A Moving Epiphany
ROCHE, JOHN P.
A Moving Epiphany As I Saw It By Dean Rusk As told to Richard Rusk Norton. 672 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by John ? Roche I am never putoff by taciturnity. My father, who had been at sea as a...
...Rusk catches the essentials of both Kennedy and Johnson in his typical disinterested fashion...
...demotion to Private seemed arrogant...
...Kennedy's love-life was not his business...
...He pointed out that Rusk treated everybody formally and had picked up the crisp last-name bit from General George C. Marshall—who upon being called "George" by Franklin D. Roosevelt, allegedly said, "Marshall, or General Marshall, Mr...
...Well," he said mournfully, "that's what Lady Bird says too," and hung up...
...Bundy further explained that the Secretary was especially wary of me because he suspected I was in the Apostolic Succession from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...
...Rusk, by the way, is remarkably nice to Bobby Kennedy...
...Inmy judgment it is in no way an Apologiapro vita sua...
...Indeed, the number of "brilliant" persons inhabiting Foggy Bottom or occupying embassies will startle those who worked with State on a day-to-day basis...
...President Johnson told me of Rusk's opposition in 1967, and the author has amplified the antecedents of the doomed invasion...
...and there was nobody on the CIA account...
...Did Rusk really expect the British, the French and the Pakistanis to rush to the rescue of the Republic of Vietnam...
...Through most of World War II, I was dignified as "Sergeant...
...Except for some gentle side-shots at Arthur Schlesinger and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Rusk has harsh words for nobody...
...I believe him...
...But when I met Dean Rusk shortly after joining Lyndon B. Johnson's White House staff in 1966,1 was in for a shock: He made dad seem long-winded...
...There is no point to recapitulating Rusk'slong march on Vietnam: Hewas "Mr...
...He suggests, without excusing himself or anyone else, that the early months of John F. Kennedy's Administration were an amateur hour: JFK came to office promising rule by a new generation...
...In my view this was the fork in the road for the United States policy...
...Dean Rusk stands pat on his life and record...
...If so, why were they never officially asked to join the battle...
...Concretely, once I learned we had terminated Diem "with extreme prejudice," I was convinced that we had to redeem our honor by protecting the South Vietnamese...
...Rusk is at his best in his evaluations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson—that is to say, I agree with him completely...
...Rusk asserts that he knew nothing of this, although his "brilliant" Assistant Secretary, W. Averell Harriman, was a member of the informal "Bobby Committee" that launched the operation...
...Recall that the first two appointments Kennedy announced (doubtless at his father's urging) were J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and Allen Dulles at the CIA...
...To their credit, Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles and Kennedy aide Schlesinger were...
...As I Saw It reveals little that is new, but it provides a valuable perspective on severalmajor events of the 1960s...
...As someone who was totally baffled by the Bay of Pigs debacle, for instance, I find Rusk's analysis of that disaster quite compelling...
...This initial impression was radically altered over the next few years...
...True, Rusk and Vice President Johnson, both extremely cautious men, expressed strong reservations, but in that gung-ho ambience, nurtured on Kennedy macho, who was prepared to be a defeatist...
...I suspect Schlesinger and Goodwin might have a similar reaction...
...What Rusk does not mention is that from that day forward Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy became de facto White House Chief of Staff and set out to even the score with " Operation Mongoose," the bizarre scheme to eliminate Castro with explosive cigars, etc...
...The Bay of Pigs simply fell through the slats: All the top New Frontiersmen were up to their eyeballs recruiting personnel...
...and Rusk and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara simply assumed the operation had been properly sandboxed...
...The 75 million Americans born between 1945-65—most of whom (like every generation) think the world began the day they arrived in it—could learn a lot about the nature of American ideals and culture, and the amazing advances this country has made in the past half century, from reading the reflections of this unduly modest man of overwhelming integrity...
...He had a laserlike mind that could cut to the heart of any problem, if he decided it was worth his time and effort—since he was intellectually lazy...
...In addition, he was a superb public performer who could charm the barracudas of the press with his irony and neatly duck any significant question he chose not to answer...
...My father, who had been at sea as a radio operator for 16 years before he married my mother, was a remote man whose idea of a jolly evening at home with the family was to put on his earphones and listen to Morse-code messages on shortwave...
...Johnson was a bit too impetuous for his ScotchIrish taste, but a man who, once he made a decision on American ideals and interests, would never look over his shoulder...
...Nevertheless, in the midst of all the chaoshestoodbytheU.S...
...It is, rather, a challenge to younger generations of Americans to understand, and hopefully appreciate, the values of a generation that brought this nation through the Depression and World War II and convinced us that—despite our post-World War II withdrawal syndrome, which in two years virtually eliminated our military power—we had to return to the trenches to contain Soviet totalitarianism...
...They understood each other: The poor white kid from Cherokee Country, Georgia, who rose to be the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and the ambitious youngster from Stonewall, Texas, who according to Robert Caro made his first million by stealing from church poorboxes, were on the same wavelength...
...On the murder of South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem Rusk is uncharacteristically vague, though he is critical of the cabal that set the wheels in motion in late August 1963—Harriman, Roger Hilsman, Michael Forrestal, and Henry Cabot Lodge...
