Dean Rusk

...He was also motivated by more fundamental impulses...

...in March, 1947, he joined the department as director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, succeeding Alger Hiss...

...Johnson valued Rusk's advice and did not backbite him, as had the Kennedys...

...Numerous leaders of the antiwar movement, of course, made an equally egregious error in mistaking Ho for George Washington...

...He recognized the unsavory, authoritarian character of the South Vietnamese government, but he was persuaded that with American support it could in time become democratic...

...Appointed president of the Rockefeller Foundation at the end of 1951, Rusk performed effectively for nearly a decade at the head of a major philanthropic institution that enjoyed the special esteem of the nation's social and cultural elite...

...It was this universalism, he concludes, that led us into the Vietnam disaster, and Dean Rusk was hardly its sole proponent...

...Cohen manages about as well as one could expect...

...He appears to have come out on top largely because, unlike the other contenders, he possessed no visible liabilities...

...Even after he became the recipient of widespread outrage and some unnecessary personal vilification, most observers were willing to admit that he was a decent man who had labored tirelessly in one of the most demanding of American public positions...

...Racially alien American troops, engaging in relocation programs, employing massive firepower indiscriminately, knowing nothing of the culture they had invaded, utterly incapable of distinguishing friend from foe among the natives, had no chance of "winning the minds and hearts of the people," or more modestly, of overcoming the enemy in guerrilla combat operations...

...Rusk, for his part, suppressed numerous misgivings, supported LBJ down the line, and made none of the customary Washington efforts to disassociate himself from a losing cause...

...he overrode these doubts because his life had prepared him to believe that the war was an unpleasant necessity...

...Withal, he was a tolerant, humane individual who worked at an exhausting pace and truly offended no one...

...This is one of the best books in a decidedly mixed group...

...He was too gray a presence for that, never quite able to establish dominance over the vast bureaucracy he headed, more prone in policy-making conferences to summarize options than to advocate firm policy courses...

...Consequently, he never acted on its corollary-that his mission required the management of limited options in an imperfect world...

...Richard Rovere, in a famous tongue-in-cheek article, proclaimed him the chairman of the American Establishment...

...Like many men of his generation, he was profoundly affected by the appeasement of the 1930s...

...This is a damning commentary, not on the man's character, but on his intellectual qualifications to manage a foreign policy in a complicated world...

...He deftly places Rusk within the larger context of foreign-policy making during the 1960s, and arrives at a balanced estimate of the man and his significance...

...Indochina was significant geopoliti-cally, but hardly worth an open-ended commitment...

...The defects of this book are for the most part inherent in its format...

...One may agree that the ideal of an independent South Vietnam with a chance to develop free institutions amounted to a "noble objective...

...In the process, he won recognition as a practical policymaker, a shrewd judge of political tendencies, and an excellent communicator...

...It is necessary for the historian to explain the processes by which Rusk remained committed to a military and foreign policy disaster right down to the bitter end...

...Born to extreme poverty in rural Georgia, he worked his way through Davidson College, became a Rhodes Scholar, and was dean of the faculty at Mills College before his thirtieth birthday...

...In his original post and in subsequent assignments as deputy undersecretary and assistant secretary for far eastern affairs, he came into contact with about every major international problem of the postwar world...

...In a manner consistent with his definition of the role of a cabinet official, the Secretary felt compelled to be a team player, loyal to the president and his policies, particularly to his second chief, Lyndon Johnson...

...After John F. Kennedy's election as president, Rusk was on everyone's short list for the senior cabinet position...

...It is equally irrefutable that we were slowly but surely led out of the morass by a conservative administration adhering rather consciously to maxims of Kealpolitik...

...ilowever one felt about Vietnam at the time of initial American intervention, it is hard to deny in retrospect that the episode was a miscalculation of tragic proportions...

...Rusk was also wrong in not taking the Europeanists more seriously...

...a replay of Munich would propel the human race toward World War III...

...They argued not simple prejudices but rather the central questions of any foreign policy-the national interest and the means to secure its advancement...

...A widely respected public servant when he took office as secretary of state in 1961, Rusk was a pariah at his departure in 1969, physically and financially exhausted, scorned by a cultural elite that once praised his appointment, and condemned to exile at the University of Georgia...

...The indecisive, nearly endless character of the war and the fuzzy nature of the enemy's challenge gave birth to an antiwar movement unlike any the United States had experienced for a century...

...A totalitarian Communist regime would foreclose that option forever...

...It is not that Rusk would otherwise be remembered as a great secretary of state...

...It is undeniable, however, that he and the other people who led us into Vietnam were liberal-minded individuals who thought they were following a moral imperative...

