean acheson