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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
Subject
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United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
Description
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The collection consists of 172 oral history interviews with Dean Rusk and his colleagues between 1984-1989. Includes audiotapes and transcriptions documenting Rusk's life from early childhood in the 1910's through his teaching career in the 1980's. The interviews contain information on Rusk's service as U.S. Under Secretary and Secretary of State during the administrations of Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson and his involvement in foreign relations including the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. The interviews also document his position as president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s.<br /><br /><a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=14&type=&tags=OHMS&featured=&subcollections=0&subcollections=1&submit_search=Search+for+items">View all OHMS indexed interviews in this collection here.</a>
Creator
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Richard Geary Rusk
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1984-1989
Rights
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Format
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Oral histories
Identifier
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RBRL214DROH
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
United States
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
OHMS Object
Contains the OHMS link to the XML file within the OHMS viewer.
https://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH-RuskNNNN/ohms
OHMS Object Text
Contains OHMS index and/or transcript and is what makes the contents of the OHMS object searchable.
5.3 Circa 1985 Rusk NNNN, Benjamin Read, Part 1, 1985 August RBRL214DROH-RuskNNNN RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Benjamin Read Richard Rusk oral history 1:|18(10)|25(2)|48(6)|56(1)|75(2)|86(10)|100(6)|112(4)|132(8)|144(10)|152(13)|166(7)|179(4)|189(9)|208(16)|219(10)|233(1)|250(1)|260(4)|271(14)|285(7)|302(1)|314(3)|322(7)|335(10)|351(7)|362(13)|374(11)|387(7)|399(8)|421(10)|435(9)|445(4)|452(8)|467(2)|480(6)|495(1)|508(9)|524(5)|530(9)|547(11)|570(6)|584(10)|594(8)|609(11)|621(9)|636(13)|644(7)|656(3)|665(2)|679(10)|697(12)|721(13)|731(1)|748(9)|765(1)|777(16)|792(12)|801(7)|826(3)|837(7)|855(1)|866(3)|888(4) 0 Kaltura video < ; iframe id=" ; kaltura_player" ; src=" ; https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/p/1727411/sp/172741100/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/26879422/partner_id/1727411?iframeembed=true& ; playerId=kaltura_player& ; entry_id=1_efplpi49& ; flashvars[localizationCode]=en& ; flashvars[leadWithHTML5]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.position]=left& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.clickToClose]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.layout]=vertical& ; flashvars[chapters.thumbnailRotator]=false& ; flashvars[streamSelector.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[EmbedPlayer.SpinnerTarget]=videoHolder& ; flashvars[dualScreen.plugin]=true& ; & ; wid=1_qfpmhih6" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; English 23 Effects of Rusk's personality on the office Last time we talked about my dad's tendency toward reticence... Read talks about how Rusk's personality affected the State Department, mentioning his reticence and loyalty to the presidents he served. He compares Rusk with George Marshall and notes Rusk's willingness to work extensive, strange hours to solve a problem. Read briefly mentions a Johnson-era government efficiency study. administration ; cabinet ; character ; Heineman Report 17 676 Innovations and integration at the State Department How about talking some more in a more general way about my dad's administrative capabilities... Read discusses some of Rusk's lasting impacts on the State Department, including creating an official dissent channel for Foreign Service Officers, counteracting Jim Crow laws in public venues in New York and Washington, and establishing an affirmative action program to recruit female and minority Officers. He talks about Secretaries of State Vance and Muskie (both of whom served under President Carter) in relation to Rusk's policies. Read also discusses the failed bill that was proposed in 1965 by Representative Wayne Hays, which would have placed nearly all employees in the State Department, the Agency for International Development and the U.S. Information Agency in a unitary Foreign Service department. administration ; ambassadors ; appointments ; Averell Harriman ; Bill Crockett ; Foreign Service ; integration ; management ; Mennen Williams ; race ; Soapy Williams 17 1261 " ; The crush of daily responsibilities" ; How was he with personnel? Read talks about Rusk's daily responsibilities and the overwhelming amount of information, meetings, congressional testimonies, travel, and press relations he had to keep up with. He notes that there was little time in Rusk's daily schedule for substantive and long-term analysis but notes that Rusk would hold supplemental weekend meetings. Read talks about the difficulty of delegating from Rusk's position. assistant secretaries ; USAID ; USIA 17 1859 Rusk at the end of his term What happened at the end? Read talks about the toll Vietnam took on Secretary Rusk and comments on Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and the Dominican Crisis. Read mentions Rusk's health problems and talks about Secretaries Vance and Muskie, who served in the position after Rusk. crises ; fatigue 17 2307 Rusk's relationships with Congress and the press This was a strong card for Dean Rusk, his abilities to relate to the Congress and communicate with people on both sides of the House... Read says Rusk's knowledge, integrity, and decorum helped him interact with Congress effectively, particularly during the Vietnam War and the televised Fulbright hearings, which changed the public narrative about U.S. military success in Vietnam. In contrast, he notes that Rusk was not forthcoming with the press, and he lists several of Rusk's press secretaries. Everett Dirksen ; Richard B. Russell ; William Hightower 17 https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Vietnam_Hearings.htm Fulbright Hearings of February 1966 2784 Secretary Rusk's work with diplomats What about Dean Rusk's sense of professionalism and his dealings with other diplomats? Read discusses foreign diplomats' perceptions of Secretary Rusk. He talks about the possibility for miscommunication between representatives and mentions Rusk and the Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin's relationship. Read also extols Rusk's dictation skills, giving an example from the Cyprus crisis. cables ; communications ; diplomacy ; foreign relations ; McGeorge Bundy ; NATO ; Turkey ; USSR 17 3338 Rusk's involvement in arms control ...going to mention arms control, because the period of your father's tenure in office he was so associated with Vietnam... Read discusses Rusk's influence on the Test Ban Treaty and the Arms Control Disarmament Agency. He calls the lack of a ban on Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles (MIRVS) a missed opportunity for the Rusk administration. Read briefly mentions setting up a farewell soiree for Rusk at the end of his term. Adrian Fisher ; Bill Foster ; Butch Fisher ; Johnson ; LBJ ; nonproliferation ; warheads ; William Foster 17 RICHARD RUSK: Mr. Ben Read, my dad' ; s executive secretary from 1963 through 1968. This is a continuation of an earlier interview. Rich Rusk is doing the interviewing. This is August 1985. [break in recording] RICHARD RUSK: Last time we talked about my dad' ; s tendency toward reticence and not being terribly clear in what he expected or wished out of people. He was there for eight years and you were there for five of those eight years. READ: Six. RICHARD RUSK: Six of those eight years. This was an obvious shortcoming to many of those who worked with him. Was it obvious to Dean Rusk? Did you or anyone in the Department close to him bring this to his attention and say, " ; Look, we simply need more direction here and these are the reasons why?" ; READ: Well, I' ; m sure we could have been more explicit than we were. I do think it must have been clear to him that the people with whom we had most business to conduct felt shorted somewhat in that regard. There were many times when one of us would have to go back in for more detailed descriptions on what had happened to what he wanted to have happen flowing from meetings at the White House with the President, etc. Whether we were as candid with him about the problem as we should have been--we probably weren' ; t. It was always a little awesome to tell your superior to-- RICHARD RUSK: Ship up or shape out, huh? READ: --improve on such basic things. But as I said when we interviewed the first time, and I' ; ve just reread the transcript, I think he was over-faulted in that respect. RICHARD RUSK: Over-faulted? READ: Over-faulted by some of our colleagues, because [he] had placed the very highest value on not permitting anyone to see distance between himself and the presidents that he served. That is an admirable trait and one that very few other Secretaries of State of recent vintage have been able to look back on and say they have achieved as well. RICHARD RUSK: Or even tried to emulate. READ: Even tried, exactly. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah, you spoke of this method of triangulation that you would use to try to piece together some of my dad' ; s-- READ: Yeah, and that would frequently be entirely adequate. But frequently it would unearth the fact that human beings hear things differently, and to some degree hear what they want to hear out of a conversation when it isn' ; t an obvious point and subtleties are involved. I would often get his first debriefing of White House meetings. Often, as I may or may not have to go off on some new appointment or crisis or problem or back to the White House, or back to the Hill, whatever it was, and he would--you would just not be able to complete the debriefing process to the degree that would be optimum. But, circumstances were partly at fault. RICHARD RUSK: The circumstances of the job itself? READ: The circumstances of the job itself, that' ; s right. It' ; s crushing. RICHARD RUSK: The enormity of the responsibilities, the flow of-- is that due to perhaps my dad' ; s tendency to take on [a] bit too much and get too involved in the detail of the job, or were these things he simply had to do? READ: No, I wouldn' ; t say that at all. These were things he had to do and were unavoidable in that office. The expectations that we put on the top few positions in the executive branch are really horrendous. Obviously they are not as great as the President in any Cabinet post, but they couldn' ; t be much tougher than they are on the Secretary of State. RICHARD RUSK: George [Catlett] Marshall used to work an eight-hour day, both as Secretary of State and during World War II, while he was more or less running the American war effort. He would delegate extensively in order to work that eight-hour day. Do you think that George Marshall could have gotten away with that in the 1960s given the increased complexity of the world? My dad has often wondered if he perhaps took on a bit too much and should have delegated more than he did. READ: I don' ; t see how he could have, working particularly for President Johnson, who kept hours sometimes as irregular as Winston Churchill' ; s. I remember times when he would call--specifically I remember a 3:00 a.m. meeting on the Dominican crisis when there was also a Panama crisis and a Cyprus crisis going on. He was not notoriously disciplined in the hours that he required of his principal aides. RICHARD RUSK: Do you recall instances where senior Cabinet colleagues of my father' ; s, or perhaps either of the presidents, might have called to question his confused leadership and the uncertainties with which he left his colleagues in the Department? Or was this Undersecretaries and people within the Department itself? READ: The latter. RICHARD RUSK: It was mostly the latter. Do you recall specific instances where you went to him, perhaps in collusion with some others, and brought this point to his attention? READ: It' ; s very hard to isolate an incident among such a host of contacts. If one comes to mind, I' ; ll relate it. RICHARD RUSK: Okay, the Heineman Report? This is late in the process, 1968 I think, and my dad didn' ; t know what that thing was. We ran across a Leslie [Howard] Gelb book, Our Own Worst Enemy, and I asked him about this thing, and he didn' ; t know what it was. Do you recall being involved with it? READ: I recall only a bit more than he does. It came along very late in the eight-year period. And Ben [Benjamin Walter] Heineman of the, what was it, Chicago Northwestern Railroad was appointed by the President to do an efficiency