...Nonetheless, he had been mortally wounded by his earnest, consistent defense of American involvement in Vietnam, a sin that in the eyes of his critics went well beyond simple mistaken judgment and amounted to a moral defect...

...For all their differences in style, Rusk and Johnson shared the common experience of having been poor Southern boys who had made good in the world through hard effort...

...Cohen leaves one feeling that he took John Kennedy's rhetoric about paying any price and bearing any burden far more literally than Kennedy himself...

...The decline of Rusk's reputation, of course, can be traced to one source and one alone-Vietnam, possibly the most prolific wrecker of reputations in American history...

...but both geopolitical considerations and the ambiguity of the cause in Vietnam made the devastation of the North all but unthinkable...

...The liberal community praised his...

...Ultimately, it was this failure that made his secretaryship so unsuccessful.taryship so unsuccessful...

...appointment...

...Through it all, right down to the day he left office, Dean Rusk became increasingly the war's most vociferous defender...

...Rusk appears to have been unable to make such a distinction...

...An army reserve captain called to active duty in World War II, he rapidly became an important staff officer in the Far Eastern Theatre, then a member of an elite Pentagon political-military affairs planning staff...

...The only other way to win the war, bombing North Vietnam '' back to the Stone Age," was never seriously considered...

...At bottom, Cohen argues, Rusk was a liberal universalist convinced that it was possible and desirable to spread the blessings of the American system over the globe...

...Still, as it was fought, the war was unwinnable...

...His interest in the Third World, moreover, had long prompted him to reject the European-centered viewpoints of such analysts as George Kennan, Dean Acheson, and George Ball...

...The Americanization of Vietnam became the Vietnamization of America...

...Warren Cohen, Professor of History at Michigan State University, is one of those critics, but he is largely successful in suppressing his emotions and developing an image of a man far more complex and admirable than Rusk's vehement detractors would have us believe...

...They understood and respected each other...

...From time to time, he also wrote sensible articles on American foreign policy and, in particular, on the role of the secretary of state...

...Europe was, and remains, critically important to the United States in hard-nosed ways that far transcend cultural affinity...

...indeed, a fair number of conservative universalists seem to be among us...

...During the next six years, he established himself as a valuable senior official, working with George Marshall, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, and other towering figures in what was probably the greatest epoch in the State Department's history...

...A volume in The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy series-a venerable, if not venerated, institution long inflicted upon graduate students in American history-it labors under the nearly insuperable burden of having to provide a blow-by-blow account of every issue that Rusk faced as a cabinet officer...

...If not for the American misadventure in Southeast Asia, he surely would be remembered as a devoted servant of the Republic, securely placed among the better individuals who had held his position...

...Only South Vietnamese soldiers could ferret out Vietcong irregulars...

...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...The nation, it is true, had not hesitated to employ the tactic against Germany and Japan in World War II...

...Rather like Cyrus Vance in the Carter administration, Rusk was better equipped to be chief of staff or a trouble-shooter for a more vigorous personality than to be the nation's chief diplomatist...

...Totalitarian aggression had to be stopped...

...Presented with opportunities in the Army and State Departments after the war, he selected State...

...Americans who attempted the task wreaked havoc upon the people whose rights they were supposed to be defending and left themselves open to charges of brutal imperialism...

...Rusk, one feels, never quite achieved that understanding...

...Cohen's explanations are both provocative and persuasive, suggesting as they do that Rusk's failures were products of his virtues...

...There is much to be said for this analysis...

...Liked and respected by important congressmen, he was also highly persuasive as an expositor of administration policy before business, professional, and intellectual groups...

...Liberal-minded and possessing a special concern for non-European peoples, he worked hard to start programs for what was then generally called "the underdeveloped world...

...What matters most, however, is less a diplomat's liberalism or conservatism than an understanding that his art requires the pursuit of a national interest that transcends ideology...

...Perhaps no man of consequence had come into the office with so much acclaim and so few enemies...

...From the beginning, Rusk had doubts about the large-scale use of American troops and the naive faith placed in a relatively limited bombing campaign...

...One may question whether Rusk's failure was simply a failure of liberalism...

...To his mind, the lessons of Munich applied as equally to South Vietnam as to the Sudetenland...

...John Kennedy and those around him seem to have been perpetually irked by the glacial pace of the Foggy Bottom careerists and by Rusk's inability to develop a sharper definition of his role...

...has described the Secretary, a bit cruelly but probably fairly, as a "Buddha-like" figure among more decisive men...

...Rusk and many others in the Johnson administration were indeed myopic in confusing Ho Chi Minh with Hitler...

...Rusk's early life was a Horatio Alger story...

...Cohen's analysis of this political self-immolation touches on Rusk's personality and his larger intellectual frame of reference...