Waging Peace and War
Schoenbaum, Thomas J.
D can Rusk is eighty years old this year. Retired from the law school of the University of Georgia, he is an occasional participant in televised discussions about foreign policy but otherwise...
...The supporters of General Douglas MacArthur later made much of this rejection...
...When State Department press secretary Robert McCloskey footloosely displayed too much candor about the war, President Johnson was furious and told an amused Rusk, "He'll be giving his future briefings somewhere in Africa...
...We have other things to clutch to our bosom...
...One man was standing near the open door of the plane and another crawled around behind him, on all fours...
...He made the right choice, if in what to some people seemed the wrong division: that of United Nations affairs...
...One day early in the postwar era a letter from Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru arrived, which Rusk took over to the White House...
...Yakov Malik—until Malik, upon learning that his rival, Andrei Gromyko, was going to be the USSR's new foreign minister, went on a ten-day drunken spree and Russian diplomacy over Berlin for that period stopped dead in its tracks...
...Zappa, founder of the legendary gross-out band The Mothers of Invention, would go on to fame with such albums as "Freak Out," "Weasels Ripped My Flesh," "Hot Rats," and "The Adventures of Greggery Peckery," and would ultimately sire progeny with such colorful names as Moon Unit and Dweezil...
...The men almost split their sides laughing...
...It was always other people who called me weird," one feels prompted to ask, "Gee, Frank, what other word would you like them to have used...
...But his mind is extraordinarily vigorous: Rusk is full of anecdotes, some of them telling, as well as information that will never appear in the documents that eventually, probably after the turn of the present century, will be open, in their almost impossible vastness, to historians...
...President Charles de Gaulle in 1967 pulled France out of military participation in NATO and told Rusk to his face that he wanted "every American soldier out of France...
...At a National Press Club luncheon Rusk, upon being introduced, received a standing ovation—from everyone except Schlesinger who, conspicuously in front of the head table, did not rise...
...Curiously, the book does not rely on Rusk's personal papers, because he did not have any...
...The "moon-faced, bald, serious, suit-clad secretary of state" (the author's description of his subject in this authorized biography) heartily disliked Robert Kennedy, who once came in to see the secretary accompanied by his dog, who jumped all over Rusk...
...He has been aided and abetted in this by conductors such as Zubin Mehta and Pierre Boulez, both of whom know a thing or two about unspeakable boredom...
...In fact, what's truly terrifying is the thought that people actually bought them from him...
...the secretary asked...
...The book says much more than these few anecdotes can suggest, of course...
...He came up to Rusk, put his arm around him and said, "Rusk, I've got to know you better...
...It starts out inauspiciously, with a somewhat labored description of how Rusk became secretary of state, a recital of what now seems an unimportant, certainly dated, minuet...
...After joining the faculty of the University of Georgia, the author found himself dealing with a treasure, Dean Rusk in retirement...
...Rusk cabled the King, warning of the need to take precautions against attack, and the King replied, "There won't be an attack, because I am cremating my father...
...After teaching at Mills College, a backwater school in California, and being chosen dean (where he perhaps was known to his friends as "Dean Dean"), Rusk went into the Army before Pearl Harbor, with a commission, and ended as a full colonel...
...As he explained, "Man, all you've got to do is touch that thing and it's going to go off...
...Long gone is the fame that once put his photograph in newspapers almost every day, when he held press conferences with hundreds of shouting reporters in the State Department conference room, and when his plane routinely circled the globe on missions for this and that...
...There is also some delightful and potentially useful technical data about the guitarfingering techniques that are most likely to impress nubile young women, though among TAS readers perhaps only Lee Atwater has the manual dexterity to put this material to good use...
...When the Russians showed themselves willing to back off the Berlin blockade early in 1949, everything began to move along rapidly, with Rusk dealing with the Soviet delegate to the U.N...
...To him post-1945 American policy was based not on Henry Luce's less sophisticated American century ideas but the need, after the heroic efforts of World War II, to bring world opinion around to support of American ideas and actions...
...the former secretary's health has not been the best...
...More recently Rusk had been president of the Rockefeller Foundation and pretty visible in New York City, especially in the Democratic shadow cabinet, or whatRobert H Ferrell is professor of history at Indiana University and author of numerous books, including Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917-1921 and Truman: A Centenary Remembrance...
...It is no coincidence that Sammy and Frank both live in Southern California, where people spend 90 percent of their lives reinventing them...
...I want him fired...
...The appearance of Waging Peace and War, a 500-page authorized biography of Rusk, understandably has not brought huzzas from the reviewers, nor impassioned counterarguments from commentators, scholarly or otherwise...
...Unlike his zippy pop compositions, which have a beguilingly inane quality, Zappa's classical works are a dull, predictable amalgam of Stravinsky, Varese, and Webern, interesting only in the sense that no other twentieth-century composer ever posed for a photographer while defecating...