study. I' ; ve forgotten whether it was just the Department of State or several departments: probably the national security agencies. No one took it terribly seriously because the Department had been studied so many times by so many different people, and it came along about eight years into the Administration ; not the time when you are apt to get fresh new departure. RICHARD RUSK: Ideas for restructured government. READ: No one was eager to do it, and as I recall it--and this is very, very tenuous in my mind--the people who were doing the interviews for the Heineman group were not terribly profound or didn' ; t really get into the major problems that were afoot at the time. RICHARD RUSK: Oh, I see. READ: I don' ; t think anyone took it terribly seriously. RICHARD RUSK: Was that done at President Johnson' ; s initiative? READ: I suppose it must have been, or Heineman might have been a friend of one of the President' ; s aides at the White House who thought it would be a good idea. I just have not idea of how it really started. It was just a very small ripple. RICHARD RUSK: Do you think that study was called by the President to focus in on this problem involving State, leadership in foreign affairs, my dad' ; s quality of reticence, or was it a more general thing? READ: I doubt it, and I don' ; t think it had much of an impact one way or the other. RICHARD RUSK: Can you recall--let me ask one more question and then we' ; ll go on to something else. Can you recall an instance where lack of direction from Dean Rusk definitely affected policy elsewhere in the world and adversely affected the situation for another Undersecretary that-- READ: I can' ; t really say that in terms of policy. Perhaps if he had given more of the nuances of his own thinking to some of his colleagues, the actions they took and the policies they drafted would have been more in keeping with his own desires and impressions. But it' ; s very, very hard for me, and I' ; m unable to say where there may have been a specific shortcoming. I do know there was a widespread feeling among many of the Assistant Secretaries that they would have liked to know more of what his real thoughts were. And yet he delegated a great deal to them and they never had trouble getting to him when they felt that they needed to. He was always very accessible. And those complaints are always present to some degree, as I can attest having seen two other Secretaries of State at close hand. Their time is so compartmentalized and so short ; it' ; s one of those things that goes with the job. RICHARD RUSK: You want to identify for the tape the other Secretaries? READ: [Cyrus Roberts] Vance and [Edmund Sixtus] Muskie. RICHARD RUSK: How about talking some more in a more general way about my dad' ; s administrative capabilities: running the Department as a whole and-- READ: Well, I guess I learned more in retrospect than I did at the time on that, because I was dealing in information flow in the sixties. I was working directly for him, and the administrative management and headaches were somewhat off to the side. And in those days they were handled by Bill [William] Crockett, who was Assistant Secretary for Administration. Budget matters, appointment matters, and administrative matter were in my province when I came back into the Department in 1977 as Undersecretary of State for Management. The best service one can do is not impose those problems on the Secretary of State unless absolutely necessary for their resolution. RICHARD RUSK: Handle those below his level. READ: To the greatest degree you possibly can. On the other hand, there are times when you need very much a presidential or secretarial initiative to push a bureaucracy in a new direction or to stop from doing what it' ; s doing. To turn the organizational approach of a large group of people even a few degrees is not just a simple matter of writing a directive and thinking it' ; s done. And I think he accomplished some notable things during his time, in the administrative field. The dissent channel, which you have probably heard about, which he institutionalized, is still going strong. RICHARD RUSK: Go ahead and describe that. I don' ; t think we have it on tape anywhere. READ: There had been no formal dissent channel for younger officers in the field who disagreed strongly with an ambassadorial view of our policy or perception of development in that country. He encouraged the formation of the dissent channel. It is still used with discretion and sparingly, but it really has been a great outlet for Foreign Service officers who feel very deeply that-- RICHARD RUSK: --things were wrong. READ: --the country team to which they are assigned was just not getting the gist of what was going on. And those dissent channel cables were read right up to the top, responses were prepared, and then, of course, if the policy was reaffirmed, you were expected to carry it out. You didn' ; t want to just hear the same complaint over and over again. It wasn' ; t abused in the field at all ; it was used well and on the whole quite effectively. RICHARD RUSK: When did he start that? READ: Some time during his tenure, I' ; ve forgotten what year it was. RICHARD RUSK: Mid-sixties? READ: Probably around then. We even had a dissent prize that was awarded. I think [William] Averell Harriman' ; s name was attached to it. He probably donated the award for the best use of the dissent channel each year, to give it recognition. RICHARD RUSK: Sounds like something Harriman would have his name attached to. He was an effective dissenter, I suppose? READ: Indeed. Another innovation he made from which I benefited when I picked up the management duties in 1977 was in the civil rights area. He had made a start in the sixties which was very important on a number of things. The highways between New York and Washington and the restaurants excluded people of any color other than pure white. He encouraged remedial action to be taken, and action was taken. It was a small step in retrospect, but an important one for the diplomatic corps. Most importantly, he instituted an affirmative action program to recruit young Foreign Service officers who were women and minorities. RICHARD RUSK: Is that Carl Rowan' ; s group? There was a group comprised of Carl Rowan and, I think, G. Mennen Williams, perhaps not Mennen Williams, and some others that worked within the Department to help integrate the Foreign Service. READ: Soapy [G. Mennen] Williams was associated and Wayne Fredricks, his deputy, quite closely with the affirmative action efforts for a greater intake of minority and women officers into the Foreign Service. And that was a very important departure point, because the old criticisms were all too true of the Department at the end of the war being principally Ivy League, Eastern and white. When we came back into office in the Carter period, the Democrats, we found that that beginning had been an important one, although it had languished badly during-- RICHARD RUSK: During the Nixon years? READ: Yes, and when I took over in 1977 in the management area, there were still only four plus percent minorities and less than ten percent women Foreign Service officers. Secretary Vance was able to give it a mighty shove and Muskie continued that, and we were able to virtually double the number of minorities and increase by fifty percent the number of women Foreign Service officers in a static total number foreign service. This has not reversed since 1981 in any major degree. I am newly acquainted with this, because I had to testify in a women' ; s action suit in court just two or three months ago. RICHARD RUSK: So those changes have endured? READ: They were institutionalized. We worked them into the new Foreign Service Act of 1980 in a number of respects. It' ; s the only place in the federal statute books where the words " ; affirmative action" ; appear explicitly. But there was a solid beginning there in the sixties which was very important. RICHARD RUSK: Any other innovative steps that my dad was associated with? READ: Well there were several failing efforts that he spent quite a bit of time on, encouraging Crockett. And Crockett was working with the head of the Civil Service Commission at the time, John Mason. One was in the budgeting area. They had something called the PDBS, or something like that: planning, performance and budget system, or something of that nature. It didn' ; t get very far. Crockett made another effort to bring everyone within the Department into the Foreign Service, requiring service abroad. It was known as the Hays bill. It never got anywhere because it was pushing against reality. A certain number of people very valuable to the Department simply don' ; t want to serve abroad, and never will serve abroad for their own reasons. And when the Republicans were in office in the early seventies they tried to renew this effort administratively, and put out all sorts of directives to that effect. I found when I went in in 1977 that zero progress had been made. It is just not the nature of the beast. You can' ; t require overseas service by an entire group that is at least half Washington-based and wants to be and is suited to be. RICHARD RUSK: So there is a great deal of the Department that is not really subject to administrative control or at least administrative initiatives? Not since John Kennedy made his statement--who was it in the Kennedy Administration that referred to the Department as a " ; bowl of jelly?" ; Was that [Arthur Meier] Schlesinger [Jr.]? READ: It could easily have been Schlesinger, and it might have been Kennedy. RICHARD RUSK: And those other initiatives were at the behest of my father? READ: No, but he gave them encouragement and support and a fair amount of time. He, as you also know, in the ambassadorial appointment process, made some important firsts in terms of minority appointments: minority ambassadors in the field and women appointments. A lot more needed to be done and always will in this area, but they were some important beginnings. RICHARD RUSK: How was he with personnel? As the head of this giant department, did he get maximum performance out of people? Could he hire and fire effectively? READ: I don' ; t think any Secretary of State has ever hired or fired anybody as far as I know. RICHARD RUSK: Other people do that? READ: Other people do it. Obviously, when an Assistant Secretary really wears out his welcome, you can let that fact be known and things will be done. But personnel in the normal sense of the word is removed, and will always have to be in the Department of State, because it' ; s just not something that a Secretary can attend to and has to delegate. So, George [Wildman] Ball and his people, for instance, were instrumental in working up the ambassadorial assignment slates that would be approved or changed by the Secretary before they went to the President. But, there just isn' ; t time today for a Secretary to do much more. RICHARD RUSK: Ben, this continually comes up in our conversation, and you are one of the few that alludes to this pressure business, this information flow and the daily responsibilities. You were right in the midst of it. Maybe we should talk some more about that and what implications that had for Dean Rusk' ; s performance and his decision-making. Maybe you can elaborate on what you mean by " ; the crush of daily responsibilities" ; for my father as Secretary of State and policy implications of that. READ: The problem is a profound one, which gets worse with the passage of the years. In Dean' ; s time, the Secretary' ; s normal schedule was just chock-block from beginning to end. As you may recall from the home end, we would send security people out with overnight cables: some of the top cables his immediate aides would have prepared as the most important for him to look at before he came into the office around nine. And of course there would have been some phone calls at home if there was something moving fast. Catching up after eight hours of sleep with what two-thirds of the world has been doing is not an easy task. It' ; s something that none of the other domestic department heads has to worry about. When you come into the Department you have small and lay staff meetings to pick up immediately to help give you impressions of the most important business of the day by the top people in the Department and the USIA [United States Information Agency] and AID [Agency for International Development] and the related agencies. And then wider meetings with twenty-five to thirty-five Assistant Secretaries and Assistant Secretary-level people in a room. RICHARD RUSK: How often would he have those wider meetings? READ: A couple of times a week. That meeting process would be through by ten (a.m.), and in that interim between nine and ten there would have been all sorts of other things that would have transpired. Cables would have come in. Phone calls would be waiting. If it was a day in which you had to go to the Hill, you were due on the Hill, you would have had to leave the staff meeting early to go up on the Hill. Requirements of major committees and subcommittees dealing with foreign affairs just can' ; t be underestimated