Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 22, 1994 TAG: 9412220108
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN WALLACH HEARST NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Rusk, the son of a poor Georgia minister-turned-farmer, rose to become the chief foreign-policy steward for two presidents, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
He was so loyal to both presidents that he swore never to tell tales or write his memoirs. He never did.
But Rusk, who joined the State Department as a junior foreign-service officer after World War II Army duty, will be remembered most for his anti-communist fervor and for his skill in managing U.S. interests in a world threatened by the Soviet Union and China.
He was secretary of state from 1961 to 1969, an era that saw the signing of the first nuclear nonproliferation treaty but that also saw direct challenges to America's national security in Cuba, North Korea, Berlin and Vietnam.
In the battle to contain communism, Dean Rusk was as effective as any general.
After North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, it was Rusk - then the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs - who seized an opportunity to have the U.N. Security Council adopt a resolution dispatching U.S. troops to help South Korea repel the invaders.
That opportunity arose when the Soviets stalked out of the Security Council in anger. When the Soviets weren't there to veto the resolution, the U.S. representatives persuaded the other council members to approve the measure.
Rusk was so intensely loyal to Johnson's policy in Vietnam that he once snapped ``Whose side are you on?'' when John Scali, then an Associated Press reporter, questioned the wisdom of sending another 50,000 troops to the war-torn Southeast Asian nation.
In his 1990 autobiography of his father, Richard Rusk called his father ``an architect of a war that killed 58,000 Americans and nearly a million Vietnamese.''
In a 1972 interview, Rusk defended his views on Vietnam, declaring that if the United States had failed to act, the Soviets would have seen it as a sign of weakness and would have marched on Berlin.
In defending his Vietnam policy, Rusk gave weight to the ``domino theory,'' the belief that if Vietnam ``went'' communist, the nations bordering Vietnam - Thailand, Laos and Cambodia - also would ``fall'' like dominoes to the red menace.
After Vietnam fell to the communists, Rusk contended it was the failure of American willpower that resulted in the collapse of the anti-communist regime in the south.
``I overestimated the patience of the American people,'' Rusk conceded.
Rusk was also there in 1961 when Kennedy ordered the ill-fated invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, when East Germany began building the Berlin Wall and when in 1962 the world was on the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis.
After Kennedy gave the final ultimatum to Khrushchev to remove Soviet long-range offensive missiles from the communist island or risk war, Rusk summed it up this way:
``We're standing eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked.''
Rusk was the first of five children to attend college. His father was a Presbyterian minister who was forced to work as a teacher and farmer and finally as a mail carrier when he developed throat cancer. He sent Dean Rusk to Davidson College in North Carolina, where he won a Rhodes scholarship to continue his studies at Oxford.
Because he chose never to write his own version of what happened in the Kennedy-Johnson era, history may be robbed of the full story of Rusk's involvement in several major Cold War crises. There is evidence, for example, that he opposed the Bay of Pigs invasion.
He once said that he also tried on several occasions to persuade President Johnson to halt the bombing of North Vietnam so that peace talks might start but that Johnson listened to Walt Rostow, his national security adviser, who firmly opposed such a pause.
In 1952, Rusk became president of the Rockefeller Foundation where he remained until Kennedy called on him in 1961 to become secretary of state.
He returned to Georgia to become a professor of international law at the University of Georgia, where he led a very private academic life.
by CNB