...A day later the President phoned to inquire whether I had indeed said this, and I answered "Yes...
...His usual cool calculation of odds seems to have been overcome by his belief in abstract international law...
...To their discredit, the minute Fidel Castro was triumphant they announced their brilliance to the world...
...He has caught Johnson's volcanic nature and limned it beautifully...
...He called me to the Mansion one night to review a speech, and I discovered him with Rusk going over a map of North Vietnam clearing bombing targets...
...He does wryly note, however, that Bobby later went to LB J with a deal: If Johnson would replace Rusk with Bill Moyers, RFK would not run against Johnson in 1968...
...he was his Secretary of State, nothis "chaperone...
...commitment to the security of South Vietnam against external attack...
...In short, this is an irenic and essentially reflective work by a man acutely aware of his own shortcomings yet prepared to face his Maker with no apologies...
...But LBJ was terrified of behaving "unpresidential" in a press conference—he was awed by JFK's often flimsy spectaculars —and came across like a stuffed moose...
...I once made this observation at lunch in the White House mess and some "buddy" reported it back...
...Standfast," right out of John Bunyan...
...JFK had expressed total confidence in Dulles...
...Still, he agonized over many of the questions he seemed to treat so matter of factly, and during the North's 1968 Tet offensive he was surviving on "aspirin, scotch, and four packs of Larks...
...Whenever I had to see the Secretary of State to clear some statement die President proposed to make on a foreign policy issue, he struck me as hostile, coldly impersonal...
...after all, when LB J became President he was stunned to discover that we had been running "Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean...
...What, then, is this book...
...He may have been misguided on occasion, but as the standards of human freedom are raised in all sorts of unlikely places, Dean Rusk surely merits aplace in the pantheon of democracy...
...That left me aghast...
...Rusk believed we had a vital interest in the area, whoever was running the show in Saigon...
...Rusk, who was extremely close to Johnson, found this amusing, but I doubt if it improved Moyers' standing with his boss...
...But let's skip the well-known details about Johnson and Vietnam and move to the high ground...
...Jack Kennedy was one of the most intelligent men of his generation and, after the Bay of Pigs taught him the crucial lesson that the President has to birddog every major initiative, demonstrated great ability...
...the key figures in Harry S. Truman's Administration, if alive, had been out of the loop for eight years...
...and Richard Goodwin as an egregious White House meddler in serious matters of state...
...The outstanding story left is what his security agent, Bert Bennington, observed about foreign policy advisers in an elevator whose other occupants were Dean Acheson and George Ball...
...Most accounts of the activities of the ad hoc Executive Committee of the National Security Council during the 13-day crisis, the Secretary shows, exaggerate the voltage level...
...Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern Affairs William ?. Bundy, a veteran Washington insider and close personal friend, helped fill a couple of my perception gaps...
...His main complaint is that the Attorney General kept trying to ensure the loyalty of senior State officials to the Kennedys, not to the United States...
...In the case of the Cuban missile crisis, Rusk tells us it was Soviet expert Llewellyn Thompson, not Bobby, who wisely proposed that the President disregard Nikita S. Khrushchev's second formal letter and reply instead to his first personal, rambling one...
...there was little excitement and a great deal of serious analysis...
...He has omitted any mention of anumber of characters, perhaps because he couldn't think of anything good to say about them...
...All in all, he struck me as the stereotypical Ulsterman who wouldn't tell you your coat was on fire unless you asked...
...He placed amazing faith in the existence of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and our obligations thereunder...
...Moreover, I despised his military style of address: "Roche, that sentence says too much...
...To many people SEATO, John Foster Dulles' 1955 attempt to create a NATO for Southeast Asia—a "Monroe Doctrine" forthearea as Dulles put it at the Manila signing —was a nonstarter, whatever slight utility it may have had in the '50s...
...Once the Secretary satisfied himself that I was not a stringer for the New York Times or the WashingtonPosi, or a supercilious chochem, he raised my security clearance (psychologically speaking) all the way to "Confidential" and was extremely witty in an acerbic way, particularly about the selfstyled great statesmen he had encountered...
...He was cool, as the kids said...
...President...
...This dimension of Rusk is almost totally lacking in his memoir...
...Johnson was surely as intelligent, and he had a computer mind: He knew everything and was incapable of relaxation...
...Johnson was convinced not a sparrow fell without Bobby's collusion, and in my personal view RFK, a demonic rogue, went to some lengths to set up Moyers, McNamara and others as traitors to LB J. Unfortunately these precincts have not reported...
...They might, in the 19th-century British phrase, "eat with the Tories," but they "voted with the Whigs...
...The Secretary agrees with me that South Vietnam was Diem's nation not ours, but he obviously felt deep down that we should save the Vietnamese from themselves...
...An interesting aspect of this book— an elaborate oral history that also represents a reconciliation of father and son, a moving epiphany—is that the Dean Rusk I got to respect and like (particularly as a bridge partner on interminable flights) seems to have become abornagain Christian...
Vol. 73 • May 1990 • No. 8