in any way. (interruption) RICHARD RUSK: What about congressional testimony? Dean Rusk estimated that he spent at least twenty-five percent of his time getting ready for congressional testimony or actually participating in congressional testimony. READ: That process was a tremendous strain. I remember sitting with him for the two days of the Fulbright Vietnam hearings. RICHARD RUSK: You were there for that? READ: I was sitting right behind him through the whole thing. I had been in charge of the preparation of the briefing books from all parts of the Department. The books were phone book size to be ready for questions, only a fraction of which would be asked, but which you had to be prepared for. And the emotional strain of preparation and testifying was a tremendous drain. I would have guessed at time that Congress took a third of his weeks. RICHARD RUSK: A third of his week went to congressional testimony? READ: At the worst, yeah. And then travel and press problems were always present. Headaches that the press can cause, particularly with two Presidents that were so sensitive to the media and the amount of time you have to spend as Secretary to achieve the right understanding by the media is great. Therefore the day is considerably shorter before you even begin to grapple with your appointments or how you' ; re going to move arms control along, or what you' ; re going to do about German discontent, or whatever may be needed. RICHARD RUSK: What percent of his day, or his time as Secretary, do you think was spent discussing or analyzing the substance of policy? READ: I' ; m sure he would say, and I would say, never enough. The problems of the immediate, the problems of the ephemeral are your biggest enemy. When a press headache breaks in the morning story, that may look terribly important to the President and they call the Secretary to do something, who remembers a day or two later, let alone in history? And therefore you' ; re always fighting for more time to spend on the longer run basis issues. Analytical time and the times to discuss those subjects tend to get put off endlessly. I can remember his scheduling Saturday morning meetings to discuss population problems and such issues: the type of things that just never break into the urgent stuff. And I can remember his doing that with countries that weren' ; t on the front page: Indonesia, the seventh most populous country in the world, but one in which things usually weren' ; t pressing. And it' ; s the hardest thing in the world to do, because everything is pushing you toward attention to the crisis of the moment. RICHARD RUSK: Did he delegate as effectively as he could or should have? READ: How do you delegate some of this? You don' ; t, and you can' ; t. The committees want to hear you, the Secretary of State. The press is clamoring to get at you. He used to hold Friday afternoon background press briefings. RICHARD RUSK: The bottle club? READ: The bottle club. But infinitely more time he put into guidance to [Robert Joseph] Manning, or [James Lloyd] Greenfield, or [Robert James] McCloskey on what was uppermost in their headache book, or how to cope with it, and relaying to them the President' ; s concerns or his own concerns: trying to mop up when some other wing of government went off on a different note. And on top of that, of course, he had information that was pouring in all through the day. So if you' ; re doing the sort of staff job and you' ; re constantly juggling the cables that are at the top of his pile, and you almost need to develop a new skill: not reporting, not even editing reports, but editing editors. Because the need for synthesis, the need for awareness that you can piece into this mosaic is just crushing and continuous. RICHARD RUSK: Well, my dad says ninety-five percent of the Department' ; s work gets handled at levels below the Secretary of State. He' ; s absolutely right in that respect. READ: Of course he is. And yet that five percent, in terms of importance, sometimes approximates ninety percent. RICHARD RUSK: And you traveled with him as well? READ: Yes, off and on--not all the time, but a number of the major trips that he was on. RICHARD RUSK: Then he had the society routine, the social functions of diplomacy as well, on top of that. It was a busy eight years. READ: Very, very busy. RICHARD RUSK: What happened at the end? Everyone comments on how tired he became during that last--certainly the last year, perhaps the last two. The job began to get to him. Do you care to comment on this? And how did it affect the performance of his job in the final year? READ: I don' ; t think tiredness affected his performance. God knows the fatigue was there. I felt it even in my totally secondary position. I was dog tired by the end of January 1969. And when you look at some of his colleagues in the Kennedy-Johnson cabinet--McNamara had worn out a year and a half earlier, or a year earlier. END OF SIDE 1 BEGINNING OF SIDE 2 READ: The Vietnam War imposed the greatest strains. I would come in late in the day with lists of what the Air Force was going to bomb in the next twenty-four hours. And sometimes he would have to interfere in that process because of negotiation going on that the field commanders knew nothing about. But he would never say, " ; Oh, I' ; m just too tired, go away." ; He would stay with it despite fatigue. The time when I saw fatigue at the most dangerous level was the time I mentioned earlier, which was something that most people have forgotten: the Dominican, Panamanian, and Cyprus crises simultaneously, and Johnson new in presidency, trying to burn the candle at both ends. They were all just dog-tired and at the point of silliness. They were proposing Dominican Republic Cabinet lists but the names meant nothing to them, sometimes early in the morning, and flashing this stuff to Ellsworth Bunker down there. You knew they didn' ; t know what they were doing. [tape interruption] Well, I was then in my late thirties or early forties, and, you know, I felt that fatigue. I was there early and I was there after he left, and not only that but I was a lot younger and I didn' ; t have any of the responsibilities he had. But there is a point where you' ; ve had a crisis that is relentless, it goes on beyond two or three weeks, when you are just not operating at your top potential. And he was no more immune to that than any other human being that I' ; ve ever met, although he was an incredible stoic--durable beyond belief. But things would just pour in. You' ; d be finishing a day when you were just so tired you could barely put your brief case in hand and get out the door, and were about to try to do so and something new would break: a new Berlin crisis, or a Pueblo affair. [break in recording] READ: [taking about Dominican Crisis]--talking to Ellsworth Bunker afterwards--he was one wise old bird, as you probably know from your father' ; s recollection of him. He received some directives that made no sense, and he knew it. RICHARD RUSK: From my dad? READ: From the system: from the President, from the Secretary, etc. And he would say, " ; Yup, yup," ; and he would do what needed to be done and was feasible. RICHARD RUSK: Not necessarily in conformance with that memo? READ: Not in that precise way or form. And thank goodness, because he was a wise enough old bird to be able to do that. A younger, less experienced person would have saluted and done something stupid and played it by the book. The presidential understanding--any president' ; s--of that sort of process is negligible. I remember being over with them one evening during the Dominican Crisis when the President wrote a message to Bunker, handed it to me, or somehow it got to me, and I sent a messenger over to the State Department. And there it was being typed and put on the old green form of cable, and was probably being put into the cable machine when Johnson turned to me and said, " ; Have we got his answer yet?" ; And, of course we hadn' ; t gotten his answer yet. RICHARD RUSK: It had just gone out. READ: So the President wouldn' ; t wait, and just picked up the phone, got Bunker, read him the message, and in the clear talked about it. The ability to misunderstand what you' ; re talking about at late hours is profound, when you' ; re tired and only half awake and not really alert. RICHARD RUSK: What kind of health was my dad in physically? Was he bothered that much during all this last year in office? READ: Yes. I' ; m not a doctor, and I never asked him about his insides, but my impression was that he was suffering at least some stomach distress and had genuine pain parts of the day and had to take pills for it. Obviously that' ; s a debilitating additional stress and strain to have to suffer through on top of all other duties of office. RICHARD RUSK: Now, you served for Secretary Muskie and Cyrus Vance in a little different capacity. Are you in a position to draw any comparative analysis of my dad with these other two, on this question of information flow and the total sweep of the job? How did he do, in the comparative way, handling the vast complexities of duty? READ: I' ; m not sure how profitable comparisons are, people are so different. Vance would get in much earlier. His first meeting would be an hour earlier in the day, even an hour and a half sometimes. We used to meet at seven thirty in his office after having read cables and all that. He only suffered for three years in that job and not eight years, which is a very big difference, of course. Ed Muskie was only there for eight or nine months. So, I don' ; t think comparisons are relevant. RICHARD RUSK: Okay. [break in recording] RICHARD RUSK: About the amount of time my dad spent getting ready for testifying before Congress: this was a strong card for Dean Rusk, his abilities to relate to the Congress and communicate with people on both sides of the House. Why was he good at it? I take it that is a more or less unanimous opinion that he was definitely good in his relations with Congress. Why was he so effective? READ: Well, he conveyed a sense of knowledge and integrity which was all important in dealing with Congress. They never had the feeling that he was being duplitious [sic]. He could be very, very cryptic, but he would never mislead, and they knew it, and he had his own sense of decorum and civility. His dignity stood him in very good stead. Members who would be rude to him, and there were some, would be looked at askance by their colleagues. A few in the House and one or two in the Senate would try to pick away at him. They never got anywhere and I think they demeaned themselves in the process. But they didn' ; t give him any patsy balls. They gave him some awfully tough workings over on Vietnam in particular. Because a lot of them came to doubt profoundly the reasons for what we were doing. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. Do you think that the administration was able to hold support for Vietnam as long as they did because of the strength of my dad' ; s relation-ship with the Congress? READ: In part, yes. RICHARD RUSK: Do you have any particular stories about the Fulbright hearings of ' ; 66,' ; 67, I think it was? READ: I just remember an enormously tense, long, probably sixteen hours spread over two days, and difficult set of exchanges with him. At about lunch time the second day, something like that, he turned to me and said, " ; When are they going to ask the tough ones?" ; We had--he was so well prepared. (laughter) And there were so many vulnerabilities that they hadn' ; t touched on. RICHARD RUSK: So Fulbright' ; s group wasn' ; t too well prepared, then? READ: No, they were not. RICHARD RUSK: Son of a gun! [break in recording] RICHARD RUSK: Were you there for his civil rights testimony in--that would have been ' ; 64? I think it was on behalf of the Civil Rights Act. READ: I don' ; t recall. RICHARD RUSK: Anything else relating to congressional testimony? [break in recording] RICHARD RUSK: Just go ahead. READ: I think he could have used two or three more really close associates among the members. On the Republican side, [Bourke Blake] Hickenlooper was someone he dealt with closely. I knew, having worked in the Senate, he didn' ; t have terribly much weight with his colleagues on that side of the aisle. And if he had one or two really close and intimate friends on the Democratic side who would have gone to bat for him on occasions, it would have been very helpful. But there were few [Arthur Hendrick] Vandenbergs in the Senate in those days. RICHARD RUSK: Yeah, there were a few. Of course, he had Everett [McKinley] Dirksen and Richard [Brevard] Russell [Jr.]