...For the past twenty years Zappa, a perfectly fine satirist who penned such bona fide classics as "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" (which, I still believe to this day, they do not), has been trying to gain wider acceptance by drawing attention to his unspeakably boring "serious" compositions...
...Indeed, there is something pathetic about a book written by a man whose highest subcultural honor is winning the Dutch Grammy, particularly since the author spends half the time pleading to be taken seriously as an artist, and the other half discussing fellatio and women who like to make plaster molds of rock stars' penises...
...It is truly terrifying to think that Frank Zappa could have ever supported himself by selling encyclopedias...
...Retired from the law school of the University of Georgia, he is an occasional participant in televised discussions about foreign policy but otherwise not much in the news...
...Vandenberg replied, "Well, that is the basis of our war plans...
...In this sense, his quixotic quest for respect parallels the current exploits of Sammy Davis, Jr., who at this very moment is wandering around the United States apologizing for the first sixty years of his life and assuring the public that it won't happen again...
...All in all, Dean Rusk comes into his own in this biography, as an extraordinarily talented figure in the public life of only a generation ago...
...Rusk even went other public figures one better, by destroying all records of his private conversations with President Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson...
...Provocative Squats...
...On a state visit to Washington, President Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia asked immediately for call girls, and in private conversation with the President was mostly concerned about the sexual WAGING PEACE AND WAR: DEAN RUSK IN THE TRUMAN, KENNEDY, AND JOHNSON YEARS Thomas J. Schoenbaum/Simon and Schuster/542 pp...
...What's the matter, Arthur," he asked, "is something wrong with your legs...
...The result was a midnight cable dismissing him...
...And its careful organization, straightforward writing, and thoughtful analysis testify not merely to a worthy subject but a worthy biographer...
...A man who has spent much of his adult life denying charges that he once consumed fecal matter on stage is going to have a hard time becoming the next Arthur Fiedler...
...Also in the past is his role in the Vietnam war, when he was the target of student groups everywhere (not least at my own university, Indiana in Bloomington, where during one of the secretary's speeches a group of activists ensconced in front-row seats shouted him down—leading to much talk about the right of free speech on a university campus, leading also to a delegation of students who went to Washington and presented their personal apologies for what they rightly considered marked incivility...
...Finally, Zappa supplies a rare insight into door-to-door marketing techniques when he discusses his early days as an encyclopedia salesman...
...Rusk attended Davidson College—a sort of poor boys' Princeton— before traveling to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship...
...Rusk asked for a copy, and got it, and in an accompanying note the President, not one of the world's great spellers, told Rusk it was for his "memmorabilia...
...The Real Frank Zappa Book is a lot like Zappa's music: sometimes funny, generally stupid, most engrossing when he is talking about sex, least engrossing when he is talking about anything else...
...The gunner blanched and grabbed it away, crying, "No, no, no...
...Rusk's anger boiled over...
...The action of the book starts at last with a long flashback to his early life in Atlanta as the poverty-stricken son of a mailman...
...Indeed, Zappa is a perfect example of how rock stars destroy their careers by learning how to play their instruments...
...King Savang called off the war with the Pathet Lao to cremate the body of his father, who had died eighteen months before and had been preserved in formaldehyde...
...Jack has been telling me that you were opposed to the Bay of Pigs, but that after it happened you acted as if you had done it yourself...
...The new Presidentelect, John F. Kennedy, did not know Rusk but had taken notice of Rusk's long experience in the Truman Administration and, before that, in World War II, when he was an aide to General Joseph W. Stilwell...
...Joe Queenan is a senior editor at Forbes...
...When he left government in 1969 he took nothing, as a matter of principle, for he believed that whatever records he made of public business were not, as many statesmen seem to have believed, private property...
...Provocative Squats...
...Flying over the Hump one day, Colonel Rusk watched Chinese troops roughhousing, laughing and joking like soldiers everywhere...
...The fact that it is authorized makes it doubly so...
...He made the most of it—which was all the easier because Rusk believed in the U.N.'s mission...
...Not exactly enamored of the Indian, President Harry S. Truman began to make all sorts of scathing notations on it, including, "What does he want me to do, consult Mousey Dung...
...Instead the book rests on hundreds of hours of conversations between the author and his subject, assisted by one of Rusk's sons...
...19.95 Joe Queenan THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 45...
...Alas, for the most part, The Real Frank Zappa Book is a pathetic plea by a third-tier rock star to be accorded a respect he's done nothing to earn...
...Does that include the dead Americans in the military cemeteries as well...
...23.95 Robert H. Ferrell 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 attributes of his favorite movie stars, notably Marilyn Monroe and Gina Lollobrigida...