. They were a few of the so-called " ; whales," ; but he could have used some more, I suppose. READ: Everett Dirksen was a selective whale on certain subjects at certain times. RICHARD RUSK: The marigold? What about press relations, now? I' ; m sure you were involved in getting Dean Rusk ready for his press conferences that were a major part of his job. How did he handle working with the press? READ: Well, I missed the first two years of his period as Secretary. My impression was from what Greenfield and Manning and others tell me, that it was a very uneasy relationship initially, that he was ill at ease, unyielding, and didn' ; t give as much as he could have given even though the press always wants more than you can give them. But, he certainly got much better, visibly during his period as Secretary. He had some very, very strong admirers among the press corps. RICHARD RUSK: Who were some of those people? READ: Oh, John [William] Hightower, AP [Associated Press], I remember. I think Chalmers Roberts, to some degree. RICHARD RUSK: Was John Chancellor perhaps one? READ: I don' ; t remember that specifically. Obviously, he was of no use to those who were trying to write gossip columns and finding cleavages in the administration and liked to build their own theories and that sort of thing. He never gave them any information, and so he was thoroughly unpopular with that type of--the gossipy end of the Washington press corps, but there were only a few times when he lost his cool with them. It usually was with significant provocation. I guess the one that' ; s remembered best by the press people that I talked to, and by me too, was when he turned to them and asked, " ; Whose side are you on?" ; at one point, on Vietnam. It was a mistake ; I' ; m sure he could see that in retrospect. But he handled it usually quite professionally. There was a difference among his press advisers. Manning and Greenfield and McCloskey tended to be much more constructively critical than Ernest [Kidder] Lindley. Ernest would always say, " ; Dean you were the greatest ever, ever." ; And none of the rest of his staff thought that was very useful for him. (laughter) RICHARD RUSK: What were these other people likely to say to him when they were being constructively critical? Just reacting to substance of his-- RICHARD RUSK: Yeah, they would say, " ; Gee, you really hit such-and-such a question, but did you really want to go as far as you did," ; or " ; Couldn' ; t you have gone further on subject A and B?" ; And obviously that' ; s a more useful reaction than one of unadulterated praise which Ernest had. RICHARD RUSK: My mom said my dad really began to unwind and became quite good at dealing with the press once he started taking a little shot of brandy or scotch just before a press conference. [break in recording] RICHARD RUSK: What about Dean Rusk' ; s sense of professionalism and his dealings with other diplomats? READ: Well, I think he' ; s had no peers in that respect. Among the Secretaries that I' ; ve known and dealt with, many of the foreign ambassadors told me in the years after he had left office that they respected his professionalism more that they had anyone else' ; s. He had never been devious. He had been effective in getting across what he was trying to get across, but he didn' ; t do it in a tricky way. He wasn' ; t trying to dissimulate or mislead. His professionalism was such that he could speak with really a significantly high degree of clarity and precision and almost shorthand in the ' ; diplomatisse' ; of the period, so that he could accomplish a message, get across a message, faster and more clearly than others that I observed first hand. And that included both of his immediate Republican successors. This is not a small virtue in that office. It' ; s the one on which you build up that credibility with time and experience ; and it' ; s a rare and valuable commodity. I guess the only area where I would fault him, and I' ; d fault every one of the others that I' ; ve dealt with, is that--and to some degree the better they get at it the worse they get in this other respect--that they are so clear in their mode of expression that they are convinced that the other fellow comprehends. Indeed, that fellow should comprehend if he were up to snuff on English and the vernacular and the idiom. But all Secretaries of State should deal more on paper, as well as oral communication, more than they do. RICHARD RUSK: And that' ; s a good general rule of thumb for the entire experience? READ: Very, very much so. I remember one instance where Dean was talking to [Anatoly F.] Dobrynin. It was something real important at the time ; I think it was Berlin, but I' ; m not even sure of that. And he was trying to make three points: A, B, C. and they were concisely and clearly put. And he repeated them. And Dobrynin nodded comprehension: not agreement of the viewpoint, but agreement that he had gotten the message. He didn' ; t indicate any confusion, just took at face value, apparently, what had been told him. We had proof positive in the form of a defector within forty-eight hours, from another eastern European country, that the message Dobrynin had sent back was in error on all points. They were like ships passing in the night. And when you look at the profoundly different electrochemical systems we have upstairs and the perceptual gulfs that divide east and west, that' ; s not terribly surprising. The more you know about the neurosciences, the more concerned you become about your ability to communicate across these vast gulfs of linguistic problems, orientated towards totally different cultures and value systems. RICHARD RUSK: Do you recall the substance of what was discussed there? READ: I think it was Berlin, but I remember specifically the process because it was such a complete confirmation of oral communication falling short, even with as polished an ambassador as Dobrynin. But who knows what' ; s driving him? I was talking to a man in the White House yesterday. He had a proof positive that Dobrynin has miscommunicated to Moscow as recently as two or three months ago. RICHARD RUSK: Maybe he' ; s doing that for his own purposes? READ: It could be for his own purposes ; it could be for self-glorification, for fear of--but who knows? RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s an interesting point. READ: But if you give a person a diplomatic piece of paper, he is duty bound to convey it. He fails to do so only at his peril. And so why not let other eyes fall in the government on the essence of that communication and have the double check that that permits? RICHARD RUSK: In talking about Soviet diplomats and people on the other side-- READ: I remember coming in to your father' ; s seventy-fifth birthday party at the State Department in line with Dobrynin, and we got to chatting about your father. It was very clear then, and I have talked to Dobrynin in the intervening years, that he really had very considerable admiration for the abilities of your father in that office. He obviously had to go toe to toe on all sorts of issues, but he really had the greatest respect for his professionalism. RICHARD RUSK: Any other people other than Dobrynin, here in Washington, or perhaps not here in Washington, that could speak on that? READ: I think only Dobrynin and [Andrei Andreevich] Gromyko would be able to give you the full flavor of that. [break in recording] RICHARD RUSK: Did you go with him to the United Nations during his annual trip there when-- READ: No. I made a point of avoiding that. RICHARD RUSK: Good for you. You had some call over your own schedule? READ: Yes. [break in recording] READ: He was also a superb draftsman. I guess the message he dictated that went almost without change that I remember best is one for which he got a lot of criticism later, or the government did, but which was, in my books, completely necessary to accomplish what we were doing at the time. It was the first Cyprus crisis and we had information as solid as a rock that the Turks were boarding their ships for an invasion of the island. And we gathered in your father' ; s office one evening. The White House crowd was there. I' ; ve forgotten whether it was [McGeorge] Bundy or his Middle East fellow at the time, I think it was [Robert William] Komer, and all of the Middle East people from State. And in their presence he dictated an absolute blast at the Turks, telling them in the straightest possible language what irreparable damage it would do to NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] if they moved in this way, and we would have to reassess basically our relationship if they carried through their threat. But it worked. And of course, after it had worked and the Turks were smarting-- RICHARD RUSK: Can you identify that message at all? READ: I think it was to Inonu in Turkey. RICHARD RUSK: Do you recall the timing of that? READ: Well it was the first Cyprus crisis. You' ; d have to look that up. I think it was ' ; 64 or ' ; 65. RICHARD RUSK: He more or less did that on the spot to his colleagues? READ: Yes. To his colleagues. They had minimal, if any, suggestions during or after his dictation. None of them thought it was too tough, which some of them did in retrospect. But it was an extraordinary piece of drafting. You will be seeing later today [C.] Jane Mossellem, who will recall how polished some of the speech drafts came out in terms of what he would put on the dictating machine and give to her. RICHARD RUSK: My dad did most of his own speech writing? He would take drafts from other people? READ: He' ; d take drafts form others but do a major rework. RICHARD RUSK: Of course, that' ; s something he developed back during the CBI [China-Burma-India Theater] days working for General [Joseph Warren] Stilwell. Those cables are what caught the attention of the superiors in Washington. Something else you had in mind? READ: Well, I was going to mention arms control, because of the period of your father' ; s tenure in office he was so associated with Vietnam that people just don' ; t recall him as interested in or concerned with arms control. And it' ; s a perversion of history to let that impression remain. I don' ; t think there' ; s anyone who was more pleased and delighted to see the Test Ban Treaty achieved in 1963. I used to go over with him--I think I may have mentioned in or first interview--to see Kennedy each day during those negotiations. RICHARD RUSK: Incidentally Ben, you were under fairly short leash with the distribution of those cables from Averell Harriman. Was that something that my dad wanted to institute? READ: It was the President' ; s directive. And we had to broaden it one by one as the days passed on. And your father would concur in that. But it was all handled with a single copy in the State Department and a single copy to the White House. But after the test ban was achieved, what was the next target? It was a very much tougher one to accomplish: non-proliferation. It took many years to hatch. It was ' ; 68 before it was achieved. Both of the principals involved in that effort from the Arms Control Disarmament Agency are dead: Bill [William Chapman] Foster and Butch [Adrian S.] Fisher. But I can remember time and time again when one of them would come to me and say, " ; We' ; ve got to get Dean' ; s help. We' ; re just at a dead end here," ; or " ; There' ; s a problem with the White House and we' ; re not getting through to the President," ; or " ; The Defense Department' ; s doing this or that and we can' ; t clear things." ; RICHARD RUSK: Butch Fisher is Bill Fisher? READ: No, that' ; s Adrian S. Fisher. He was the Legal Adviser of the State Department in the [Dean Gooderham] Acheson days, but was the Deputy Director of ACDA from 1961-69. And many, many times he and his boss, Bill Foster, would work into the late date schedule with your father, and he would give counsel and advice on how to move that tough subject forward, giving them a sense of what else was going on with the Soviets on Vietnam and other things that made an opening possible or not possible. And he would encourage me when I would put together the evening reading items that he would send to the President and sign off on at the very end of each day, I would always try to put in something about where we stood on that long-range quest without too many days in between, he would encourage that: reminding the President that this was on the agenda and an important part of the agenda. And in many, many quiet ways of that sort he would show his extreme interest in achieving progress in that field. RICHARD RUSK: Yes. I was aware of it. They negotiated five major arms control agreements back during his tenure. READ: And not terribly many in recent years. RICHARD RUSK: Was his degree of interest in arms control more substantial than Lyndon Johnson' ; s? READ: I can' ; t say what Johnson' ; s own instincts and motivations were because I never talked to him directly on that subject. RICHARD RUSK: As an operational thing, was he heavily involved with arms control, or was this the type of thing that was more or less done by other people and they would come to him at certain points? Did he ever get into the operational day to day negotiations? READ: Your father? RICHARD RUSK: Yeah. In a major way, the details of the negotiations? READ: Well, we had these two very able people at the head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. And they used good discretion regarding when to bring things to him and when to consult him and when they needed his help. He was always available. Looking back in terms of opportunities we' ; ve missed on arms control--and there were some--I think probably the most crucial one we missed was an effort to try to accomplish a ban on deployment and testing of Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles. RICHARD RUSK: MIRVs? READ: Yes. There was a point where that conceivably could have lent itself to the same sort of treaty that we accomplished in the test ban field. It was verifiable by unilateral means. It wasn' ; t attempted. And there were some people who raised that with your father. No one knows whether he ever raised it at the time either with the President or if it' ; s something he didn' ; t think it appropriate to raise. RICHARD RUSK: Was he himself sold on the need to put a cap on MIRVs. Did you ever talk with him personally? READ: I don' ; t remember ever getting his personal view on that specific subject. But I remember having people some to me who were concerned and working them into his appointment schedule. They were going to talk that problem with him. And they were deeply concerned about where we were headed. In the luxury of hindsight, it' ; s a great pity that we didn' ; t accomplish something here, or try to. RICHARD RUSK: Would Dean Rusk' ; s acknowledgment of, or his support of that position to try to cap MIRVs have been essential in the scheme of things to negotiate a treaty? READ: Undoubtedly, because the great military engine had found a new technical tool and was moving inexorably in that direction. Now of course, the problems implicit in these multiple warhead weapons is so obvious to anybody that we' ; re trying to move back towards single warheads. But it' ; d be interesting for you to get his view on that. I fault us as a State Department on that point, and some people specifically fault him on not having gone to bat on that. RICHARD RUSK: Any of these people still alive? READ: Yeah. Len [Leonard Carpenter] Meeker, Jose [Joseph John] Sisco, and some others who felt that way. But Len and Joe were the ones that I remember specifically who sought time to raise it with him, and did. (interruption) RICHARD RUSK: You' ; re talking about my dad' ; s-- READ: Final soiree and departure. RICHARD RUSK: Final few days at the Department. READ: I think we got the idea about six weeks ahead of that, after the Nixon win at the polls, to have a final evening as close to the very end as we could, when he could invite the President over and do some " ; hail and farewells" ; to Dean and Virginia [Foisie Rusk]. RICHARD RUSK: Is that normally done? READ: I don' ; t know. But at any rate, I formed a committee of six, which included my wife Nan [Read] and myself, and Luke [Lucius Durham] Battle and his wife Betty [Battle], and Clem [Clement E.] Conger and his wife LeAnne [Conger]. The committee of six-- RICHARD RUSK: Safety in numbers. READ: Well, we needed Clem' ; s help for a variety of reasons-- END OF SIDE 2 Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule. video 0 RBRL214DROH-RuskNNNN.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskNNNN.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
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65 minutes
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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Rusk NNNN, Benjamin Read, Part 1, 1985 August
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RBRL214DROH-RuskNNNN
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Benjamin Read
Richard Rusk
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audio
oral histories
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sound
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United States
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Vietnam War, 1961-1975
Cold War
Foreign relations
Description
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Benjamin Read interviewed by Richard Rusk. Topics include the staff of U.S. Presidents and the U.S. Foreign Relations Administration.<br /><br /><span>Benjamin Read served as Executive Secretary/Special Assistant to Dean </span><span class="hitsection"><span class="subhit">Rusk</span></span><span> </span><span>from 1963-1969.</span><br /><br />This interview is continued on <a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/RBRL214DROH/RBRL214DROH-RuskOOOO">Rusk OOOO</a>.
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1985-08
OHMS
-
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Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
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United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
Description
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The collection consists of 172 oral history interviews with Dean Rusk and his colleagues between 1984-1989. Includes audiotapes and transcriptions documenting Rusk's life from early childhood in the 1910's through his teaching career in the 1980's. The interviews contain information on Rusk's service as U.S. Under Secretary and Secretary of State during the administrations of Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson and his involvement in foreign relations including the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. The interviews also document his position as president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s.<br /><br /><a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=14&type=&tags=OHMS&featured=&subcollections=0&subcollections=1&submit_search=Search+for+items">View all OHMS indexed interviews in this collection here.</a>
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Richard Geary Rusk
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
Date
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1984-1989
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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
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Oral histories
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RBRL214DROH
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United States
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
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https://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH-RuskOOOO/ohms
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5.3 Circa 1985 Rusk OOOO, Benjamin Read, Part 2, 1985 August RBRL214DROH-RuskOOOO RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Benjamin Read Richard Rusk oral history 1:|9(11)|26(2)|40(4)|45(12)|63(8) 0 Kaltura video < ; iframe id=" ; kaltura_player" ; src=" ; https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/p/1727411/sp/172741100/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/26879422/partner_id/1727411?iframeembed=true& ; playerId=kaltura_player& ; entry_id=1_53uo8y59& ; flashvars[localizationCode]=en& ; flashvars[leadWithHTML5]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.position]=left& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.clickToClose]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.layout]=vertical& ; flashvars[chapters.thumbnailRotator]=false& ; flashvars[streamSelector.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[EmbedPlayer.SpinnerTarget]=videoHolder& ; flashvars[dualScreen.plugin]=true& ; & ; wid=1_0pre1ab7" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; English 6 The Johnson administration's soiree for Rusk We're talking about the soiree in honor of the Rusks at the very end of the Johnson Administration. Read discusses a party thrown for Dean Rusk, recalling Rusk's address to the State Department and gifts presented to Rusk. Read describes Rusk as " ; unfailingly helpful" ; to his successors: William Rogers, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Meigs Haig, Cyrus Vance, and Edmund Muskie. Foreign Service ; secretaries of state 17 READ: We' ; re talking about the soiree in honor of the Rusks at the very end of the Johnson Administration. And in came some very generous contributions toward a present, so we got something that would be on permanent display in the State Rooms in the State Department and for him more personally. Chip [Charles Eustis] Bohlen told us that Dean had admired several times, when he was in the embassy in Paris, a painting of Ben [Benjamin] Franklin minus wig in Paris during his days in the 1780s. And Clem [Clement E.] Conger found a marvelous reproduction painter. We brought back the original and commissioned the reproduction, and the final product looked identical. But it was a marvelous evening. We talked to the President' ; s appointment secretary, and he and Mrs. [Claudia Alta Taylor " ; Lady Bird" ; ] Johnson immediately agreed to come over, and gave the warmest of remarks. RICHARD RUSK: I heard those, yeah. READ: Then his final morning departure I remember, in a way that he probably doesn' ; t remember, waiting with him in his own office. I think there were just the two of us at one point and it was early that morning, or I guess it might have been lunch time. But anyway, there was a huge stream of people coming in or leaving through the C Street entrance below, and Dean turned around and said, " ; What do all these people do?" ; RICHARD RUSK: " ; What do all those people do?" ; READ: Yes. Because so often he would know what had to be done and couldn' ; t understand why it took an army to do it. I found it a marvelously poignant remark. But at any rate, he went, and Bill [William Pierce] Rogers was finally ensconced. I guess he left right at the hour of the inauguration. I can' ; t remember. I think it was before Rogers had come back. And he went down and said a few words to a law group that had gathered in the front diplomatic entrance to the Department. Hundreds of people had turned out for the occasion. RICHARD RUSK: Were his remarks recorded? Did anyone get a copy of that? READ: They may have been in the newsletter of the Department. I don' ; t know. RICHARD RUSK: What was the gist of his remarks? READ: Well, it was just an expression of great respect for the Foreign Service and the Department, people who were so often the butt of the public criticism and criticism by politicians. There was another thought I had before we break up today, Rich. I think I did mention it on the occasion of the 75th anniversary party in Washington. In his relationship with his successors he was unfailingly helpful. He never made life more difficult for them. And you can' ; t say that of practically any other Secretary during this period. When Rogers, who was savaged very badly during his term of office as Secretary, was most wounded, I remember seeing Dean and him lunching together at the Metropolitan Club. And I know what a solace it was to Bill. RICHARD RUSK: Really? This happened several times? READ: I can' ; t say. When Henry [Alfred Kissinger] was in office--and your father hadn' ; t been one of his greatest admirers during Henry' ; s professorial days and later when he had been at odds with Rogers--but after Henry became Secretary of State he was immensely helpful to him. I knew Henry quite well. And I remember breakfasting with him the morning of my own appointment back in the government, and he just said in such a heartfelt way that, " ; I can' ; t tell you how indebted I feel to Dean Rusk." ; RICHARD RUSK: He told me that. I haven' ; t interviewed him yet. But he said, " ; Dean Rusk is a hero to me and I want you to know it." ; READ: He hadn' ; t always thought that, you know. He had been critical of him during Vietnam. I remember when Henry told me that Rogers had been appointed. He didn' ; t say it was Rogers because it was still not revealed. He said, " ; We have appointed a man who in a year' ; s time is going to better than Dean Rusk." ; Well, we know what he ended up thinking. And we know also today, and with the full luxury of hindsight how much he admires Dean Rusk and his virtues. Even [Alexander Meigs] Haig [Jr.] has told me that Dean was always there when he needed him and wanted advice. I don' ; t know how often he sought it or anything else, but Haig felt that way: and of course, [Cyrus Roberts] Vance and [Edmund Sixtus] Muskie the same. END OF SIDE 1 [SIDE 2 BLANK] Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule. video 0 RBRL214DROH-RuskOOOO.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskOOOO.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
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6 minutes
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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Rusk OOOO, Benjamin Read, Part 2, 1985 August
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RBRL214DROH-RuskOOOO
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Benjamin Read
Richard Rusk
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audio
oral histories
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sound
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United States
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Foreign service
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Benjamin Read interviewed by Richard Rusk. Topics include a farewell party for Rusk and Rusk’s assistance to later secretaries.<br /><br />This interview is a continuation of <a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/RBRL214DROH/RBRL214DROH-RuskNNNN">Rusk NNNN</a>.