...After setpiece interviews, Rusk was propelled into the secretaryship...
...After his return home he sent back an invitation for Jacqueline Kennedy to visit Indonesia—without her husband...
...This is true of everyone from Talking Heads to Sting to Paul Simon, all of whom started out as affable tunesmiths, writing harmless, appealing ditties but who then went out and ruined everything by taking piano lessons...
...In Laos international affairs were on the back burner, so to speak...
...Provocative Squats...
...accompanied the President to Heathrow airport, and upon arrival was three sheets to the wind...
...Rusk learned years later that not a single high official in Taiwan supported the idea, and the Nationalists made the offer only on the categorical assurance that the Americans would turn it down...
...W hat could only come from an authorized biography, however, are personal anecdotes from Rusk himself...
...Simply put, America does not clutch to its bosom a guy who writes songs about the joys of dental floss or the Illinois enema bandit, much less a composer whose songs include the chorus, "Provocative Squats...
...During the Vietnam war, on a trip aboard a helicopter gunship up to Da Nang, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., feeling playful, took the chopper's machine gun and wheeled the barrel across everyone's face, Rusk included...
...The book offers fascinating information, even about the Rockefeller Foundation, Rusk's extracurricular adventure of the 1950s, but takes on special importance in chronicling the 1960s when for eight full years the once poor boy from Georgia, for whom his mother had fashioned homemade drawers from flour sacks, became one of the most important players in the world game of diplomacy—a game punctuated in Vietnam by war...
...As Rusk watched, a third soldier pushed the standing man over the crouched soldier, pitching him out of the plane...
...Certainly not Debussy...
...Rusk told Kennedy he was not going to have Mrs...
...He was tempted to remain, since he could have become a brigadier general in the Pentagon hierarchy, but the opportunity presented to get into the State Department...
...During the Korean War, the Nationalist Chinese offered to send 33,000 of their best troops to Korea and Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson rejected the offer...
...Here is a sampling: • Chinese cruelty horrified Rusk, when during World War II he was stationed in the Asian theater...
...British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan got along easily with President Kennedy, and after a dinner at Chequers the getting-along was much facilitated by highballs...
...Zappa, who now writes letters to Presidents, appears on talk shows discussing pivotal cultural matters, and even testifies before congressional committees, is literally begging America to overlook the indiscretions of his youth and embrace him as a legitimate cultural avatar, a sort of tie-dyed Aaron Copland...
...appa, which was badly dictated by L./ the rock star and then badly co-written by journalist Peter Occhiogrosso, is not without its appealing moments, such as Frank's description of John Wayne's surprise appearance at one of his early gigs...
...On another occasion the attorney general asked the secretary to go on a hike, and Rusk told him he had been an infantry commander in the war and had done all the walking he was going to do in his life...
...Truman turned bright crimson and said, "Well, you just go back and get yourself some more war plans, because you are not going to put me in the position of either doing nothing or beginning nuclear war...
...Thus, when he starts his autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, with the remark "I never set out to be weird...
...President Johnson, also present, went around to Schlesinger...
...During the Vietnam war the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., sharply criticized Rusk in his book, A Thousand Days, describing him as resembling a buddha...
...crash pad was complete without a black-and-white poster of Frank Zappa sitting, trousers wrapped around his ankles, and staring out from a bathroom in which he was taking a putative crap...
...Again, perhaps an unexpected treasure, owing to the lack of personal papers and the physical problems of the subject, not to mention what everyone assumed to be Rusk's implacable reticence: these factors said that not much could come from an authorized biography...
...q D ack in the sixties, no hipster's .1...
...It deserves plenty of attention...
...As luck would have it, the coming of the Korean War only enlarged Rusk's influence...
...But this book, I hasten to add, is a sleeper...
...At the height of General MacArthur's contentions with the Truman Administration, a newspaper leak indicated that MacArthur's resignation was imminent, and Rusk and General Omar N. Bradley took the news to the President, who blew his top: "That son-of-a-bitch isn't going to resign on me...
...The "P.M...
...The subject, one guesses, makes that impossible...
...Rusk told J. Edgar Hoover that if he, the secretary of state, ever found a tap on his telephone or a bug in his office, he would immediately resign and go public with the evidence...
...All of us have read in recent years of Rusk's physical problems...
...ever it should be called, that was then housing itself at the Council on Foreign Relations...
...General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, chief of staff of the Air Force, was briefing the President on the need to use nuclear weapons in Korea, when the President practically rose out of his chair and said, "Who says that...
...The book was so sharp about Rusk that Washington reporters began to sympathize with the secretary...
...q THE REAL FRANK ZAPPA BOOK Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso/Poseidon Press/352 pp...
...Kennedy visit that "international lecher...
Vol. 22 • August 1989 • No. 8