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1985-08
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Dean Rusk Oral History Collection
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United States--Officials and employees
Politics and Public Policy
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The collection consists of 172 oral history interviews with Dean Rusk and his colleagues between 1984-1989. Includes audiotapes and transcriptions documenting Rusk's life from early childhood in the 1910's through his teaching career in the 1980's. The interviews contain information on Rusk's service as U.S. Under Secretary and Secretary of State during the administrations of Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson and his involvement in foreign relations including the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War. The interviews also document his position as president of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s.<br /><br /><a href="http://georgiaoralhistory.libs.uga.edu/items/browse?search=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=14&type=&tags=OHMS&featured=&subcollections=0&subcollections=1&submit_search=Search+for+items">View all OHMS indexed interviews in this collection here.</a>
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Richard Geary Rusk
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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1984-1989
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RBRL214DROH
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United States
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https://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH-RuskWW/ohms
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5.3 March 1985 Rusk WW, Benjamin Read, March 1985 RBRL214DROH-RuskWW RBRL214DROH Dean Rusk Oral History Collection Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia Benjamin Read Richard Rusk 1:|16(15)|25(9)|37(6)|54(2)|69(5)|84(14)|99(3)|113(6)|129(11)|148(1)|164(2)|180(2)|194(13)|205(5)|220(5)|236(13)|252(12)|261(13)|280(8)|291(17)|300(14)|312(5)|323(10)|334(8)|346(9)|361(8)|376(4)|402(2)|412(11)|432(13)|466(4)|478(12)|490(3)|506(15)|521(9)|543(2)|554(10)|563(3)|576(9)|588(6)|605(2)|620(8) 0 Kaltura video < ; iframe id=" ; kaltura_player" ; src=" ; https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/p/1727411/sp/172741100/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/26879422/partner_id/1727411?iframeembed=true& ; playerId=kaltura_player& ; entry_id=1_7nunyzb2& ; flashvars[localizationCode]=en& ; flashvars[leadWithHTML5]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.position]=left& ; flashvars[sideBarContainer.clickToClose]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[chapters.layout]=vertical& ; flashvars[chapters.thumbnailRotator]=false& ; flashvars[streamSelector.plugin]=true& ; flashvars[EmbedPlayer.SpinnerTarget]=videoHolder& ; flashvars[dualScreen.plugin]=true& ; & ; wid=1_l773i6yo" ; width=" ; 400" ; height=" ; 285" ; allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=" ; 0" ; title=" ; Kaltura Player" ; > ; < ; /iframe> ; 39 Read's introduction to the Department of State Why don't you just start from the beginning? Read describes his path to becoming Executive Secretary and Special Assistant to Dean Rusk. He shares some of his duties and provides a brief history of the office. Read comments on his relationship with Dean Rusk. Brubeck ; communications ; George Marshall ; Marine Corps ; State Department 17 464 Working under Rusk / Test Ban Treaty Did you ever get in trouble with my dad...? Read says that Rusk knew how to filter important information and deal with short term crises. He mentions President Kennedy's American University speech, recalling that the test ban proposal precipitated his living in the White House and monitoring cables for the next two weeks. Read recalls corresponding with various foreign policy experts to find answers to Dean Rusk's questions. communications ; private information ; Russia ; Soviets 17 772 Rusk's knack for evaluating intelligence It sounds like you were very involved in the procedural aspects of how my dad operated. Read comments on Dean Rusk's discipline and discretion in analyzing crisis information. He recalls the Gulf of Tonkin incident, commenting on Rusk's reaction and William Bundy's pre-formulated Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Read mentions Rusk's insightful interpretation of a message from the Moscow hotline. CINCPAC ; interception ; Johnson ; Llewellyn Thompson ; Russia 17 1202 Stressful international incidents of the early 1960s ...other incidents I recall: one was probably in the fall of '63... Read talks about tensions during the blockade of Berlin, a false alarm regarding a Chinese attack on the U.S. Navy, a rogue American missile headed for Cuba, and a U.S. fighter jet that crashed in Manchuria. ballistic missiles ; Checkpoint Charley ; communications ; crisis diplomacy ; East Germany ; foreign relations ; Gulf of Tonkin ; NMCC ; Operations Center ; public relations ; Russia ; Soviet 17 1844 Getting a read on Dean Rusk Let me use another line of questioning here. Richard Rusk and Benjamin Read contrast Dean Rusk, a reticent man with a great poker face, to former Secretaries of State including the more communicative Dean Acheson and the inconsistent Henry Kissinger. Read describes his own role as a conduit between different departments as he attempted to determine and share what Rusk was thinking. Read postulates that Rusk was secretive in order to protect his privileged relationship with the president and also as a result of his personality type. Bundy ; debriefing ; information ; Lucius Battle ; memory ; Rostow ; Tuesday luncheons 17 RICHARD RUSK: Well, where do we start? READ: I am in your hands. It' ; s hard to know. RICHARD RUSK: I could let you free-lance it or ask you a bunch of questions. I have a bunch. READ: Why don' ; t you start with the questions? RICHARD RUSK: Why don' ; t you just start from the beginning? Incidentally, you were in the Marine Corps Reserve during the war. Where did you serve? READ: South Pacific, and then in China for a year, which was an interesting experience. I was a buck sergeant back in those days. RICHARD RUSK: I' ; ll be darned. I went into the Marines right after high school. READ: I first met your father in early ' ; 63 when my predecessor in that job, [William H.] Bill Brubeck, who was then special assistant to your father and Executive Secretary of the State Department, called and asked if I would be interested in becoming his deputy. He made it clear that he was going to be moving on in two or three months. I said I would. I had been on the Hill for four or five years as legislative assistant to the senior senator from Pennsylvania, Joseph S. Clark, but I had not met your father before then. Bill, who I had not known that well either, and I became acquainted when we were both working for the Kennedy campaign back in 1960. RICHARD RUSK: Briefly, what did your duties entail? Summarize your jobs roughly. READ: In the earliest weeks I was Deputy Executive Secretary to Brubeck. And I had minimal contact with your father. Bill left In about May of 1963, and I then accepted Secretary Rusk' ; s offer to become Executive Secretary and Special Assistant to him. It is the Secretariat which processes all of the papers to and from the Secretary, the then Under Secretary, and the top three or four officers of the Department. The Secretariat is also responsible for communications with the other departments and the White House to and from the State Department, other than, obviously, the private communications of the Secretary. It was a group of about a hundred or so people. RICHARD RUSK: You were the filter in the Department? READ: That' ; s right. The " ; official bottleneck" ; as I used to call it. The office had been set up by George [Catlett] Marshall, who of course was your father' ; s role model, I guess you could call it with today' ; s terminology. When he came over from having been Chief of Staff to be Secretary of State in the forties, he was appalled to find that people were bringing in pieces of problems to him, not in proper sequence or in any sense of priority. RICHARD RUSK: You' ; re talking about George Marshall? READ: Yes. So he ordered a Secretariat set up which was to, in effect, perform the functions that he had gotten use to having the Joint Staff perform during the war. It grew. I think it was set up in ' ; 49 and had various lives in that first decade, but it had grown to roughly a hundred people. By the time I arrived on the scene the operation center, which had just been newly set up, was a part of it. RICHARD RUSK: Even though you did not have much contact with my dad then, what were your initial impressions? Be as candid as you can. READ: I was awed by your father initially. As I said, I was not seeing him that much on a day-to-day basis-- [break in recording] READ: Your father, as is everyone else in that job, was spread thin in terms of tasks that have to be performed between waking and going to sleep. When I was still a deputy contacts were minimal, and it was very hard to feel acquainted. But when Brubeck moved on to the White House just two or three months after I arrived and your father asked me to take on the job as principal " ; traffic cop" ; on the floor, I started to have daily contacts with him. RICHARD RUSK: This was ' ; 63? READ: Yes. May of ' ; 63. From then on, of course, it was a very close relationship that matured over the years: one in which we saw a great deal of each other at any time of day under every sort of condition until the end of his tenure in the Department. I think back on it as a relationship that I treasure and value very much. RICHARD RUSK: I suppose you knew him as well or better than anyone there? READ: Well, I am not so sure that is true. He had some old friends, like George [C.] McGhee, of course. By that time I guess George had gone to Germany. But there were others who had known him. He had known [Lucius D.] Luke Battle, and I think you have already seen Luke? RICHARD RUSK: That' ; s right. I saw him yesterday. Is the word circulating that I am in town? READ: Luke is an old friend and we were at a dinner party together last night. But it is very hard for a Secretary of State to have time for personal relationships in that job, as everyone knows. He had not brought a phalanx of people with him as other Secretaries had done, so I guess the people who were on a day-to-day contact basis were the ones who got to know him best. RICHARD RUSK: I am trying to visualize the job as the special assistant. You were in charge of the written traffic: the cables, the things that he saw. What about phone calls, scheduling, the meetings, the whole gamut of input/output there? READ: Yes, it is a bit more complicated than that in terms of organization because the Secretary and Under Secretaries each have their own personal staffs. I had a role in their selection, so I related to them in sort of an oversight capacity. But there were certain things that I would handle directly. I would not usually get involved in scheduling things or the detailed operations that the assistants in each of the offices would have. RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever get in trouble with my dad for either failing to show him something that he should have seen or either giving him more than he had to see? READ: Oh, innumerable times. I would not say it was trouble because he was enormously patient with that sort of thing, but you can never be satisfied when you are in that sort of a job that you have the right amount of information in the right form and priority. If you were complacent about it or happy about it, you would not be doing a good job. RICHARD RUSK: As a general question: Do you think that he himself had a good handle on what he needed to see, as opposed to what was unimportant detail? READ: I like to think so. And yet I say it with a feeling of real inadequacy in a number of respects. In that sort of a job you are always fighting the problems of the immediate as opposed to the mid-run and long-run, and the latter invariably tend to get too shorted as you look back with the luxury of hindsight. RICHARD RUSK: The long-range plan and the analysis? READ: Yes. You carve out that time from immediate pressing demands. The problems of press and Congress and visitors and travel are all just pushing the immediate and tend to crowd out the others unless you take great pains. I was very fortunate in terms of getting an early feel for the job in terms of relationships with your father and George [Wildman] Ball and the others. I think within a week of the time that I succeeded Brubeck, President Kennedy made his American University speech offering the test ban to the Soviets-- RICHARD RUSK: Behind our house? READ: Exactly. RICHARD RUSK: I wasn' ; t even there. READ: And by a set of coincidences I got to be sort of the chief cook and bottle washer in that operation. RICHARD RUSK: When in ' ; 63 did you take over? READ: Sometime in May. I can' ; t pinpoint exactly. At any rate, when the test ban delegation left, [William] Averell Harriman, who had been sworn in for his twentieth job at the same time I was sworn in for my first job, came back from the White House after getting his final instructions from Kennedy and said then, " ; The President wants complete control of the traffic to and from that delegation and does not want to endanger something that he places this much importance on," ; or leaks or that sort of thing. So he said that he wanted the executive secretary of the Department to live in the Department for the next ten days or two weeks, and do whatever it took to assure privacy for communications about the negotiations. RICHARD RUSK: Are you talking about the Test Ban Treaty? READ: Yes. So I found myself in the extraordinary position that whenever a cable started coming in with a slug word " ; BAN" ; out, I would be called down to the communications center and I would be the only one authorized. I would take it up to show directly to the Secretary and Under Secretary. Other people, like the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] director and head of Arms Control, would have to come to my office to read the thing because it was in single copy. By the end of the day, with all those people having innumerable other duties, we fell into the habit during that ten-day period of going over to see the President and summarizing what had come in and what needed doing in way of instructions. It was a marvelous experience, because I would come back with envelopes stuffed in all of my pockets with Kennedy notes, Rusk notes, and [Robert Strange] McNamara notes, and take a deep breath and write the cables that they had more or less thought they agreed on, and sign all their names at the bottom and send the thing out. It was an extraordinary period in my life. RICHARD RUSK: I heard Kennedy had the habit of jotting down things on scraps of paper-- READ: Illegible as hell. RICHARD RUSK: And at the end of the day the secretaries would have to dump his pockets out and try to figure out what he said and did. Is my dad the same way in that regard? READ: To a much lesser degree. I would frequently come in in the morning and I would find a whole set of chits from Evelyn [N.] Lincoln, Kennedy' ; s secretary, that Kennedy would have dictated the preceding night saying, " ; Where is that ship that went through the Panama Canal heading towards Brazil?" ; or " ; What do we know about center left coalitions in Italy?" ; And obviously you would be farming these out to people who could give the answers, but it was an indication of his enormous and telescopic interest in foreign affairs. When you go through that sort of a ten-day period you get broken in in terms of personal relationships very happily and very thoroughly. RICHARD RUSK: It sounds like you were very involved in the procedural aspects of how my dad operated. Maybe you can comment briefly on how well you think he handled that. What was unique to Dean Rusk about his style of operation that you clearly recall? In what ways did it work and in what ways didn' ; t it work? READ: He was enormously disciplined in the way he absorbed and took information. He was fond of saying, " ; Whenever we are asleep two-thirds of the world is awake and causing mischief." ; And indeed it was. And always when you are serving up information, analysis, the way we were in that job, you' ; re always struggling because you are dealing with a kaleidoscopic situation that you see imperfectly and incompletely, particularly in crisis situations, and you have to be just terribly concerned with limitations of your vision and understanding of the events that were transpiring. Your father had a very good feel for that. By the time I arrived on the scene, he knew well the limitations of the first sort of messages you get when a crisis breaks. Some are less experienced in that terrible beat would be much more apt to take the early fragmentation messages at face value. RICHARD RUSK: An interesting view. Do you recall a specific instance of that? READ: Yes, I think of the second Tonkin Gulf incident. RICHARD RUSK: Incidentally, while we' ; re at it, the little anecdotal types of stories are priceless to me. Those are the types of things that make a book, so whenever one pops in your head let me have it. READ: In the Tonkin Gulf situation, for instance, I remember we were getting these fragmentary reports from military-- RICHARD RUSK: He was getting the intercepts during that affair? READ: Oh sure. Well, it was mostly traffic through CINCPAC [Commander-in- Chief Pacific], originating through fleet units. Intercepts were not really a part of that particular picture. But he showed a very healthy degree of skepticism right from the beginning about what our destroyer on a dark night was observing. I am sure that he must have voiced those concerns when he talked to President Johnson. Obviously, the decision to respond was made anyway, because the President and others were ready and anxious to go. RICHARD RUSK: Do you have the feeling, as some critics have suggested, that that Tonkin Gulf resolution was sitting in the President' ; s hip pocket there waiting for a situation? READ: [William Putnam] Bundy had a draft as I recall it. We were not looking for an incident, certainly, and not to create an occasion to put it forward, but it was there when the incident appeared to have occurred. RICHARD RUSK: At the same time? What do you mean that it was there? READ: As I recall it--it' ; s a long time after the event--Bundy had a draft of a resolution expressing congressional support for general governmental actions in Vietnam. Obviously he did not anticipate the precise Tonkin Gulf incident, but the scope of the endorsement had been laid out in an advance to await a serious incident. RICHARD RUSK: They were probably looking at the idea of a congressional resolution? READ: Yes, it was sound contingent planning. Then this came along, and it seemed to mostly fit the bill. But I remember many other occasions. RICHARD RUSK: LBJ, I take it, was more the desk officer on that one, and my dad more or less went along for the ride on the Tonkin Gulf response. Is that the way you recall it? It wasn' ; t really handled out of the Secretary' ; s office? READ: Of course it was a Presidential decision, but I remember briefing your father before the Tuesday luncheon and then getting debriefed by him afterwards. He handled information in a very intelligent perspective. I remember, for instance, just to pursue that point another round or two, the first time that the hotline spoke in anger or for real was in the dying hours of the ' ; 67 Middle East War. For four or five years it had been in place, just transmitting and receiving for a few hours each week. RICHARD RUSK: Such test messages as, " ; The Quick Brown fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dog." ; READ: Yes, that sort of stuff. And in came a message which was really very, very hairy when you looked at it. It was from the Secretary General of the Soviet Union, and on its face it looked for all the world like, " ; You call the Israelis off within the immediate future or we are going to take action." ; It was close to a straight ultimatum. RICHARD RUSK: Toward the tail end of the Six Day War? READ: Yes. Again your father took it in perspective. He consulted with Tommy Thompson, who was a very wise old owl about Soviet relations, and Tommy said-- RICHARD RUSK: Is that Llewellyn [E.] Thompson? READ: Yes. " ; This is the sort of thing that the Soviets have done in the past to be able to show their client states after an event is over." ; It may be in that category. It would have been so easy for a new Secretary, a new President, to just have gone off and panicked at that point because it was right at the time the Liberty had been sunk. And people were watching fleet movements in the Mediterranean very closely and not knowing quite what the Soviets were going to do, if anything. He knew how to handle that extraordinarily well. He knew how to handle information fast when the occasion called for it. I remember just two other little incidents. Is this trivial? RICHARD RUSK: No, keep going. No, hell no. We are going to take it all in and we will edit the tapes and we will send it to you, but I have a lot of tapes and a lot of time. You have to call your own limits on what we can do today. READ: Two other incidents I recall: One was probably in the fall of ' ; 63, probably before the Kennedy assassination. We had been having a series of low grade and not so low grade crises over Berlin. Check points would be blocked and traffic would back up, then they would be let through in a trickle. And this had occurred several times. Once, when [Andrei Andreevich] Gromyko was in town--I can' ; t pinpoint it by month--one of these actions had occurred by the East Germans, obviously with Soviet consent and approval because they did not operate any other way in such a difficult area. It had gone on for quite a while and was getting extremely tense. All sorts of elaborate Allied contingency plans for such occasions were beginning to reach phase one, where you identified the units to make a move down one of the corridors towards Berlin. And of course it was the last thing in the world you wanted to do unless you absolutely had to. But it was right at the point where within hours it would have been a probe with God-knows--what consequences for Central Europe. RICHARD RUSK: A probe from West Germany down the Autobahn on the ground? READ: Yeah. And I remember we had an open line from the operations center to Checkpoint Charley in Berlin where this was occurring. And a lieutenant was on the other end telling me, " ; I think they' ; re getting ready to let us through. We just noticed some car movements." ; I was able to convey this to your father just before or while he was seeing Gromyko. But it was before he would have had to deliver to him the type of stern message that would have indicated actual western action. But, you know he would absorb that sort of thing instantly and be able to shift gears accordingly. I remember another, but I' ; m not going to bore you with other instances. RICHARD RUSK: No, go ahead. READ: I just remembered another one. One of the most scary times I can recall was a telephone call I got from the operations center, probably ' ; 65 or ' ; 66, at the ungodly hour of three o' ; clock in the morning, or something like that-- RICHARD RUSK: You were at home? READ: At home asleep. And the message was the sort of thing that just brings you a total adrenaline peak instantly. It was to the effect that two hundred planes had crossed the China border and were on their way toward U.S. Naval units in the Gulf of Tonkin. And you take a deep breath when you get a message of that sort at cobweb hours of the night. And I said, " ; Call Rusk, call Thompson. Ask them to come in immediately to the Operations Center. I hadn' ; t had to go to that sort of extreme before. I got there first, and the crisis had completely evaporated. It had been either an electronic test game that the Chinese had been pulling or our people had picked up a flight of geese or God knows what it was. But your father' ; s reaction when he arrived a few minutes later was absolutely marvelous. When I told him that we were victims of electronic wizards and the crisis had gone away and we would probably never know why, he just grinned and said, " ; Go back and get some sleep." ; So easily--A lesser person could have said, " ; Goddammit!" ; RICHARD RUSK: Good stories ; they' ; re well worth recapping. READ: But he could act so fast, too, on other occasions. I remember another harum-scarum story in the very end of the Johnson administration. A controlled missile flight off the Carolinas had gone haywire, and we received a message from the National Military Command Center to the Operations Center that " ; the missile has gone ballistic and it' ; s heading towards Cuba." ; RICHARD RUSK: One of our missiles? READ: One of ours. I said, " ; What sort of a warhead does it have." ; And they didn' ; t know. RICHARD RUSK: Could they identify the missile? It was our missile-- READ: It was ours, but they didn' ; t know whether it was an armed warhead. READ: I mean the person at the NMCC didn' ; t know. Obviously there were people that knew somewhere, but you weren' ; t in communication with them. RICHARD RUSK: They weren' ; t there. Okay. READ: I asked what the impact point was likely to be, and they said it could impact in Cuba. I remember breaking in on your father, as I had to do so many, many times, to tell him this grisly tale. He said " ; I will call [Anatoly F.] Dobrynin. You contact the Swiss, who were an intermediary power representing our interests in Cuba at the time, and tell them it' ; s an accident." ; And he did, and I did, but the thing overflew the island and went in the drink and was never heard of, thank heavens, again. But, you know, you live with that sort of stuff. RICHARD RUSK: Jesus! Now that' ; s not on the record anywhere. Would that be classified information? READ: I haven' ; t any idea whether it is or not. RICHARD RUSK: All right we' ; ll take a look at that before we put this in our collection somewhere. I' ; m sure the Department could advise on that. But what type of missile was it? READ: It was probably just a damn drone, you know. But the first information was " ; a missile has gone ballistic." ; RICHARD RUSK: What part of the country was it fired from? READ: It was off the Atlantic shore. Probably off the Carolinas somewhere, off Georgia ; and it was heading in the wrong direction. It happened so many times when you-- RICHARD RUSK: Any other details worth recounting about that one story? READ: Not really. RICHARD RUSK: Did my dad get hold of Dobrynin? READ: I' ; m not sure. It was lunch time. RICHARD RUSK: I' ; ll have to ask my dad. READ: --It' ; s over, but your life is shortened considerably when you go through those incidents. RICHARD RUSK: Especially living in a nuclear target like Washington, D.C. READ: I' ; m trying to remember if he was involved in another occasion like that. Two unarmed fighter planes were flying from Okinawa down to a base in Thailand, around the China perimeter of course, when one plane got in trouble. We were actually patched through at the OP Center to one of the pilots. He said that the pilot of the other plane had apparently blanked out. They had gained cruising altitude, whatever that was, and he saw the head of the pilot in the other plane had dropped to his chest and the plane did a U-turn and was heading straight north towards the Shantung Peninsula in North China. The pilot we were speaking to tried everything: he tried a wind under wingtip to wake the guy up. Obviously he' ; d had a heart attack or something had gone wrong with his oxygen or goodness knows what. RICHARD RUSK: It wasn' ; t just a question of falling asleep. READ: No. We had no communications with Peking at this point. We didn' ; t want them to scramble. RICHARD RUSK: What year would this have been? READ: Mid-sixties is as close as I can place it. The only way we knew to get through was through [Richard W.] Reuter, if you can believe it, because we had heard that the English news service was received in the foreign ministry on a regular basis. RICHARD RUSK: So much for non-recognition of Red China. READ: Exactly. And it was one of these desperate situations where you needed communications and just didn' ; t have them, and you were just helplessly watching something unfold. As I say I' ; ve forgotten--Obviously it' ; s the sort of thing you would alert fairly high up the line on. I just can' ; t remember at the moment if we engaged your father while that tragedy was unfolding ; probably not, because there was nothing that could be done. RICHARD RUSK: What happened to the plane? READ: It disappeared. It went into Manchuria and was never heard of again. No China planes scrambled. It obviously crashed, ran out of gas. RICHARD RUSK: Was there public notice of that? READ: No. RICHARD RUSK: Never was? Hmm. Interesting. You' ; re telling me some good stories. READ: Well, they' ; re just stories-- RICHARD RUSK: Let me use another line of questioning here. Lucius Battle said that--of course he had worked as Executive Secretary for Dean [Gooderham] Acheson as well as my dad. I asked him to contrast the two Secretaries. END OF SIDE 1 BEGINNING OF SIDE 2 RICHARD RUSK: --And Luke Battle said one thing very clearly, and that is Dean Acheson told him everything: exactly what he had said to the President. He would come back and tell Battle what went on and they' ; d write out memos of conversation, memos of phone calls, the whole works. My dad was far more, almost secretive with that stuff. He wasn' ; t nearly as open with what had been discussed at the highest levels with his assistants. You know, Battle didn' ; t have the same degree of access to what was in his mind. And it didn' ; t bother him so much as Assistant Secretary for, what was it, Educational and Social Affairs, because my dad let him run his own show and there wasn' ; t much need for consultation. But it did affect his job as Executive Secretary. Why don' ; t you comment on that? And did you have that same degree of problem with knowing what was in my dad' ; s mind? READ: Yes, I did from time to time. It got less with the years. RICHARD RUSK: Less of a problem? READ: With the years. Maybe it was your father' ; s nature, I don' ; t know. I' ; ve always attributed it in my own mind, to your father' ; s absolute unwillingness to let distance grow between himself and the President, which would have added to the President' ; s burdens. Other people in the bureaucracy and press are so attuned to what leadership has to say and do and quick to build on any differences, real or imagined. I would prepare, for instance, in the Johnson years, the agenda and the back-up for the weekly Tuesday luncheons that President Johnson would have with Secretary of State and Defense and the National Security fellow. And frequently that would involve calling over to Walt [Whitman] Rostow and saying, " ; What do you have on your mind? What do we have on our mind?" ; getting Joe [Joseph A.] Califano [Jr.] at the Defense Department to see if McNamara had anything. And then you' ; d get the back-up for the expected agenda. Sometimes it would just choke a horse: It was just too much. Your father was terribly tolerant in getting these chunks of paper much too late, frequently, because he just couldn' ; t force the-- RICHARD RUSK: Did he have a habit of reading things like this? [turns pages quickly] READ: Yeah. RICHARD RUSK: Taking pictures, you know, not reading. They noticed that in Davidson College. He had that reputation. READ: Well, thank goodness! It' ; s a marvelous asset with the volume of stuff that' ; s thrown at you as Secretary. But, I would sit with him when he would get this stuff, tell him where some of the bear traps were, and he would ingest it on his own. Sometimes with late items I would ride with him to the White House, ride with him to there from the Hill, wherever you could catch him at that point in the morning. And of course after the lunch I would go in and say " ; What happened?" ; and he would usually give a succinct sort of action summary of what had happened. Frequently it would be bare bones. And it was partly the attribute which I described of not wanting distance to develop between himself and the President, and partly it was just simply the pressure of time. You' ; d be halfway through a debriefing and the phone would ring or something would come along and you just wouldn' ; t have a fuller chance. RICHARD RUSK: What would be the distribution of that action summary: Secretary of State and that was it, or Secretary and you? READ: I would make notes, I would send action and information items in different directions. I would orally brief the tinder Secretary and that sort of thing. But very often, when I' ; d gotten an ambiguous reading or when I thought it was of sufficient importance to try to get the fullest reading possible, I would call Rostow or Bundy and one of McNamara' ; s assistants. RICHARD RUSK: Rather than my dad? READ: No, after talking to your father. RICHARD RUSK: After talking, when it was still not quite clear in your mind? READ: I' ; d get a triangulation on what they' ; d said. And frequently the three of them would have very different understandings, which is human nature. I mean, you hear what you want to hear sometimes, particularly when you' ; re going at great speed. RICHARD RUSK: Would you walk out of my dad' ; s office after that initial debriefing, not quite knowing what had taken place or what was in his mind, having done whatever follow-up you could and still walking away uncertain? READ: No. Normally he would give me what you needed to get for a reading on a given issue, but there were times when you needed more in order to give the bureaucracy guidance on what they needed to know, and either he would not have time to give it, or I couldn' ; t get it out of him, or I would do these triangulations to try and get a more precise understanding. I developed a profound mistrust of how people' ; s electrochemical brain sets can play tricks on them in terms of conversations and observations of common fact. The more you can deal in paper, the safer you are In terms of important information. RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever confront him or point out to him the difficulties you were encountering and what was his response? READ: Yes, I think he could understand the problem. Sometimes he would help by calling the others to iron out differences, but we both knew that the pressures would be just as great, if not greater, next week. There were many times when I wished that he would share more, not just with me, but with others, because they would come to me and say, " ; What does he really think?" ; And I could give them only the summation or a sort of a synopsis line. So, often you can--when there aren' ; t disadvantages--you could get people' ; s cooperation better by giving them a fuller debriefing. But that was not his style of operating. He would not spend time chitchatting about what he said and about what someone else said, and so on and so forth. RICHARD RUSK: Would there have been any other reason for him doing that other than wanting to protect his privileged relationship with the President? Would anything else have figured into that? READ: His own makeup is obviously very reserved, reticent to indulge in personalities, although sometimes he needed a grasp of personalities to understand the real dynamics of the situation. But many times it was his strength. I saw enough of Henry Kissinger during that period to know the innumerable difficulties we had because he would be telling one thing to one person and another thing to another person and he would meet himself coming around a corner time after time by the end of his period as Secretary. Your father never had that trouble. There was an integrity about what he said publicly, privately, and to different parties that stood him in awfully good stead in that tough period. RICHARD RUSK: Let me ask you this: Can you recall specifically when that really hurt, when that trait of people not knowing what was in his mind really hurt policy, where it was clearly damaging? READ: No, I don' ; t recall having any specifics in mind, but I know that it was a problem, a genuine problem: one that recurred. I felt the frustration that many others would bring to me about him in this respect. The morning staff meetings where the secretaries and all of us would come in, and you would have a room of thirty or forty people, he would give very little, he would receive, but he was not a giver on such occasions. RICHARD RUSK: I gather that my dad had many strengths and many fine qualities, and as his son I' ; m as aware of that as anyone, but his reticence was a serious deficiency and it did affect the operation of the Department such as you have suggested there. Do you recall the reactions of other people? I remember there was one guy who claimed that he could read Dean Rusk on a basis of his facial expression, a little nervous tick. READ: There were none--(laughing) RICHARD RUSK: A good poker face, huh? READ: A marvelous poker face. I got to know some of those characteristics. I would go in with something that I thought was terribly urgent and he would be on something more urgent, and I would--By the third or fourth or fifth year I knew when not to say anything until he finished what he was doing. But he was remarkably good at not showing petty reactions to anybody. And that is a tremendous tribute because you have every provocation in the world to do so. You hear skullduggery by his friends and foes of the most unbelievable sort. Frequently when I would bring some of these tales of skullduggery back to him, he would simply give me a quizzical look or raise an eyebrow. He didn' ; t need to do more than that. RICHARD RUSK: Didn' ; t pick up on it, huh? READ: We would clearly be appalled by certain things, and words were not very necessary. I might relate one case which I hope would not be used. RICHARD RUSK: Do you want it on the tape? READ: Let' ; s take it off the tape. END OF SIDE 2 Resources may be used under the guidelines described by the U.S. Copyright Office in Section 107, Title 17, United States Code (Fair use). Parties interested in production or commercial use of the resources should contact the Russell Library for a fee schedule. video 0 RBRL214DROH-RuskWW.xml RBRL214DROH-RuskWW.xml http://purl.libs.uga.edu/russell/RBRL214DROH/findingaid
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43 minutes
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Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies
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Rusk WW, Benjamin Read, March 1985
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RBRL214DROH-RuskWW
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Benjamin Read
Richard Rusk
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audio
oral histories
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sound
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United States
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Foreign relations
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Benjamin Read interviewed by Richard Rusk. Topics include President Kennedy and U.S. foreign relations and administrations.<br /><br /><span>Benjamin Read served as Executive Secretary/Special Assistant to Dean Rusk from 1963-1969.</span>
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1985-03
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